Beyond the Highland Mist (13 page)

“For now. When she’s cured, I touch her all she wants.”

“She
is the key word there.”

Adam laid his palm against Adrienne’s cheek, intently
studying the wound on her neck. “I need boiling water, compresses, and a dozen boiled linens.”

“Bring me boiling water, compresses, and a dozen boiled linens,” the Hawk roared at the closed door.

“And I need you out of this room.”

“No.” There was no more finality in death than in the Hawk’s refusal.

“You leave or she dies,” Adam murmured, as if he’d merely said “It’s raining, had you noticed?”

Hawk didn’t move a muscle.

“Sidheach James Lyon Douglas, have you a choice?” Adam wondered.

“You have all my names. How do you know so much about me?”

“I made it my business to know so much about you.”

“How do I know you didn’t shoot her yourself with some obscure poison that isn’t even Callabron but mimics it, and now you’re faking a cure—all so you can simply steal my wife?”

“Absolutely.” Adam shrugged.

“What?” Hawk snarled.

Adam’s eyes glittered like hard stones. “You
don’t
know. You must make a choice. Can you save her at this point, Lord Hawk? I don’t think so. What are your options? She’s dying from something, that much is plain to see. You think it’s Callabron, but you’re not certain. Whatever it is, it is killing her. I say I can cure her and ask a boon for it. What choice do you have, really? They say you make hard decisions look easy. They say you’re a man who would move a mountain without blinking, if he wanted that mountain moved. They say you have an unerring sense of justice, right and wrong, honor and compassion. They say, also”—Adam grimaced at this—“that you are passingly fair between the sheets, or so
one woman said, and it offended me in great sum. In fact, they say entirely too much about you for my liking. I came here to hate you, Hawk. But I didn’t come here to hate this woman you claim as your wife.”

Adam and Hawk stared at each other with barely harnessed violence.

Adrienne cried out sharply and shuddered in Hawk’s arms. Her body convulsed, then tensed as if pulled taut on a rack. Hawk swallowed hard.
What choice?
There was no choice, no choice at all.

“Cure her,” he muttered through gritted teeth.

“You grant my boon?” the smithy asked.

“As we agreed. Only if she chooses you.”

“You will place no restrictions upon any time she chooses to spend with me. I am wooing her from this day forth and you will not caution her from me. She is free to see me as she pleases.”

“I am wooing her too.”

“That is the game, Hawk,” Adam said softly, and Hawk finally understood. The smithy didn’t want his wife handed over freely. He wanted a contest, a battle for her favors. He wanted an open challenge, and intended to win.

“You will hate it when I take her from you, dread Hawk,” the smithy promised. “Close the door when you leave.”

“H
OW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT A MAN’S WORLD CAN BE TURNED
inside out before he even has a chance to see it coming and try to stop it, Grimm?”

Hawk had started drinking the moment the door had shut on his wife and the smithy. He was trying with determination to get head-reeling, feet-stumbling, bellyaching drunk and was not succeeding.

“Do you believe he can cure her, Hawk?”

Hawk puzzled a moment. “Aye, Grimm.
I
do. There’s something unnatural about Adam Black, and
I
mean to find out what it is.”

“What do you suspect?”

“
I
don’t know. Grimm,
I
want you to find out everything about the man you can. Talk to everyone on the estate until you get some answers. Where he came from, when he came here, who he’s related to, what he does all day.
I
want to know about every breath he draws, every piss he takes.”

“Understood, Hawk.”

“Good.”

They both turned to stare at the door to the Green Lady’s room. It had been hours since the smithy had closed the door. Not a sound had escaped since.

“Who would try to kill her, Hawk?” Grimm puzzled. “Mad Janet was practically a recluse. According to the gossip at Comyn keep, fewer than five people ever saw her. How could a lass so far out of circulation offend anyone enough to invite murder?”

Hawk rubbed his head tiredly. His stomach was churning and the Scotch wasn’t helping. On sudden impulse he rolled the bottle away from him, toward Grimm. “Don’t let me have any more. I need a clear head. I can’t think right now. He’s touching her, Grimm. He could be bathing her, gazing upon her. I want to kill him.”

“So do it, when he’s done curing her,” Grimm said easily.

“I can’t!”

“Then I’ll do it for you,” Grimm said, ever faithful.

“Nay. We made a pact.”

“You made a pact with him?” Grimm’s eyes flared wide. “Damn it all to hell, man! You never break a pact. Why would you be so foolish to make a pact with a man you can’t stand?”

“He can save my wife.”

“When did you come to have such feeling for this Mad Janet you swore never to take to wife anyway?”

“Shut up, Grimm.”

“What’s the pact, Hawk?” Grimm persisted.

“He wants Adrienne.”

“You gave him Adrienne?”

“Grimm, no more questions. Just find out anything and everything about this man called Adam Black.”

“Be assured, I will.”

“You are flawless, beauty,” the smithy said as his coal-black eyes raked over her nude body twisted in the damp sheets.

“Flawless lalless,” Adrienne pooh-poohed dreamily. The heat was ebbing, slowly.

