The Ravishing One (34 page)

“Because he hated you more than McClairen.”

At the sound of that long-silent voice, Carr wheeled around, smiling.

“Ah, Janet. I knew you’d speak to me someday soon. Over your sulks, are you?”

Lud, she was lovely. Her dark eyes sparkled and her hair fell in rich, ebony waves. Her one-sided smile, so piquant, so enchanting, lit her white face. He truly had loved her.

She curtsyed, her lovely face alight with humor. “I might be.”

“And perhaps you ‘might be’ right about Tunbridge,” he said magnanimously.

“I know I am. Why are you here, Ronald?”

He waved his cane in the air. “I’ve come to kill McClairen.”

“Ah,” she exhaled. “Why?”

“Poor, simple Janet. Because if I kill McClairen others will see that I am still a man to fear, a man to obey, a force to be reckoned with.”

She laughed, the ghostly trill like sunlight dancing on water, and beckoned him closer.

“I don’t think so,” she said as he approached. She
turned, floating above the flinty ground, as graceful as a feather on water. He followed her, mesmerized by her beauty, captivated as he’d been so many years ago by her freshness, her obvious adoration of him.

“Wait! What don’t you think?”

She looked over her shoulder at him, gesturing for him to come with her. “I don’t think that’s the real reason you’re here, Ronald.”

How dare she question him!

“Really?” He invested the word with haughty intonation, but she only laughed again and moved on, and he hastened to follow her.

“I think you want to kill Thomas because as long as he lives, the McClairens will have won!” she whispered like a naughty child revealing a secret.

“They haven’t won!”

“But they will.” She finally stopped.

“Oh, yes, Ronald,” an older feminine voice said.

He turned slowly. An old hag stood before him, bent beneath the weight of her gray dress, a black veil draped across half her face, leaving exposed a twisted and deformed countenance, a smashed nose, a drooping eye, a slack and malformed mouth.

“Who are you?” he demanded, angered that she should have interrupted his conversation with Janet.

“Gunna,” she said.

He searched his memory. “You’re Fia’s nurse!”

“Aye.”

He snorted. “Begad, does she keep such as you around still? Has she quite lost her faculties?” He laughed cruelly, glancing over his shoulder to see if
Janet appreciated his wit. Her gaze was fixed on the deformed creature in front of him, clear recognition in her pretty black eyes.

“No. But methinks you have,” Gunna said. There was something wrong. The way she spoke … His eyes widened. Where was the creature’s thick, near unintelligible burr? Why did she suddenly sound like Janet?

“Who are you?”

“I told you,” she said. “Gunna.”

“No.” He shook his head, violently aware as he did so that Janet was mimicking him, her spectral head shaking in increasing agitation as she mouthed the words, “No, no, no.”

Gunna’s mouth pleated into some semblance of a smile. “But there was a time, a long time ago, when I was someone else. Someone who no longer exists.”

“Who’s that?” he demanded, a little river of fear running through his bowels.

“Janet McClairen,” she said softly.

He jerked his head around and met Janet’s impish smile. She shrugged expressively. “Impossible,” he said. “I killed you. I pitched you from—” He stopped abruptly and looked about as if coming out of a daze. Only then did he realize where he was, where she’d led him.

He stood on the cliff path beyond the old kitchen garden, above the rocks where Janet had died. In horror he stared as the surf below bludgeoned the shoreline.

“You’re dead,” he whispered.

“No. I was hurt, oh … very badly. But I still had my mind. I clung to a piece of driftwood. The riptide
carried me far down the shore, where some passing fishermen found and rescued me.”

He looked up, incomprehension clouding his beautiful blue eyes. The hag lifted her hand and pulled at the scarf. It dropped, revealing a Janus face, a horrifying amalgamation all the more disturbing because the ruined half melded with the half that was still lovely, the high curve of the cheekbone taut and smooth, the dark-lashed eye as dark as ink.

“Impossible.” He backed away from her in horror.

“Difficult,” the creature corrected in Janet’s voice. “Years went by while I recuperated. Remember the night you killed me how I swore I would do anything to protect my children from you? I meant that, Ronald.

“I came back. With your loathing of ugliness and your love of good value, it was easy enough to convince you to hire me to take care of my own children. All I needed to do was stay out of your way and I could care for them, love them, but most of all do what I could to counterbalance your poisonous tutelage.”

