The Return of Black Douglas (7 page)

He pushed back the hood of his byrnie. His hair was black as sin and deliciously long. Even in the brilliant sunlight, he was a dark adaptation of the desires of her mind, for everything about him was mysterious and hard as steel, with an edge that was as ruthless and dangerous as the trenchant sword he had wielded a moment earlier.

She had a sinking feeling that he wouldn’t consider coming after her from that height, even if she were dipped in gold. Would he risk rescuing her? A moot thought, for he would never make it. He wouldn’t risk injury or death to him or his horse just to capture her.

Or would he?

With an expression as cold as a pagan’s philosophy, he put the spurs to the side of his horse and went over the side. Was he crazy? A whirlwind came out of nowhere and stirred the branches of trees and sent debris spiraling. She heard the faintest bubbling sound of laughter, or was it simply the wind? She gasped and held her breath, and everything fell silent.

In a lightning-quick moment of decision that would give Mars, the god of war, pause, she watched him begin a death-defying descent of man and beast, straight down the near-vertical drop. The slightest slip would mean instant death, and yet he gave the horse his head, and the two of them raced faster than a torrent on its way to the sea. She was spellbound, for everything moved in slow motion after that.

Everywhere lay clumps of fern and golden prickly gorse, shapeless and deformed. Stones flew, but the Highland pony’s foot was sure. Wiry, tough, and sturdy, he sailed over stumps and a fallen tree, his hooves striking fire from chips of granite strewn along the way.

For a moment, the crags in the distance echoed the thunder of his stride. Then, in what had to be the most terrifying and magical moment of her life, she watched that small, sturdy horse with fire in his eye, and the incredible, almost impossible daring horsemanship of his rider. For an instant, the rider loomed larger than life, dark and threatening as a master of the underworld. She wouldn’t have been surprised if both he and his horse had sprouted wings and flown right over her head and vanished into the stratosphere.

In a heartbeat, it was over, with no sign that it had happened at all, save the dust that began to settle into the fresh imprint of hooves and the rustle of the wind that stirred it.

Chapter 11

It’s true that heroes are inspiring,

but mustn’t they also do some rescuing

if they are to be worthy of their name?

—
Independent
Jeanette Winterson (b. 1959)
British author

Idiots! The ride should have killed them both.

But it hadn’t. With a slow pace, the stallion came toward her, and she leaned back a little bit further with each step that brought him closer. A lump formed in her throat, choking her with fear. Transfixed, she stared at the rider as she imagined what he could do to her.

She was frozen, unable to do anything but watch and wait. He was handsome as the devil, yet she eyed him warily as he approached her. He stopped no more than three feet away, crossed his arms over the pommel, and leaned forward, his cold gaze going over her with slow ease. Well, she had to hand it to him. There was something sexy as hell about a man dressed for battle, sweat gleaming on his forehead, his hair damp. Never did a man wear a pair of over-the-knee boots the way he did, and she was from Texas.

Under the scrutiny of his piercing gaze, she felt like an iceberg melting from the inside out. His blue eyes were sharp and assessing, and there was a brutal strength to him that could easily snap her neck in two, if he were so inclined. His face was young with unlined features, yet she sensed an ancient wisdom, as if he had seen more than his share of the dark side of life. He was the definition of gorgeous with a chiseled, masculine face and devilishly black hair. Even his frown was sexy as hell. Why did she feel she had seen him before?

Masculine to the core, he seemed as fierce and wild as this barbarous place. He might be a hottie, but she sensed that within he was as cold and hard as a slab of coarse-grained granite.
I’m staring into the face of history.
He was a Highlander through and through. Never, ever, in a million years of excavation would she imagine this was what a Highland warrior would look like, and oh, was the real warrior better than the imagined one. The opportunity, the research that could be done here. It was a gold mine, not to mention the possibilities of extracurricular benefits. The thought left her mystified and somewhat breathless.

She tried to present a brave front and decided to break the ice. “Greetings, Sir Knight, I hope your chivalric beliefs have not been truant of late and that your code is as honorable as your knight’s regalia.”

He stared at her impassively, and just when she thought he wouldn’t, he spoke, his words tempered with a lilting burr. “’Twould seem ye have yerself in a bit of a predicament, lass.”

Lass… Oh, my, with that voice, he could make a bloody fortune in ringtones. “Yes, I’m in need of help, as you can see.”

