A few moments later, he stood in the round tower watching the elderly man remove dusty woolens draped over objects stacked behind an assortment of trunks near the wall. The elder seemed to be looking for one item in particular, and upon locating it, devoted much care to wiping it free of dust. Then he swiveled it about and propped it in front of him, where all could see.
Vengeance sucked in a harsh breath. The elder had uncovered a portrait of a dark-haired girl sitting between a man and a woman. The man bore an eerie resemblance to himself. The woman was a beauty with wild blond tresses. But the little girl—ah, merely gazing upon her filled him with pain. He closed his eyes, his breathing suddenly rapid and shallow.
But you canna leave me, Aedan! Ma and Da hae gone sailin’ and I canna bear to be alone! Nay, Aedan, dinna be leavin’ me! I’ve a terrible feelin’ you willna be comin’ back!
But this “Aedan,” whoever he was, had had to leave. He’d had no choice.
Vengeance wondered who the man and child were and how he knew of them. But such thoughts pained his head so he thrust them from his mind. ’Twas none of his concern.
“ ’Tis Findanus and Saucy Mary, with their daughter, Rose,” the old man informed him. “They promised centuries ago that although the keep might be abandoned, one day a MacKinnon would return, the village would prosper, and the castle would be filled with clan again.”
“I am not a MacKinnon,” Vengeance growled.
The elder retrieved yet another portrait of three men riding into battle. Even Vengeance was forced to concede his resemblance to them was startling.
“ ’Tis Duncan, Robert, and Niles MacKinnon. The brothers were killed fighting for Robert the Bruce more than a century ago. The keep has stood vacant since. The remaining MacKinnon resettled easterly, on the mainland.”
“I am no kin of theirs,” Vengeance said stiffly.
The lass who’d invaded his castle snorted. “You look just like them. Anyone can see the resemblance. You’re obviously a MacKinnon.”
“ ’Tis an uncanny coincidence, naught more.”
The villagers were silent for a time, watching their elder for a cue. The old man measured him for several moments, then spoke in a tone one might employ to gentle a wild animal. “We came to offer our services. We brought food, drink, and materials to rebuild. We will arrive each morn at daybreak and remain as yer servants ’til dusk. We pray ye choose to remain with us. ’Tis clear ye are a warrior and a leader. Whatever name ye go by, we would be pleased to call ye laird.”
Vengeance felt a peculiar helplessness steal over him. The man was saying that whether he was MacKinnon or not, they needed a protector and they wanted him. He felt a simultaneous disdain, a sense that he was above it all, yet … a tentative tide of pleasure.
He longed to put a stop to it—to cast the villagers out, to force the female to leave—but not being privy to his king’s purpose in sending him there, he couldn’t, lest he undermine his liege’s plan. It was possible that his king expected him to submit to a fortnight of mortal doings to prove how stoically he could endure and demonstrate how well he would perform amongst them in the future. There was also the possibility that since he was his king’s emissary in the mortal realm, he might have future need of this castle, and his king intended the villagers to rebuild it. He shook his head, unable to fathom why he’d been abandoned without direction.
“Oh, how lovely of you to offer!” the lass exclaimed. “How kind you all are! We’d love your help. I’m Jane, by the way,” she told the elder, clasping his hand and smiling. “Jane Sillee.”
Vengeance left the tower without saying another word. Jane. He rolled the name over in his mind. She was called Jane. “Jane Sillee,” he whispered. He liked the sound of it on his lips.
His head began to pound again.
“What’s ailing him, milady?” Elias, the village elder, asked after Aedan had departed and introductions had been made all around.
“He suffered a fall and took a severe blow to his head,” she lied smoothly. “It may be some time before he’s himself again. His memory has suffered, and he’s uncertain of many things.”
“Is he a MacKinnon from one o’ their holdings in the east?” Elias asked.
Jane nodded, ruing the lie but deeming it necessary.
“I was fair certain, there’s no mistakin’ the look,” Elias said. “Since the battle at Bannockburn, they’ve left the isle untended, busy with their holdings on the mainland. Long have we prayed they would send one of their kin to stand for us, to reside on the isle again.”
