SWNOVELS The Highlander: Chapter 17
After the matriarchs carried the flames to their hearths, Mena had thought the evening’s festivities over.
Oh, how wrong she’d been.
She was wrong about a lot of things, wasn’t she? Ravencroft was supposed to have been a place of quiet escape, not of sensual awakening. The laird was supposed to have been a retired old officer, not this commanding, virile mountain of walking sin and temptation.
And whatever was in her new glass was supposed to have been cider, though she had a sneaking suspicion it was anything but.
Torches wended their way through the night, and once they were left in their respective places, the grown men and women of Wester Ross emerged from their tents, tenements, manors, and mires and congregated in the city of fine canvas shelters that had sprung up on the western hill of the Ravencroft estate.
“The children are abed, safe from the in-between. Now the real festival begins!” Gavin St. James, Earl of Thorne, loped to catch up with her, falling into easy step with his long stride as Mena wandered to investigate the gathering. “What do ye make of that, English?”
He swept his arm to encompass the ribbons, banners, and all forms of bohemian decoration that ornamented the rather Gypsy-like dwellings which were arranged in a circle stacked about five or so deep. In the center of the large circle was another bonfire. Though not as big as the ones that smoldered next to Ravencroft Keep, the fires were accompanied by strategically placed torches to lend a darker, more intimate glow to the night’s festivities.
“What are they doing?” Mena queried. “What is the in-between?” A brightly played fiddle-and-flute melody reached across the night to her and the accompanying drums called out to her spirit until her feet ached to dance.
Gavin swiped a mask from the table lorded over by Mrs. Grady, and tied it over his handsome features, smiling as he did so. His voice took on a bardish eeriness as he explained. “Before the Christians came, we Scots had two halves to the year, the light half and the dark half. The light half belongs to the living. The dark half belongs to the dead and the denizens of the Other World.”
“Oh?” Mena glanced around her, watching people in black cloaks and painted skin affix dark masks to their faces. Gowns fit for a London ball and simple homespun dresses alike were rendered exotic by hip scarves and outlandish jewelry. “Let me guess, Samhain marks the dark half of the year.”
Strains of strange pipes and drums began a dark rhythmic reel with no distinguishable beginning or end. More ale, Scotch, and other spirits flowed and lent the festival a reckless sort of apocalyptic frenzy. Some ladies had relieved themselves of their bodices altogether and danced around the fire with their chemises hanging from their shoulders, barely covering their unbound breasts.
No one seemed necessarily scandalized, so Mena decided not to be, either. The matching black masks that everyone wore lent a certain amount of anonymity to the occasion, and thereby some sort of wicked consent to such outlandish behavior.
“Clever lass,” Gavin crooned, magically appropriating two more glasses of cider, one of which he traded with the nearly empty one in her hand. “Samhain literally means ‘summer’s end.’ Tomorrow, November first, is our traditional New Year. We’re both leery and respectful of borders and transitions here in the Highlands. Bridges, clan boundaries, crossroads, thresholds, these are our holy places. Places where those of the Other World tend to linger. Likewise twilight, dawn, Samhain, and Beltaine, the hinges of the year, are our most mystical and often most precarious times.”
Mena accepted the mask he handed her, toying with the ribbons. “You celebrate these times because you fear them?” she assessed.
“Exactly that.” He grinned, the effect turned a bit ghoulish by the black mask above his sensual lips. “Come midnight, we turn ourselves into that which we fear and we drink and dance and philander like there is no tomorrow. We do so to welcome the ghosts, the demons, the faerie, and the witches to cavort with us, in hopes they doona turn their magic against us when they are most powerful. This is the time of the in-between.”
A shiver of delicious anticipation slid through Mena as crofters, farmers, ranchers, milkmaids, land owners, and lairds all became black-masked apparitions of the mysterious Scottish “Other World.” That place where all blessing and all misfortune had its genesis, and therefore the devil could take the consequences of this night.
Warm from the dubious contents of her cider, Mena gave in to the giddy, reckless spirit that seemed to ripple through the crowd, and allowed Gavin to help her affix her mask to her eyes.
“Do ye know any reels, lass?” Gavin queried as they reached the edge of the circle of revelers who’d begun to dance around the bonfire.
Mena grinned. “Do I know any reels?” she scoffed, tapping her toes along with the quick and merry music. “Please, I’m from Hampshire. We invented the reel.”
“I thought ye said ye were from Dorset,” a masked merrymaker interceded; the red beard and jowly smile identified him unmistakably as the steward, Russell.
