"The arms of a man who murdered his wife?"
Gilpatrick's mouth hardened. "If ever a woman needed killin', it was that one. Even so, lookin' at you here, now, I doubt you could've stomached snuffing out her life."
Wary respect, exchanged despite years of hate, despite the hideous scar, the stolen lands. Despite everything.
"What the devil am I supposed to do to find the bastard who made the accursed wager? Where am I to start?"
"By hiding the girl," Gilpatrick said. "If she were my daughter, I'd keep her locked up tighter than the Regent's crown. The slightest signal to these men would see you dead. And there are more around every corner, choked up with hate and poverty, needin' someone to blame for their children's empty bellies. Your enemy wouldn't have to flip them more than tuppence for them to bloody a dirk in your chest."
"Calvy said Cass's attacker spoke Gaelic."
"That narrows the field to half the crofter folk in the west country, trying to keep the words alive. None of my men came after your daughter, Kane. But someone did. And if I were a wagering man, I'd guess they were hungering for a tale about how they'd breached the walls of Rathcannon and stolen away your princess. Hungering for the gold of whoever is thirsting for your pain." Gilpatrick's jaw hardened. "Be certain of this, Kane: If I do learn any more about who stalks you, I'll get word to you as fast as I can."
"I don't understand—why... why you are doing this."
"Because even when your da would'a shot your pony, you wouldn't fight me, Kane. Not 'til I struck the first blow."
With that Gilpatrick signaled, and a raw-boned man with a pronounced limp came forward, leading a skittish Hazard by his reins.
Aidan mounted, bewildered as if the cudgel end of the scythe had yet again slammed into his skull.
"If I catch wind of anything more, I'll send word to you," Gilpatrick said, turning to stride away.
"Donal?"
It was almost thirty years since Aidan had used that name. An eternity. Yet only yesterday. Gilpatrick turned, meeting Aidan's gaze with a quiet intensity, a certainty that he was remembering too.
"Give your son a piece of Rathcannon he can keep for all eternity," Aidan said, his throat tight.
"What?"
"The Gilpatrick crypt is untouched. I'll leave orders that you are to be allowed on Rathcannon land whenever you wish to visit him."
The rebel's eyes widened. "You would... offer that? Why?"
"Because he belongs there," Aidan said softly. "Bring the boy home, so he can sleep with kings."
CHAPTER 21
The Thorned Paw Inn reeked of neglect, stale liquor, and intrigue. A haven for the dregs of humanity, poison seemed to seep through its walls, its floors, along with the stains water sent oozing down the walls.
It was a place most sane men would shun—especially a man like the one even now pacing the confines of the cramped room. His immaculate breeches and exquisitely tailored coat were as out of place as a handful of glittering sapphires would be on the splintered oak table. But momentary discomfort was a small price to pay when vengeance was nearly in a man's grasp.
Richard Farnsworth paced the room, impatience flashing in his eyes.
Even so, he could wait however long was necessary.
Patience was the one virtue Richard had attained the hard way. It had been a long time to have to hide the poison in his soul, but the waiting would soon be over.
They should return any moment now, the men he'd hired to abduct the prize he had plotted so long and hard to make his own.
Cassandra Kane, Aidan Kane's cherished daughter, an heiress in her own right, the perfect tool to exact his revenge.
She would be frightened, no doubt—the proud little beauty stolen away from her papa's castle. But she could hardly expect pity from him. It was ironic justice that she be as terrified as he had been when his path first clashed with that of Aidan Kane.
Richard downed another mug of wine. Vengeance. That was the only thing left to him. The goal he would go to any lengths to achieve—even if it meant taking a young girl into his bed. Distaste drew a shudder from him at the prospect. But there was no escaping the necessity.
A drunken vicar lolled in the inn's chimney corner, his slack flesh so permeated with gin that a pinprick might burst him like a rotted wineskin. Gin and a heavy purse would assure his cooperation in performing the wedding rites, the license in Richard's coatpocket would see that it was legally binding. And the consummation would be a masterpiece of hellish vengeance beyond Satan's own imaginings. But the purest pleasure of all would be the instant Kane realized that he'd been betrayed by yet another wife—that his mousy little bride was the one who had flung wide the gate to his castle, allowing his enemy in.