“They know?” he asked.

The smile curving half her mouth disappeared. “No,” she said. “I could never reveal who I’d been for fear that one of them would let something slip and you would simply kill me anew. So I stayed Gunna, the nurse. In a very real sense you did kill me, Ronald, for I could never tell them now. How could they understand, and what to say? For though I was nurse, companion, servant, and tutor, I never again was their mother.”

His head whipped back to stare at the beautiful Janet. She was gone. “Janet!”

“To whom do you speak, Ronald?” the half hag asked quietly.

“To Janet. To you. To …” He stopped, his gaze widening with terror. For how can a man be haunted by a living woman? And yet haunted he surely was and had been for years. He’d only to look—

“You are mad, Ronald,” the monster Janet said calmly. “How can my spirit haunt you when I still own it, no matter how hard you tried to separate me from it? How else to account for the phantom you see? You are mad, Ronald. Haunted by your own evil.”

“No!” he shouted frantically. “Get away from me. You are the phantom! You aren’t real. You’re not Janet! Janet is beautiful. Janet loves me. Janet—”

“Is here.”

The beautiful side of her mouth curved into that perfect, three-corner smile while the other side of her mouth slackened, a hideous, toothless maw. He backed away, his hands thrust out before him.

“Monster!”

He was still crying out in terror when he plummeted to the rocks below.

It took the workmen fifteen minutes to get down to the cliffs. They’d heard the cry and some had even seen a man’s figure flailing wildly just before disappearing over the cliff’s flinty lip.

“Lord have mercy on him, poor bastard,” Jamie Craigg said, peering down at the rocks below.

“Ye can lower me down to him,” offered the boy Gordie, already tying a rope around his waist.

“Good.” Jamie nodded his agreement. “But there’s no hurry, lad. No one could survive a fall to those rocks. Eh, Gunna?” He looked sadly at the old, twisted woman who’d followed the small crowd out.

“Nay,” she said calmly. “No one ever has.”

Epilogue

MAIDEN’S BLUSH
MCCLAIREN’S ISLE
CHRISTMAS, 1766

I
don’t hold out much hope for him,” Ash Merrick said. He was sitting beside his wife, Rhiannon, speaking in a low, hushed voice to his brother, Raine. Outside the windows rattled as a fierce wind swept down from the north. But inside Maiden’s Blush a huge fire roaring in the hearth chased away any encroaching chill.

The Merrick children had all been tempted, coerced, and bullied into bed, where they’d fallen immediately into slumber. Except for Ash’s youngest. Gunna sat near the fire, clucking as she dried young Cora MacFarlane’s tresses, and Kay was snuggled deep in a wingback chair, his perennial companion, a book, open in his lap.

Rhiannon, involved as she was in nursing their first-born
daughter, paid little heed to her husband, Ash. Raine, however, nodded in agreement.

“Poor devil. I know I shouldn’t feel sorry for him, but I do. I mean, it’s not like
we
escaped unscathed. Why should he?”

“Exactly,” Ash said.

“Ach!” Favor appeared behind Raine’s chair, fresh from putting the last of their brood to bed. She leaned over his shoulder and bussed him on the cheek. “Misery loves company, is it?” she asked, a challenging light in her eye. “You are the most wretched, horrible pair. Why on earth would you wish on another that which you yourselves so patently and vocally hated?”

“Well,” both men mumbled a bit sheepishly.

“I mean, really, Favor, me love,” Raine defended himself, “consider the victim. He’s not exactly without resources.”

“For all he’s done, he’s still only a man, Raine Merrick. Just think of what he’s up against,” Favor countered, and to this unassailable argument there was simply no response.

At that moment a feminine voice, cool, calm, measured, and suave, could be heard coming toward them down the hallway.

“Ashton,”
the voice said, “has had
his
preliminary sketch done.
Raine
has sat for
his
preliminary sketch. And
I
have had mine.”

Fia appeared, gliding into the room on nary a whisper, her beautiful face as enigmatic as ever, only the accent she gave certain words betraying a hint of temper. One slender and eloquent brow rose on her pure
white forehead, investing the silence that followed with regal imperative.

“Not a chance in hell,” Ash muttered. “Poor bounder.”

