The Blood of Roses

“ALEX, PLEASE … PLEASE TAKE ME
WITH YOU!”

“If you leave me, I know I will never see you again. You will never come back. Everything will happen, just like in the dream, only I won’t be there to warn you!”

“Nothing is going to happen!” he declared fiercely. “It’s a dream, Catherine, a nightmare! Nothing is going to happen to me, or you!”

“But … it is so real,” she cried, her eyes round and wet, her lips trembling beneath the hail of kisses he assaulted her with in order to try to calm her.

“It only
seems
real,” he insisted. “Because you’re worried about me. …” He took her face into his hands. “Please don’t ask me to do something I can’t do.… Can you understand how important it is for me to know you are safe, regardless of the madness going on in the rest of the world?”

Catherine allowed herself to be drawn forward, allowed her lips, her every breath to be plundered by the savagery of his embrace. His hands raked up into her hair, scattering the pins as he freed the golden cascade and brought it streaming forward over her shoulders. Strong, determined arms lifted her then and carried her to the bed, where she was not permitted to speak again, not permitted a single thought beyond the ecstasy of their union.…

HIGH PRAISE FOR MARSHA CANHAM
Winner of the
Romantic Times
Lifetime Achievement Award
AND HER PREVIOUS NOVEL,
THE PRIDE OF LIONS

“AN ELECTRIFYING LOVE STORY with characters that leap from the pages, breathtaking descriptions of Scotland’s awesome beauty, superb dialogue and fascinating details.”

—
Romantic Times

“A TENSE, HIGHLY EXCITING ROMANCE… [that] travels from the opulent ballrooms of England to the Scottish highlands.”

—
Affaire de Coeur

“ABSOLUTELY BLOODY MARVELOUS!”

—Virginia Henley, bestselling author of
Dream Lover

“COMPELLING, EXCITING, AND RIVETING. When you talk about historical romance, it doesn’t get much better than this!”

—Elaine Coffman, bestselling author of
If You Love Me

“CANHAM HAS DONE IT AGAIN!”

—Nan Ryan, bestselling author of
Outlaw’s Kiss

Dell Books by Marsha Canham

Midnight Honor
Swept Away
Pale Moon Rider
The Blood of Roses
The Pride of Lions
Across A Moonlit Sea
In the Shadow of Midnight
Straight for the Heart
Through a Dark Mist
Under the Desert Moon
The Last Arrow

This book is dedicated to the astonishing number of concerned readers who wrote to me demanding to know if I just intended to leave all those loose ends dangling in
The Pride of Lions.

Now really, would I do that to you?

“L’audace, et toujours de l’audace!”

—motto of the ’45

Blackpool, August 1745
Prologue

C
atherine Ashbrooke Cameron stood in front of the rain-lashed window, her breath lightly fogging the inner surface of the glass pane. Outside the inn, the streets were all but deserted, the cobbles glistening under the steady downpour, the lights from the cramped, multistorey dwellings reflected in the shimmering puddles and bubbling runs of the gutters.

She had been in Blackpool for four days—an interminable length of time for someone not normally noted for her patience. A crowded seaport, it smelled of fish and offal, of coal dust from the huge shipments exported south to London, of the countless unwashed bodies who labored tediously, day after day, to earn a few pennies with which to feed and clothe their families: not exactly the type of company the young and beautiful daughter of an English peer of the realm might be expected to keep.

As she stared out the window, Catherine’s long slim fingers toyed absently with the enormous amethyst ring she wore on her left hand. It was her only solid reminder of the reality of the time lapsed since she had ridden away from her home in Derby five weeks earlier. Five weeks. It might well have been five years. Or five centuries. She had changed so drastically—
things
had changed so drastically: attitudes, circumstances, situations …

Where she had once been careless and spoiled, pampered to within a razor’s edge of her finely honed temper, she now felt old and wise, experienced and mellowed far beyond her eighteen years. Where once an arrogant snap of her fingers would have brought any young man within a radius of a hundred miles fawning on his knees before her, she now knew that all the begging, pleading, hoping, and praying would not bring to her side the one man she ached to see.