Richard rubbed his fingers together in anticipation, greedy for the moment he saw destruction in Kane's eyes. The same blazing humiliation, the utter desolation the Irish knight had left in Richard's own.
The sound of horsemen riding up made Farnsworth straighten, and he all but bolted down the stairs to greet his reluctant bride.
But when the door opened, no terrified beauty spilled in, only the curs he had hired to abduct her, the three looking bewildered, shaken, and chagrined.
"Where is the girl?" Richard snapped.
"She was too close guarded! A bleedin' army couldn't a taken her!" a bald man whined.
"We had 'er in hand, and some damned fool servant dodged betwixt us. We shot him, certain sure, but it gave the girl time to get away."
"Aye, an' the shot brought a score of people runnin' from the ball. We were lucky to get away with our very skins."
Frustration and rage raced like venom through Richard's veins, the emotions all the more potent because they had seethed inside him, hidden for so long. The thought that Kane had bested him again was acid in old wounds. The knowledge that he'd been thwarted when he'd been so close to his goal was infuriating.
"You fools! You incompetent fools! I should shoot you myself!"
One of the men eyed him warily, a hand flicking to the hilt of a knife.
"Damnation, you're not worth bloodying the floorboards," Richard raged. "Get out, all of you. If I ever see your faces again, or if you ever breathe a word of this night's work, I swear I'll shoot you where you stand."
The men bolted out, and Richard turned to see the vicar staring at him owlishly, a damn annoying smile on his vacuous face.
"Whatcher goin' t' do now, friend? Yer ladybird seems to have slipped the net."
"I'm going to snare her myself. And when I do..." Richard's jaw set grimly. "I shall repay her a hundredfold for the inconvenience she has caused me."
"I suppose you're goin' t' walk right up t' Sir Aidan's doorstep an' say how d'ye do?"
"Exactly. It's time I made a most concerned call upon my beloved stepsister. She will be delighted to see me. She always was."
With that, Richard stalked to the chamber in which he'd planned to bed his bride. He flung his clothes into a portmanteau. If he hurried, he could reach Rathcannon before nightfall.
* * * * *
Exhausted, Aidan made his way up the castle stairs. How many times had he passed by the crests knitted into the very bones of Castle Rathcannon, ornamenting doorways and mantels, turrets and grand ballrooms?
More often than he'd admitted, even to himself, he'd felt the subtle rasp of guilt against him, the excruciating sensitivity a thief must feel when taking out a stolen treasure, breathless because of its beauty, while his hands felt soiled by the knowledge that he had no right to touch it, to hold it.
It was the same clumsy awe he'd felt for Cassandra. An awe that reached new heights in the wife who waited for him in the bedchamber that had been the scene of Delia's darkest betrayals—and that now, with biting irony, held his own most fragile hopes.
He clamped his good arm around ribs that throbbed and ached from the blows he'd taken from the butt of Gilpatrick's scythe, the pain exacerbated from the jolting ride along dark byways. The gash cleaved
into his shoulder arced a ribbon of liquid fire from his collarbone to midbicep, his legs dragging like lead weights of pure exhaustion. But neither the beating he'd suffered, nor the wounds he'd sustained could match the battering he'd received in places far deeper, where fists and cudgels and blades could never reach.
Nothing was what it seemed. Gilpatrick, his sworn enemy, had attempted to save Aidan's daughter. Rathcannon, the bastion of safety built to protect Cassandra, had almost been the scene of her abduction. Delia with her poisonous beauty had made Aidan swear never to trust another woman. Yet now, half broken, bleeding from wounds no one else could see, Aidan had brushed aside the worried queries of Sean and Gibbon, Mrs. Cadagon and Mrs. Brindle, and instead of going up to Cassandra's tower, was rushing as fast as he could toward the one person he needed to see, to touch, to tell.