“And a very nice family grouping it shall make.” Thomas Donne, newly granted the hitherto unclaimed title Viscount McClairen for his invaluable service to the Crown in ridding her waters of maritime brigands, strode into the room after his wife. A tall, lean scoundrel, he looked hard as the life he’d led.

“I don’t know.” Rhiannon had apparently been attending after all, for she looked up from her daughter’s face and studied Thomas closely. “I have a gold guinea says McClairen doesn’t have his portrait painted.”

“You’re on,” Ash said, and leaning close so that only Rhiannon could hear, whispered, “but when I win I’ll collect in something more precious than gold, lady wife,” bringing a blush to Rhiannon’s cheeks.

“I don’t want a family portrait,” Fia said, turning suddenly and moving toward Thomas. He watched her warily. A small sway had begun at her hips and it was damned provocative. And she knew it.

He glanced hopefully at Ash and Raine, who returned his smile with blank expressions. Apparently his damned brothers-in-law weren’t going to fall all over themselves coming to his rescue.

“Odd as it might sound,” Fia said, her voice growing more sarcastic as she went on, “I want pictures in the new picture gallery. As the picture gallery is at this moment bare, it falls on us—mind you, I said us,
Thomas—to furnish new ones. I assume—mind you, I said
assume
, Thomas, because I could be in error—that as the laird of the McClairens you might like portraits of McClairens on the walls. But that …”

She closed her eyes for just an instant, gathering her temper, and when she opened them he found himself staring into the blue, shimmering clarity of her eyes. Their gazes locked, holding him spellbound. Her, too. He could not help himself. He reached out and gently cupped her cheek. Her lips opened but no words came out. She turned her head slightly, deepening the caress.

“ ‘But that’ what?” Raine’s voice cut in, pouring over them like cold water. The traitor!

Fia jerked back, her expression suspicious.

“But that will be impossible,” she said tersely, “if the bloody laird of the bloody castle won’t even allow my poor artist to do a simple sketch!”

She stomped her small, satin-covered foot on the floor. The display of temper immediately set Ash to grinning broadly. It still amazed him that their silent, enigmatic sister should—only with her husband and only in the security and warmth of her own home—be given to emotional displays.

But Thomas had jumped on the pronoun.
“Your
poor artist?” He stepped forward, possessiveness ringing in his voice. Fia stepped back.
“Yours
, Lady McClairen? How so … 
yours?”

She gulped as he loomed closer, and scurried back a step. “ ’Twas just a phrase! You know I only love—” She
was suddenly being swept up into Thomas’s arms and he was smiling down at her wolfishly.

“Oh, drat you, Thomas! You did that on purpose!” Her lush, red mouth broke into a smile, and then she laughed, a full, heady laugh. “You do not play fair, sir!”

Rhiannon smiled at her husband. “Told you.”

“He might have won the battle but she’ll rise to fight another day,” Ash said. “Look. She’s already honing different tools. Ones I’ve seen before in my own household. Enough to recognize them, at any rate.”

“Ah, yes!” Raine nodded sagely. “Most familiar.”

For Fia had wrapped her arms around Thomas’s broad neck and he was watching her with an entirely different sort of light burning in his eyes.

“Enough my bonny, my beauty, my love. Soon ye’ll have a brand-new portrait to hang on the wall and I’ll make sure there’s plenty more to follow that,” he murmured, nuzzling her throat.

But Favor’s ears were quick and she looked up, her piquant face alight with wonder. “What’s this?” she asked.

Thomas turned to the little group, his dark face bright with pride. “Fia’s carrying our baby.”

Gunna stopped, frozen in the midst of plaiting Cora’s hair. “ ’Tis true?” she asked, her eyes glittering with tears.

“Fia?” Kay asked, looking up round-eyed from his book. Cora just grinned, as did the others in the room.

“Aye,” Fia said, suddenly shy. “Come early summer, he’ll be born.”

“She,”
Thomas corrected smoothly.

Raine looked over at Ash, the contempt of the expert for the novice clear on his face. “Has anyone told them how this works?” He looked back at the pair. “It isn’t like giving a tavern order, you know. One generally takes what one gets.”

“She,”
Thomas insisted, looking down at Fia. The glow in his eyes caused a pink blush to creep into her cheeks.

“And I suppose you also know what she will look like?” Ash asked sardonically.