“The middle of a battle is no’ a safe place for a woman. Mayhap ye should take care in the future, not only with where ye step, but with the matter of yer clothes—or the absence of them.”

She lifted her head higher and met his stare until she thought her neck would get a crick in it. She really hated answering him from her submissive sitting position.

“If you plan to kill me, do it now and get it over with. However, if you’re thinking to ransom me, you are wasting your time. I am alone and have no family save the sister your men kidnapped.”

Isobella wasn’t sure why it hadn’t occurred to her before that this man with the icy stare and the manners of a caveman might actually be responsible for Elisabeth’s kidnapping. The last thing she wanted was to let him see how desperate she was. She raised her chin to a lofty height.

“Where have you taken my sister? I swear, if your men harm her—”

“Do ye always talk so much and say so little?”

She sputtered, searching for something clever and gave up. “Only when I’m nervous.”

“We didna take yer sister,” he said, with a grudging hint of respect underlying the tone of his voice. “My brothers hope to rescue her from the Macleans.”

“The Macleans? Then who are you?”

“I might be asking the same of ye, mistress, but I can tell by yer speech that ye are an English wench.”

She didn’t miss the way his hard stare passed coldly over her. She tried to pull the hem of her shorts lower, to no avail. Bruised legs bare and her knees knocking together in fright, she wondered what the rest of her person looked like. Not that it really mattered. What did she have to lose at this point? She lifted her chin again in the manner that always made her mother say, “That blasted Scots blood!”

A sharp pang of separation from her life and her world ripped through her. What a day of trauma it had been so far. Her home and family were centuries away, and the Black Douglas was beyond vague about their future. That revelation had been a real shocker, turned tragic the moment those ruffians rode off with Elisabeth.

Isobella could only pray they were the kind and honorable sort and would do her sister no harm. Mull was a small island and very sparsely populated in 1515. If she were to venture a guess, she’d say there probably weren’t more than a few hundred people on the island. There were no towns, just castles and a few settlements. It shouldn’t be difficult to learn where she was.

She wouldn’t tell him any of this, however. Never expose your weakness. “I am neither English nor a wench.” The whole situation was almost comical, and she bit her lips to keep from laughing at the absurdity of it. Here she sat on her bruised backside, bleeding and aching all over, in the middle of nowhere having a staring contest with an ill-tempered lout of Celtic blood, who gave her no hint as to his intent.

She shouldn’t keep staring, but something about him was oddly familiar. What was it that held her transfixed? His hard, lean body? The chiseled angles of his face? The sexy burr of his speech? The daring of his ride? Or, was it the raw, almost primitive masculinity that seemed to radiate from him.

“Are you going to just sit there and stare, or are you going to offer some assistance? We have a damsel in distress here, in case you haven’t noticed.”

She couldn’t be certain, but she did think she saw the corners of his mouth twitch briefly—before he dismounted with a creaking of leather and a ring of rowels—as he approached her. “Get up, lass, unless ye plan to sleep here tonight and fend off nocturnal visitors by yerself.”

“Do I look comfortable sitting on these hard, lumpy rocks? It’s my ankle.”

He raked her over with a gaze that took its own sweet time, pausing for an uncomfortably long time to give her breasts a good going-over. Apparently he had already formed a remarkably accurate picture of how she would look without a stitch on.

“I would advise ye to pay more attention to what ye are aboot. Ye are in a dangerous position, and ye have no one to protect ye. That places ye completely at my mercy.”

“I am indebted to you for risking your life to ride down here, when you could have ridden off and left me to die. I am appreciative of any assistance you can give me, for I am in desperate need of help and completely dependent upon your charity.”

Her eyes connected with his ever so briefly before she looked away. “I can’t stand. I think my ankle is sprained, or perhaps I have a fracture,” she said, then adding the Latin word,
fractura
, in case he did not understand fracture.

His brows rose, and the expression in his eyes was one of interested surprise. “Fracture? You speak French?”

So much for getting it down to his level. She nodded. “A little, but I have studied Latin, and the Latin word is
fractura
.”

“’Tis the same word—fracture or
fractura
,” he said.

“Either way, it hurts. I tried hopping to the burn to soak it in cold water, but I kept falling because of the loose stones. So here I am, waiting for another option to present itself. Could that be you?”

He muttered something in Gaelic, too soft and too rapidly spoken for her to catch, but the tone and the hard set to his features told her readily enough that she was already labeled a nuisance. However, she was alive, which was promising.