Mena almost dropped her tankard of cider, blanching at her mistake. “That’s right, I did,” she breathed, groping for a way to recover.
A busty young woman twirled from the arms of her overenthusiastic partner, stumbling into Gavin and causing his drink to splash onto his shirt. Giggling a slew of blurry apologies, she ran her hands down the vest covering his muscled torso, and trailed a brazen finger along the belt of his sporran, slung low on his kilted waist.
“All’s forgiven, lass, believe ye me,” Gavin murmured with a silken intonation full of unmistakable innuendo.
“Come find me if ye change yer mind.” She nearly sang the invitation. “I’ll make reparations to ye.” She kissed him full on the mouth just as she accepted the hand of her unsteady partner and let him swing her away, leaving Russell and Gavin chuckling and Mena dumbstruck.
“I do believe she just propositioned you,” Mena marveled.
“I do believe ye’re right.” Russell laughed merrily.
“And kissed you, in front of her husband and everything!” she exclaimed. “I’m astonished that he didn’t call you out.”
Gavin’s laughter mingled with Russell’s, creating a warm, masculine sound. “Och, lass, that’s not her husband, he’s over there.” He gestured with his drink to the edge of the woods, where a short but wide fair-haired man had a tall woman against a tree, feasting upon her neck like a creature out of one of Andrew’s penny dreadfuls.
“Goodness,” was all Mena could think to say.
“Doona worry, lass.” Gavin leaned down to murmur in her ear, eliciting a pleasant chill that raced along her skin. “No one remembers they’re married on Samhain, and Beltaine is even worse.”
“Gods bless that decadent fertility holiday.” Russell crowed lustily and lifted his glass, and Gavin met it with a merry cheer of slàinte mhath.
For lack of else to do, Mena touched her glass to theirs and drank deeply, though the unhappy thought that the laird was not among the crowd dampened her spirits.
Masked and cloaked or not, he’d have been unmistakable, and his tall, broad form was conspicuously absent. Had he drifted into the woods with someone to take advantage of the bacchanalian holiday?
In-between some willing tart’s thighs?
The unbidden thought drew her brows together with a surprising rush of displeasure.
“Would ye care to teach me a reel, English?” Gavin asked, his green eyes sparkling with mischief from behind his mask. “Be it Hampshire or Dorset or wherever ye hie from?”
Mena placed her hand in Gavin’s outstretched one, thinking that his grip didn’t elicit the thrills of awareness in the places that Liam’s did, and so a dance with him was safer. Permissible. If everyone else was drinking, dancing, flirting, and … carrying on, why shouldn’t she join in? The witching hour was almost upon them, and it seemed that the later the hour, the more steeped in debauchery the evening became.
And if no one remembered they were married on Samhain here in the Highlands, then neither would she.
* * *
Finding Mena in the teeming crowd of people wasn’t at all difficult for Liam as he stalked the periphery of the dancing ghoulish Highlanders. She was unmistakable. Her glinting auburn hair had been swept up into a prim do, but was now in shambles. The front of the coiffure was still intact, but the rest tumbled down her back, nearly reaching her waist in a riot of loose glossy curls. Firelight glittered off the emerald satin ribbons threaded about the bit of black lace that passed for a bodice. Her alabaster breasts were splashed with golden light as she danced about the fire in a circle of forty, a man on each side vying for her attention as they taught her the steps.
His children had been right, she was a beautiful dancer.
She laughed gaily when she stumbled; her throaty, lilting sound of amusement evoking the lusty smiles of the men around her. Their hands went wherever they could as they helped her regain her footing.
Torturous black daggers twisted into his gut as he watched her enjoy the masculine attentions. Who’d have thought that his sweet, proper governess could move her body with all the sumptuous grace of a succubus?
The operative word here being his.
Hadn’t he made it clear enough to her, to his clan, that he meant to claim her?
Eyes glued to her voluptuous shape, he prowled around the edges of the firelight, stalking her prancing, laughing form and watching the glow from the fire set her hair ablaze with color.
Gavin came up behind her and cut into the circle, grasping her hand and smiling at her as if he were perfectly enchanted. Mena’s smile was just as brilliant as she turned her head to acknowledge him. The circle broke, and everyone grabbed a partner as the liveliest part of the reel had couples swirling about, their bodies only just managing to keep up with their flying feet.
His blood pounded through his ears and he had to crush the idea of murdering his brother and dragging her home by her luxurious hair.
This was the age of enlightenment, and the modern woman required a more deft seduction.