“And so they have, but he was injured on the way here and we must help him remember,” Jane said, seizing the opportunity offered, grateful that she now had coconspirators. “Touch him frequently, although it may appear to unsettle him,” she told them. “I believe it helps. And bring children around,” she said, remembering how in her dreams Aedan had adored children. “The more the better. Perhaps they could play in the yard while we work.”
“We? Ye needn’t labor like a serf, milady,” a young woman exclaimed.
“I intend to be part of rebuilding our home,” Jane said firmly. Our home—how she liked the sound of that! She was gratified to see a glint of appreciation in the women’s eyes. There were several approving nods.
“Also, I heard somewhere that familiar scents can help stir memories, so if you wouldn’t mind teaching me to bake some things you think he might like, I’d be most appreciative. I’m afraid I’m not the best cook,” she admitted. “But I’m eager to learn.”
More approving nods.
Jane beamed. Her morning litany really did help: Today was turning out to be a fine day after all.
Seven
AND SO THEY SETTLED INTO A ROUTINE WITH WHICH Jane was pleased, despite Aedan’s continued insistence that he was not a MacKinnon. Days sped by, too quickly for Jane’s liking, but small progress was being made both with the estate and with the taciturn, brooding man who called himself Vengeance. Each day, Jane felt more at home at Dun Haakon, more at home with being in the fifteenth century.
As promised, each morning at daybreak, the villagers arrived in force. They were hard workers, and although the men departed in the late afternoon to tend their own small plots of land, the women and children remained, laboring cheerfully at Jane’s side. They swept and scrubbed the floors; scraped away cobwebs; polished old earthenware mugs and platters, candlesticks, and oil globes; and aired out tapestries, hanging them with care. They repaired and oiled what furniture remained, stored beneath cloths saturated with the dust of decades.
Before long, the great hall sported a gleaming honey-blond table and a dozen chairs. The sole bed had been lavishly (and with much giggling by the women) covered with the plumpest pillows and softest fabrics the village had to offer. Sconces were reattached to the stone walls, displaying sparkling globes of oil with fat, waxy wicks. The women stitched pillows for the wooden chairs and strung packets of herbs from the beams.
The kitchen had fallen into complete rubble decades ago, and it would take some time to rebuild. After much thought, Jane decided it wasn’t too risky to suggest the piping of water from a freshwater spring behind the castle and direct the construction of a large reservoir over a four-sided hearth, guaranteeing hot water at a moment’s notice. She also sketched plans for counters and cabinets and a massive centrally located butcher’s block.
In the meantime, Jane was learning to cook over the open fire in the great hall. Each afternoon the women taught her a new dish. Unfortunately, each evening she ate it with a man who refused to eat anything but hard bread, no matter how she tried to tempt him.
Late into the twilight hours, Jane scribbled busily away before the fire, sometimes making notes, sometimes working on her manuscript, all the while peeking at Aedan over her papers and writing the future she hoped to have with him. She liked the laborious ritual of using quill and ink, the flames in the open hearth licking at her slippered toes, the hum of crickets and soft hooting of owls.
She relished the complete absence of tires screeching, car alarms pealing, and planes flying overhead. In all her life, she’d never experienced such absolute, awe-inspiring stillness.
By the end of the first week of renovations, she’d begun to draw hope from Aedan’s bewildered silence. Although he refused to speak to her, day by day he participated a bit more in the repairs to the estate. And day by day, he seemed a bit less forbidding. No longer did she see disdain and loathing in his gaze, but confusion and … uncertainty? As if he didn’t understand his place and how he fit into the grand scheme of things.
Jane intended to use her mouth as wisely as possible. She learned in her psychology courses at Purdue that attacking “amnesia” head-on could drive the person deeper into denial, even induce catatonia. So after much hard thought, she’d decided to give Aedan two weeks of absolutely no pressure, other than acclimating to his new environment. Two weeks of working, of being silently companionable, of not touching him as she so longed to do, despite the misery of being with him but forbidden to demonstrate her love and affection.