Catherine raised a finger and traced a path along the slippery glass, following the bright slither of a raindrop as it meandered down the outside of the pane. She felt numb, detached from the world, as if the events of the past five weeks had never happened. But the sparkle of the amethyst ring was proof that they had. The faint, lingering bruises that still marred the ivory perfection of her body were proof that they had. The tears that filled her eyes and burned at the back of her throat at the slightest provocation were proof that
something
had happened. Her brother Damien, who had arrived in Blackpool that afternoon to escort her the rest of the way home to Derby, had needed only five minutes alone with her to isolate the cause of the drastic difference in her demeanor. However, already plagued with guilt over the part he had played in condemning his sister to what must have been weeks of pure hell, he had misread the tension that shivered through her slender body.

“If that bastard Cameron forced you to do anything against your will, I’ll kill him myself,” he had announced savagely.

Catherine had opened her mouth to expound on just how dreadfully she had been used and abused—certainly the Catherine Ashbrooke of a few weeks earlier would not have hesitated to capitalize on her brother’s guilt, or to use it mercilessly to win his sympathy and pity—but she could not do it.

“No. No, Damien, it isn’t what you think. He … he did not do anything to me that I did not want him to do. In fact, in the beginning, he did everything he could to avoid me. He treated me like baggage, he ignored me, he rarely spoke to me unless it was absolutely necessary. And I truly believe he would have kept his word to annul our marriage as he had promised and send me home as soon as he was safely through the border patrols, but …”

Damien’s hands had tightened on her shoulders, forcing her to look up into his pale-blue eyes. “But what?”

“But … I would not let him,” she cried softly. “I begged, I pleaded with him to let me stay in Scotland, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“You begged …? Good God—” His voice had softened with disbelief. “You’ve gone and fallen in love with him, haven’t you?”

Catherine raised huge violet eyes to his. It was no use denying it. Hands that could not control their trembling were flung up and around her brother’s shoulders, and her whole body was wracked with sobs.

“It was not supposed to happen. I don’t even know how it happened, or why it had to happen to me, but yes. Oh yes, Damien, I do love him. I love him and I hate him and … and … he had no right to do this to me! No right at all!”

Damien had been helpless to do more than hold her and soothe her as best he could. Catherine knew there was no earthly way to explain what had happened, how she and Alexander Cameron had progressed from adversaries to lovers in an apparent wink of an eye.

“I love him, Damien. It is a terrible, hurtful, wonderful feeling, and I do not understand how it can be all those things at the same time, but it is.”

“Does … he feel the same way?”

“Yes,” she said, a little too quickly, her voice a little too high-pitched. “Yes, he does. But he’s stubborn, and he doesn’t think I would be as safe in Scotland as I would be with my family in England. There is the best bit of irony, would you not say?” She laughed bitterly and accepted the handkerchief Damien offered, wiping at her streaming eyes and nose. “He didn’t seem to care too much about my safety once he knew I had discovered he was a Jacobite spy and forced me to travel north with him as his hostage. He was rude and arrogant, and … and … he kept me so damned angry all of the time, I did not have much chance to be frightened. But when I was … frightened, I mean … he was always there, and somehow … I wasn’t frightened anymore. Does that make any sense at all?”

“For you, my dear Kitty?” Damien had smiled. “Perfect sense. And I should have known something like this would happen, dammit. I should have been able to see it that very first night.”

“I had no idea you were a romantic, brother dear.” She sniffed. “Or that you believed in love at first sight.”

“I’m not, and I don’t. But you had a look on your face that evening when Hamilton Garner confronted the pair of you out in the garden, one that screamed at anyone who cared to listen, that you had never been kissed quite like that before. I daresay it was what prompted the haughty lieutenant into challenging your bold Scotsman to a duel.”

Catherine experienced a flooding of color into her cheeks. “Hamilton recovered from his wounds, I presume?”

“He was on his feet within the week, out scouring the countryside with his entire regiment of dragoons, only to discover the mysterious Mr. Montgomery and his newly acquired bride had vanished without a trace. He was well on his way to tearing up the roads between here and London when confirmation of Prince Charles’s landing in the Hebrides reached government ears. Colonel Halfyard rushed Garner’s captaincy papers through and ordered his regiment north to reinforce the garrison at Edinburgh.”

“Edinburgh?” Catherine gasped. “Hamilton is in Scotland?”