“Decidedly lawless.”

He couldn’t know. Not possibly. “What do you mean by that?” She struggled to form the words, and wasn’t certain she even made a sound.

“Just that there must be something
criminal
about a woman so beautiful,” he replied archly.

“Nothing criminal about me,” she demurred distantly.

“Oh, beauty, I think there is much criminal about you.”

“There is something just not normal about you, Adam,” she mumbled as she tossed restlessly.

“No,” he replied smugly, “there is certainly nothing normal about me. Give me your hand, beauty, I’ll show you not normal.”

And then there was cool water, frothy ocean upon powder-white sand. Whisper of gentle surf rushing over the beach, cool sand beneath her bare toes. No ants, no rack, no fire. Just peace in her most favorite haven in the world. The seaside at Maui where she’d vacationed with her girlfriends. Beautiful, blissful days they’d passed there with fresh-squeezed orange juice and endless summer jogs on the beach, bare feet slapping the edge of the tide.

And then the stranger images. Scent of jasmine and sandalwood. Snowflake sand dotted with fuchsia silk tents and butterflies upon every bough of every limb of every rowan. An improbable place. And she was lying in the cool sands and healed by tropical lapis waves.

“Beauty, my beauty. Want me. Feel me, hunger for me and I will slake your need.”

“Hawk?”

Adam’s anger was palpable in the air.

Adrienne forced her eyes open a slit, and gasped. If her body had obeyed, she would have shot straight up in bed. But it didn’t obey. It lay flaccid and weak upon the bed while her temper shot up instead. “Get out of my room!” she yelled. At least her voice hadn’t lost its vigor.

“I was just checking to make sure your forehead cooled.” Adam grinned puckishly.

“You thickheaded oaf! I don’t care why you’re in here, just get out!”

Finally her body obeyed a little and she managed to get her fingers around a tumbler at the bedside. Too weak to throw it, she was at least able to slide it off the table. Glass crashed to the floor and shattered. The sound mollified her slightly.

“You were dying. I cured you,” Adam reminded.

“Thank you. Now get out.”

Adam blinked. “That’s all? Thank you, now get out?”

“Don’t think I’m so stupid that I don’t realize you were touching my breasts!” she whispered fiercely. At the abashed look on his face she realized he had indeed thought she’d been unconscious. “So that and my thanks are all you’ll be getting, smithy!” she growled. “I hate beautiful men.
Hate
them!”

“I know,” Adam smiled with real pleasure and obeyed her dismissal.

Adrienne squeezed her eyes shut tightly but upon the pink-gray insides of her eyelids shadows arose. Images of being held between the Hawk’s rock-hard thighs, wrapped in arms that were bands of steel. His voice murmuring her
name over and over, calling her back, commanding her back. Demanding that she live. Whispering words of … what? What had he said?

“She lives, Lord Buzzard—”

“Hawk.”

“Both birds of prey. What difference?”

“A buzzard is a scavenger. A hawk selects his kill as carefully as a falcon. Stalks it with the same unerring conviction. And fails as frequently—which is never.”

“Never,” Adam mused. “There are no absolutes, Lord Hawk.”

“In that you’re wrong. I choose, I adhere, I pursue, I commit, I attain. That—that, my errant friend—is an absolute.”

Adam shook his head and studied the Hawk with apparent fascination. “A worthy adversary. The hunt begins. No cheating. No tricks. You may not forbid her from me. And I know that you tried to already. You will recant your rules.”

Hawk inclined his dark head. “She chooses,” he allowed tightly. “I will forbid her nothing.”

Adam nodded, a satisfied nod as he plunged his hands deep in the pockets of his loose trousers and waited.

“Well? Get thee from my castle, smithy. You have your place, and it is without my walls.”

“You might try a thank-you. She lives.”

“I’m not certain you aren’t the reason she almost died.”

At that, Adam’s brow creased thoughtfully. “No. But now that I think on it, I have work to do. I wonder … who would try to kill the beauty, if not me? And I didn’t. Had I, she would be dead. No slow poison from my hand. Quick death or not at all.”

“You’re a strange man, smithy.”

“But I will soon be most familiar to her.”

“Pray the gods she is wiser than that,” Grimm mumbled as Adam stalked off into the dim corridor. Night had fallen and the castle lamps were still largely unlit.

Hawk sighed heavily.

“What deal did you make with that devil?” Grimm asked in a voice scarcely audible.

“Think you he may be?”

“Something is not natural about that man and I intend to find out what.”

“Good. Because he wants my wife, and she doesn’t want me. And I saw her wanting him with a hurt in her eyes.”

Grimm winced. “You are certain you don’t want her just because she doesn’t want you and he wants her?”

Hawk shook his head slowly. “Grimm, I have no words for what she makes me feel.”

“You always have words.”

“Not this time, which warns me truly that I’m in deep trouble and about to get deeper. Deep as I must to woo that lass. Think you I’ve been spelled?”

“If love can be bottled, or shot from Cupid’s bow, my friend,” Grimm whispered into the breeze that ruffled in Hawk’s wake when he entered Adrienne’s chamber.