After those two weeks, she promised herself the seduction would begin. No more baths in Kyleakin in one of the village women’s homes. She would begin bathing before the fire in the hall. No more proper gowns in the evening. She would wear lower bodices and higher hems.
And so, Jane bided her time, cuddled with Sexpot in the luxurious bed, and dreamed about the night when Aedan would lay beside her and speak her name in those husky tones that promised lovemaking to make a girl’s toes curl.
Aedan stood on the recently repaired front steps of the castle and stretched his arms above his head, easing the tightness in his back. The night sky was streaked with purple. Stars twinkled above the treetops, and a crescent moon silvered the lawn. Every muscle in his body was sore from toting heavy stones from a nearby quarry to the castle.
Although he’d learned to avoid pain in the land of shadows, the current aches in his body were a strangely pleasurable sensation. He’d refused to participate in the repairs at first, withholding himself in silent and aloof censure, but much to his surprise, as he’d watched the village men work, he’d begun to hanker to lift, carry, and patch. His hands had itched to get dirty, and his mind had been eager to redesign parts of the keep that had been inefficiently, and in places, hazardously constructed.
Pondering the three commands his king had given, he’d concluded there was nothing to prevent him from passing time more quickly by working.
When on the third day he’d silently joined the men, they’d worked with twice the vigor and smiled and jested more frequently. They asked his opinion on many things, leading him to discover with some surprise that he had opinions, and, further, that they seemed sound. They accepted him with minimal fuss, although they touched him with disconcerting frequency, clapping him on the shoulder and patting his arm.
Because they weren’t females, he deemed it acceptable.
When they asked the occasional question, he evaded. He completely ignored the lass who doggedly remained in the castle, leaving only to traipse off to the village, from whence she returned clean and slightly damp.
And fragrant-smelling. And warm and soft and sweet-looking.
Sometimes, merely gazing upon her made him hurt inside.
Vengeance shook his head, as if to shake thoughts of her right out of it. With each passing day, things seemed different. The sky no longer seemed too brilliant to behold, the air no longer too stifling to breathe. He’d begun to anticipate working each day, because in the gloaming he could stand back and look at something—a wall recently shored up, steps relaid, a roof repaired, an interior hearth redesigned—and know it was his doing. He liked the feeling of laboring and rued that his king might deem it a flaw in his character, unsuitable for an exalted being.
And each day, when his thoughts turned toward his king, they were more often than not resentful thoughts. His king might not have bothered to inform him of his purpose at Dun Haakon, but the humans were more than willing to offer him ample purpose.
Purpose without pain.
Without any pain at all.
He had a blasphemous thought that took him by surprise and caused a headache of epic proportions that throbbed all through the night: He wondered if mayhap his king mightn’t just forget about him.
Eight
SWIFTLY DID ONE BLASPHEMOUS THOUGHT BREED ANOTHER, the next more blasphemous, making the prior seem nearly innocuous. Swiftly did traitorous thought manifest itself in traitorous action.
It was on the evening of the eleventh day of his exile, when she was laying her meal on the long table in the great hall, that Vengeance began his fall from grace.
He’d labored arduously that day, and more than once his grip had slipped on a heavy stone. Furthering his unease, wee children from the village had played on the front lawn all afternoon. The sound of their high voices, bubbling with laughter as they chased a bladder-ball at the edge of the surf or teased the furry beastie with woolen yarns, had reverberated painfully inside his skull.
Now, he sat in the corner, far from the hearth, chewing dispiritedly on hard bread. Of late, he’d been eating loaf after loaf of it, his body starved by his daily labors. Yet no matter how much bread he consumed, he continued to lose mass and muscle and to feel lethargic and weak. He knew ’twas why his grip had slipped today.
Of late, when she spread the table with her rich and savory foods, his stomach roiled angrily, and on previous evenings, he’d left the castle and walked outdoors to avoid temptation.
But recently, indeed only this morning, he’d thought long and hard about his king’s remark concerning sustenance and had scrutinized the precise words of his command.
You must eat, but I would suggest you seek only bland foods.
I would suggest.