Norah.
Never, from the time he'd been a boy, had he allowed himself this shattering need to pour all that he was into another person's hands. His father had taught him young to mock such tender feelings, that nobility and honor were only disguises for weakness and stupidity, that to reveal the vulnerabilities in one's heart was like baring a jugular to a ravening wolf.
God knew, Delia had seared the truth of his father's words into every fiber of Aidan's being during the storm-tossed night he had raced after the coach, poison spreading through his body as he clung to sanity by the frayed thread of his child's cries of terror.
Yet in the midst of the standing stones on the Hill of Night Voices, Aidan had bared his throat to his enemy and received, not the expected death blow, but a hand, offering to aid him. In the child whose birth had destroyed his first marriage, Aidan had found his own salvation.
In the marriage bed with a bride he had never wanted, he had found not lust, not even something so simple as passion, but rather a mystic elixir that had pushed him beyond the mere limitations of flesh and need and desire, into a realm so wondrous he was still shaken by the power his solemn-eyed bride had unleashed in him. A power, a beauty that had been magnified a thousandfold in the enchanted reaches of Caislean Alainn.
Miracles—they were all miracles he didn't deserve. Chances to make things right, where he had failed for so very long. Hope—or, a voice inside Aidan whispered, the final torment of hell itself, dangling salvation before his eyes, something decent and good after so many years lost in darkness. Salvation he could glimpse, grasp with his unworthy hand, for the merest heartbeat, before the jeering fates ripped it away.
He turned down the corridor that had once mocked him with Delia's recriminations, to the bedchamber that had once echoed with the groans and pleasure sounds of his wife with another man, and realized that now there was only a kind of quiet peace, a soft expectation. Welcome.
At Norah's door, he released his ribs long enough to turn the latch and steal into the chamber quietly, so quietly. What he saw in the guttering light of the candles stole his breath away.
Half hidden by the bedcurtains, Norah lay on the bed where Delia had betrayed him, her fingers pressing something soft and white against her cheek. His cravat, Aidan realized with a jolt as he took a step toward her. She'd been crying against it; salty tracks of tears were dried upon her cheeks.
The knowledge that this woman had wept for him was more humbling than anything Aidan had ever faced in his life. The certainty that he was unworthy of even one of her tears raked through him, leaving more pain in its wake than the scoring tip of Gilpatrick's scythe when it had cut into his shoulder.
He crossed to the bed and reached out his fingertips to feel the petal softness of her cheek, so warm and alive.
He needed her. The knowledge ate like acid inside him, the raw vulnerability the most terrifying emotion he'd ever faced in his life. The trust he placed in her—this woman of gentle dignity, sweet, quiet courage—was the most delicate spindle of spun glass, indescribably beautiful, bright, and yet so fragile, it seemed it must shatter with the merest brush of his hand.
"Norah." He breathed her name, watched her come awake with a start. Her eyes flashed open, disoriented, tear-reddened, and shadowed with desperation and pain, and he knew in that instant what she had suffered for him. She cried out, a choked sound of joy, flinging herself against him with a sob. White-hot pinwheels radiated out from his ribs, the wound in his shoulder igniting afresh, but he didn't care. He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tight against him, drinking in the warmth, the vibrancy, the sweet, sweet honesty that was his new bride.
She was touching him everywhere, his hair, his face, as if she didn't believe her eyes. "Aidan! Sweet God in heaven, you're alive!"
Had anyone ever greeted him thus? Emotion crushed his throat. "Hush, ladylight," he whispered, stroking her dusky curls with his bruised hand. "I'm fine."
"Did you find the—the men who tried to hurt Cassandra? You were gone so long, I was certain you must have found the rebel—"
"I found Gilpatrick. He isn't responsible for the attack. He is the one who tried to warn us."
Norah gazed up at him, her arms still clinging, her eyes shimmering, soft. "But I thought you were enemies."
"We were bred to be. And yet... he's a good man, Norah. One I would want at my side if I were charging into battle. One I would trust with my life. He already did his best to save my daughter's,"
"Oh, Aidan." Her palm curved about his jaw, tenderness and understanding seeping through him.