She needed to be wooed.
Lurking on the outskirts of the encampment, Liam snatched a mask from the table and fastened it to his eyes, letting it rest on the bridge of his nose as he made his way toward the musicians. A piper, a drummer, and two fiddlers played in the near darkness, careful not to get their instruments too close to the heat of the fire. Bending his head toward them, he gave a request for the next dance, and then bided his time until the reel wound down.
He still wore no cloak or shirt, proudly displaying the runes painted in the ancient wode on his skin. He felt like a Druid. Like the mythical Stag King about to claim his mate.
The crowd parted for him as the slow, writhing waltz emerged from the instruments, replacing the dizzy reel. His clan whispered their exclamations as he reached from behind Mena, and placed a hand on her shoulder.
She turned to him and her brilliant smile dimmed, then faltered.
“May I have this dance, my lady?” He bowed to her with all the deference of a disciple to his master.
Or mistress, in this case.
The infinitesimal widening of her eyes told him she didn’t miss his not-so-subtle emphasis on the possessive word.
The increasingly drunk and cheerful crowd delighted in this turn of events, heckled and crowed, nudging her forward until she was nigh shoved into his arms.
“I don’t see how I can refuse,” she muttered.
Liam tensed as their bodies connected at many electrifying points, as did she. Every place his heated skin pressed against that infernal dress pulsed with awareness. The tips of her incredible breasts rubbed just beneath his chest. Her thighs pressed to his, the folds of his kilt meshing between her skirts.
Gripping her hand, he slid his other around her waist to span the small of her back and pressed her closer. They would have been hip to hip had he not been so tall, but still she fitted into his arms as if she’d been made for them. Her every generous curve and dramatic dip gave to the jutting angles and hard swells of his own body.
They began the rhythmic steps, their bodies moving seamlessly even though he could tell he’d put her more than a little off kilter. Her hand fluttered over the bare skin of his arm like the wings of a butterfly unwilling to land.
She swallowed a few nervous times before asking, “Shouldn’t you don a shirt, my laird? This cannot be seemly.”
A dark chuckle spilled from his throat. Always the proper lass, his charming Miss Philomena Lockhart. “Look around ye, woman,” he challenged. “Dancing with a half-naked marquess is the least unseemly thing happening at this very moment.”
As he led her in the slow, undulating dance, she glanced at the other couples, and then to the periphery of the tent city and even the woods beyond, where more hedonistic goings-on filled the shadows with writhing forms and suspect sounds.
Distracted, she stumbled, and Liam used the opportunity to stabilize her against his body, pulling her in tighter.
“What do you think you are doing?” she asked rather breathlessly, as she tried with little success to regain a respectful distance between them.
“Just being careful of your toes, lass,” Liam replied with mock innocence, enjoying her discomfiture more than he should. “I’m a clumsy ogre sometimes and might cause ye harm.”
“I know you would never hurt me,” she said, covering her gaze with her long lashes.
“Ye think me a better dancer than I am,” he jested.
“No.” The word sounded like a lament, and she had yet to relax into his arms, despite his efforts to lighten the mood. “You think of me better than I am…” Her voice hitched, and she made as if to turn away. “Please excuse me, my laird, but I think it’s time I retired for the evening.”
Liam tightened his hold on her, refusing to let her escape. “Doona run away from me, Mena.” The intimacy of her name on his tongue tasted sweeter than the finest Scotch. “Doona run from this. From us.”
“There is no us,” she hissed. “Now please, let me go without a scene, I beg you.”
“Ye’ll listen to me first, woman,” he ordered. And for once, she complied, though her brows snapped together in a mutinous scowl that she directed right at his collarbone.
He gentled his words as he spoke from the heart. “I meant what I said, that I want Ravencroft to be yer sanctuary.” He kept his voice and his hands gentle, though his grasp on her was unbreakable. “These stones. They will always be here. They are the clan. They have strength and integrity and have withstood the weapons of countless enemies. This is a place to build a life, Mena. And this is a night of new beginnings.”
“There are no new beginnings for me,” she said in such a soft voice, he had to strain to hear her. “It would be better for you, for us both, if you stopped this now, before you or anyone else gets hurt.”
“I’ll not stop until ye order me to, lass, and likely not even then,” he admitted, pressing her harder against his aroused body. Letting her feel the pulse of his desire against her. “Tell me you doona want this. Tell me that ye didna feel this storm brewing between us since the very first day we met. That a part of ye didna know that this was an inevitability. I knew from the first time I saw ye that it was my destiny to claim ye here in the mists. And ye must take me, Mena … all of me. Make demands of yer own. Lay claim to the pleasure I’m willing to offer ye.”