As he hunkered down beside her, his face was so near that she could feel the warmth of his breath brush against her cheek. She tilted her head back to watch him as he picked up her foot. She yelped with pain, which he ignored.

“’Tis swelling like a turkey cock—’tis no’ broken.”

“It will be if you don’t stop twisting it.” She yanked her foot back and tugged at her shorts.

He studied her with the sharpness of an eagle, and his stare seemed to penetrate the fabric of her scanty clothing. The way he was looking at her—a dunce could see that he wanted her—and the effect of it made her stomach tighten with desire, which was the last thing she needed right now. She exhaled with a breathy little moan that made her pray he had not heard it.

One glance told her she was out of luck in that department, for he was undressing her with his eyes as surely as God made little apples. She tugged at her shorts again.

“Yer fighting a losing battle, lass.” His hand was still on her ankle, and his gaze traveled slowly up her legs. The look couldn’t have been more suggestive if it had been his hand. She was trapped in his gaze, and the way he was looking her—lord, it made her feel like the only sitting duck in the pond when duck season opened. Mustering as much huffiness as she could, she said, “Surely you’ve seen a woman’s legs before.”

His eyes blazed, and a sardonic half-smile curved his lips. “Only when I was betwixt them.”

The air went out of her lungs like collapsed bellows. She sputtered while searching to find an appropriate retort. The best she could do was a haughty, “You have no right to speak so. I don’t know you.”

“Dinna fret aboot it, mistress. Ye will know me better afore the day is oot.”

Determined blue eyes met determined green ones, and for a moment it was a stalemate. He was a formidable foe; she’d hand him that much. For a disturbing moment, she couldn’t speak. She wasn’t much better at breathing.

His face might be a delight to gaze upon, with his high cheekbones and sensuous mouth, but his expression was permanently scowled, his stance prideful, his demeanor commanding, and she was certain laughter was a rarity around him.

“Ye do seem to have an abundance of flesh to cover with that wee fragment of fabric ye are wearing,” he said, his voice like the purr of a hungry tiger.

He was both mysterious and alluring, and her heart pounded wildly as she mustered a weak dose of bravado. “If you so much as lay a hand on me!”

“Do ye ken how to play Fidchell?”

He goes from undressing me with his eyes to wanting to play a board game? “I can play Fidchell, Hnefatafl, Tawlbwrdd, backgammon, chess, checkers, and several card games. What I don’t know is whether I want to play any of them with you.” He did not respond, but when had silence ever daunted her? “What does Fidchell have to do with getting me out of here?”

“Naught,” he said, and grabbed her by the arm.

“Oaf!” she said as he yanked her upward, caught her around the waist, and hoisted her over his shoulder like a sack of millet, one hand still holding her arm, while the other was splayed across her fanny. “Would it be asking too much for you to move your hand and treat me like a lady?”

“Stop yer bleating. If I move my hand,
my lady
, ye will fall on yer royal erse.”

Bleating? Erse?
She would give anything for a quick comeback, but unfortunately since none was forthcoming, she decided to let it lie fallow, vowing her day would come. He was carrying her toward his horse when she cried out, “Wait a minute! I left my backpack,” she said, pointing toward her Prada backpack.

He glanced and kept walking.

She tugged at his sleeve. “Please, I really need it.”

“Impatient as the wind, ye are.”

“It’s all I have left.”

She caught the way he stopped and looked at her and then back at her backpack with a suspicious expression suddenly etched on his face. “What is in yer pouch that has ye worrit? Dressed as ye are, I doubt ye are carting yer family jewels aboot. Or do ye have some secret ye are hiding there?”

Wonderful. She should have been more careful. The Scots were a suspicious lot, especially of that which could not be explained. And she wasn’t ready to start pulling everything out and trying to explain.
He probably thinks I’m Henry the VIII’s favorite spy.
She was definitely at a disadvantage with this man. Patient endurance was the order of the moment.

Riding out of this place was infinitely better than remaining here alone, and if that meant suffering the humiliation of his hand on her erse, then she would bear up as best she could. She focused upon her current state of affairs, especially the situation concerning her clothes, or lack of them. And there was little chance that other clothing would be forthcoming. The best she could hope for was to grab something to cover herself when they reached his home, lair, cave, rabbit hole, or wherever he was taking her. Aching and uncomfortable, she squirmed.

“Keep wiggling like that, and I will answer the question troubling me since I first saw ye.”