He felt so unsettled, off balance. "It isn't over. I have to find whoever did plot against Cass. Gilpatrick gave me some information to begin with, and he promised to send me word if he learned anything more. Whoever is stalking me is a cunning bastard, one making a game of my destruction. There are wagers involved. One regarding Cassandra. And... another about you."
"Wagers? What kind of wagers?"
"I don't know. The only thing I'm certain of is this: He wants to toy with me before he closes in for the kill."
"He must—must hate you. Is there an enemy you can think of? Someone so villainous—"
"I've spent my life neck-deep in villains, Norah. Libertine blackguards who would joyfully slit a throat over the turn of a card. I've done things I'm not proud of, more than I can even remember."
"Aidan, I don't believe—"
"That I'm every bit the sonofabitch I told you I was the night you arrived here?" A ragged sound tore from his throat, rife with self-contempt. "Believe it, Norah. When I inherited Rathcannon, it was in ruins. I found it vaguely amusing at first. I was a bold rakehell with London at my feet. I didn't give a damn about the estate, my inheritance, anything. I was a soldier, but I'd had a belly full of killing. The only other skill I possessed was at the gaming table. I used it. Ruthlessly. To survive. God knows how many of my opponents I could have ruined. We Kanes have always had an overdeveloped sense of self-preservation, the devil take the price to anyone else."
"I don't care about that Kane legacy. I know you."
Her belief in him should have healed, should have comforted. Instead, it ripped away the fragile coverings of scars long buried.
"You don't know me at all," he grated. "I pray God you never do." Shuddering need raced through him, that blend of desperation, panic, and love—God, oh, not love—that he'd felt for his daughter, yet worlds different, somehow agonizingly new, the emotions sharpened, honed even more intensely when he looked into Norah's eyes. The need to protect her from himself was fierce, and yet there was a part of him that wanted nothing more than to pour the truth into Norah's hands, to take that final risk—that, by some miracle, she could love him. In spite of the ugliness. In spite of what he had been, the past from which he could never be free.
But the hideous possibility of seeing her love for him change to revulsion, the chance of feeling those hands that had been so magical, the most beautiful things that had ever touched him, changing, shifting, shrinking away from him as if he were something dirty, loathsome... God, the courage it would take to hazard such a risk...
He drew away from her, fe
eling as if he'd somehow tainted her, sickened by all that he was, all that he stood for. He meant only to put distance between them, so that he could drag the tattered remains of his guard about him, cover up the places she'd bared in his soul with those exquisitely gentle hands.
He raised his fingers to rake his hair back from his eyes, and he heard her breath catch in her throat. Her face paled, her eyes widened, locked on his shirt. "Aidan, you're hurt!" she gasped, staring at the blood-soaked tear in his shirt.
"It's nothing. The tiniest scratch." He attempted to brush her concern away, but Norah scrambled out of the bed, her brows crashing together in such stormy anger he almost smiled.
"I barely get you healthy after your bout with the gypsy love potion, and you charge out and get yourself injured again!" She attacked his buttons, stripping the ruined garment from him. The cloth clung to the wound, and he saw her catch her lip between her teeth as she tried to gently pull it free. She flinched as she saw the eight-inch gash.
"It looks far worse than it is, Norah," he said gently. "Trust me. It's not as if I've never been wounded before."
Her mouth trembled, and her eyes filled as they skated from the cut to a chest covered with darkening bruises.
"The fete at the standing stones was a private party. Some of Gilpatrick's men took exception to my arriving without an invitation," he said, attempting to jest. "I just need to wash the cut, and then bind a tight cloth about my ribs."
"Aidan, they hurt you. I thought you said Gilpatrick had tried to help."
"His men didn't have their leader's philanthropic impulses. And as for the fight with Gilpatrick, I goaded him into it. I wanted so damn bad to gain control of something again, anything. To fight some foe besides this—this phantom that melted out of the night to try to steal Cassandra and then disappeared again."