It was the most nebulous phrase his liege had ever uttered. I would suggest. That was not at all how his king spoke to Vengeance. It made one think the king might be … uncertain of himself, unwilling, for some unfathomable reason, to commit to a command. And “bland.” How vague was bland? An engraved invitation to interpretation, that word was.
After much meditation, Vengeance concluded for himself—a thing coming shockingly easier each day—that apparently his king had suffered some uncertainty as to how hard Vengeance might be laboring, so he’d been unable to anticipate what sustenance his body would require. Thus, he had “suggested,” leaving the matter to Vengeance’s discretion. As his king had placed such a trust in him, Vengeance resolved he must not return to his king weakened in body and risk inciting his displeasure.
When he rose and joined her at the table, her eyes rounded in disbelief.
“I will dine with you this eve,” he informed her, gazing at her. Nay, lapping her up with his eyes. The tantalizing scent of roasted suckling pig teased his nostrils; the glorious rainbow hues of fiery-haired Jane clad in an emerald gown teased something he couldn’t name.
“No bread?” she managed after an incredulous pause.
“ ’Tis not enough to sustain me through the day’s labors.”
“I see,” she said carefully, as she hastened to lay another setting.
Vengeance eyed the food with great interest. She served him generous portions of roast pork swimming in juices and glazed with a jellied sauce, roasted potatoes in clotted cream with chive, some type of vegetable mix in yet another sauce, and thin strips of battered salmon. As a finishing touch, she added several ladles of a buttery-looking pudding.
When she placed it before him, he continued to eye it, knowing he’d not yet gone too far. He could still rise and return to his corner, to his bread.
I would suggest.
He glanced at her. She had a spoon in her mouth and was licking the clotted cream from it. That was all it took. He fell upon the food like a ravening beast, eating with his bare hands, shoving juicy, deliciously greasy pork into his mouth, stripping the tender meat from the bones with his teeth and tongue.
Chri
st, it was heavenly! Rich and succulent and warm.
Jane watched, astonished. It took him less than three minutes to devour every morsel she’d placed on his plate. His aquamarine eyes were wild, his sensual mouth glistening with juices from the roast, his hands—oh, God, he started licking his fingers, his firm pink lips sucking, and her temperature rose ten degrees.
Elation filled her. Although he’d never admitted that he’d been ordered to eat only bread, she’d figured it out herself. Each night while she’d dined, he’d shot furtive glances her way, watching her eat, eyeing the food with blatant longing, and a time or two, she’d heard his stomach rumble.
“More.” He shoved his platter at her.
Happily, she complied. And a third time, until he sat back, sighing.
His eyes were different, she mused, watching him. There was something new in them, a welcome defiance. She decided to test it.
“I don’t think you should eat anything but old bread in the future,” she provoked.
“I will eat what I deem fit. And ’tis no longer bread.”
Her lips ached from the effort of suppressing a delighted smile. “I don’t think that’s wise,” she pushed.
“I will eat what I wish!” he snapped.
Oh, Aedan, Jane thought lovingly, fighting a mist of joyous tears, well done. One tiny crack in the façade, and she had no doubt that a man of Aedan’s strength and independence would begin cracking at an alarming rate now that it had begun. “If you insist,” she said mildly.
“I do,” he growled. “And pass me that wine. And fetch another flagon. I feel a deep thirst coming on.” Centuries of thirst. For far more than wine.
Aedan couldn’t get over the pleasure of eating. Sun-warmed tomatoes, sweet young corn drenched with freshly churned butter, roasts basted with garlic, baked apples in delicate pastry smothered with cinnamon and honey. There were so many new, intriguing sensations! The fragrance of heather on the autumn breeze, the salty rhythmic lick of the ocean when he swam in it to bathe each eve, the brush of soft linen against his skin. Once, when no one had been in the castle, he’d removed his clothing and stretched naked on the velvet coverlet. Pressed his body into the soft ticks. Pondered lying there with her, but then he’d caught a rash from the coverlet that had made the part of him between his legs swell up. He’d swiftly dressed again and not repeated that indulgence. Unfortunately, the rash lingered, manifesting itself at odd intervals.