Her body quivered at his words. Her muscles clenched and seemed to swell inside of her dress. Her hand went from tentatively resting on his arm to gripping it desperately, as though to keep herself upright.
When her face lifted to his, her jade eyes shimmered with unshed tears. The bleak despair surprised and confounded him. Of any effect he’d anticipated his words to have, this was most definitely not it.
“I—I must confess to you something that might change your feelings.” Threatening tears lent her voice an even lower register, and Liam spun her away from the dancers and the musicians to occupy the shadows next to a deserted table piled with two empty casks and countless empty tankards.
“There is nothing you can say—”
“There was a man,” she said fervently. “Back in London, he—”
Liam pressed a single rough finger against the ripe ridges of her lips. “I know this,” he soothed.
She turned her neck and twisted her face away from his touch. “No, you don’t. You can’t possibly know. He laid claim already, don’t you understand? He hurt me, Liam, but he didn’t force me. I let him. I had to. He did things to my body, to my soul, that changed me utterly.”
Liam’s demon rose within him, and he did his best to fight it back. “Give me his name, and I’ll see his bloody, broken corpse delivered at yer feet.”
She shook her head, taking a step back against the rage that must have gathered on his features. “No. No, don’t you see? My only means of escape is to be other than I was. You know I have a secret. A terrible secret. You can’t imagine the depth of it. The scope of it. You don’t know who I am … what I’ve become. To tell you would be the end of me.” Her last words escaped on a broken voice.
He reached for her, pulling her close. He wanted to erase every bad memory from her tortured thoughts. To ease every fear she had and smite all her dragons. He wanted to destroy this man who’d caused her such pain, such shame. If only she’d give him the means with which to do so.
Unable to go to war, as was his first instinct, he tried to give her some modicum of peace, instead. “I have secrets of my own, lass. Terrible ones. The kind that will damn me in the end. Let us leave our secrets to the past where they belong, and let us have this moment. Tomorrow is tomorrow, yesterday is yesterday. But tonight. Tonight is for us.”
She searched his eyes as though his was a face she didn’t recognize. “Don’t you remember what we talked about that day in the chapel? The past isn’t just the past. It stays with us, it makes us who we are. The sins we commit tonight we will have to answer for in the light of day.”
He reached out, brushing his knuckles against the downy softness of her cheek, right below where her ugly bruise used to be. “They say the past is etched in stone,” he murmured. “But ye’ve made me believe that it isn’t. It’s merely mist and mirrors, lass. Time passes and it becomes cloudy and unclear, and we can learn to leave our pain behind.”
“But certain things linger, don’t they?” she asked bitterly. “Like the acrid smell of peat smoke. The choices you make … there are so many that are impossible to escape.”
“Ye told me once that evil can make itself seem light. Good can do the same.” He leaned down to her, crowding her with his body against the table, pressing his cheek against hers as he gathered her close. “Ye make me yearn to be a good man. Let me show you how redemption can be found, even in the darkness, lass. Doona let tomorrow dawn, with all its dangerous unknowns without having let me love ye. For it canna be a sin beneath such friendly stars.”
A tear dropped onto his bare skin, scalding him as it ran into the grooves of his chest. “Don’t you understand what I’m trying to tell you? I’m not a virgin.”
“Hush, lass,” he soothed, pressing a kiss to her brow. “For I will share a confession of my own.” He tilted his head down toward hers, his hot breath hitting her ear. “Neither am I.”
Something about the obvious absurdity of his answer caused her a small hiccup of laughter. The thought of another man above Mena, inside of her, tightened every possessive instinct with such a force he thought he would snap beneath the weight. And yet …
“It changes nothing about the fact that I want ye,” he told her. “I am not a man who holds his women to an impossible standard of chastity. That’s not been our way out here in the Highlands. This is a place of handfasts and fishwives, we like to be certain of our desire before we bind our lives.” He pulled away, using a few fingers to lift her unsteady chin up toward him.
“Look into my eyes and say that yer body does not call to mine. Tell me ye doona want me.”
Her eyes shone brilliantly from her porcelain skin. “I—I can’t.”
“Then go to the north woods in five minutes. I’ll wait for a few minutes, so we are not marked as leaving together, and then I’ll find ye.” He’d not only find her, he’d assault her with such pleasure, he’d wipe the memory of any other man from her mind.
Permanently.