Surrender

  Annie’s dread grew, images of Iain and his men suffering in the past mixed with her fears for what he might be enduring now. She couldn’t bear to think of him lying scalped and lifeless on the cold earth, everything that he was or ever would be lost. Nor could she abide the thought that he might have already been captured and be on his way to a torturous death.

  She busied her trembling hands with bandages, her back to Wentworth to hide her anger and distress from his watchful gaze, snatches of prayer flitting through her mind.

  God, please bring him and his brothers back alive!

  “Tell me, Sergeant, is it true that some of the men, mad from hunger, ate the flesh of their own dead?”

  Annie heard the general’s horrifying words, and Brendan’s voice echoed in her mind.

  Did you truly eat your belts, Private Kinney?

  Aye, miss, and worse, but I willna speak of it to a lassie.

  She remembered how hungry she’d been on the journey to the fort, and that had lasted only three days. She tried to imagine being stranded in freezing cold without food for weeks. The gnawing pain of hunger. Hopelessness. Desperation.

  “Save your pryin’ questions for me, General. Dinnae harry my men.”

  Annie gasped, whirled about, and saw Iain standing in the doorway.

  He was alive!

  Relief as heady as mulled wine rushed through her veins. She started toward him, then remembered Lord William and General Abercrombie stood nearby. She halted in her steps—and she saw.

  Iain’s face was stained with sweat and gunpowder, his green-checked shirt dark with blood. Barely conscious, Connor leaned heavily against him. Behind them stood Morgan, bearing Killy upon his back much as Iain had carried her.

  She met Iain’s gaze and saw in his eyes deep anguish.

  “You’ll have to pardon Major MacKinnon, General,” Lord William said, leading the general past Iain and toward the door, clearly displeased. “The battle has obviously gotten the better of his tongue. Major, we await your report in my study.”

  Iain ignored Wentworth, unable to break his gaze from Annie’s.

  Her wide green eyes hid nothing from him—her fear for his life, her joy at seeing him again, her worry for his men. She was a breath of life in a world filled with death, beauty in a landscape of ugliness and brutality.

  “Over here, Major.” Dr. Blake motioned toward two empty beds.

  Iain bore Connor across the room and laid him back on the bed while Morgan carried Killy to the other, then hurried off to secure Ranger Camp for the night.

  “Connor took a ball to the shoulder and lost much blood.” Iain took hold of Connor’s shirt and ripped it down the center, exposing his brother’s chest. “Killy caught the edge of a French sword.”

  He knelt at Connor’s bedside, feeling utterly useless, as Annie quickly washed the blood from Connor’s chest and shoulder and then pressed a cloth against the wound to staunch the flow.

  She took his hand, placed it on the cloth. “Press hard.”

  Iain did as she asked while she coaxed laudanum down Connor’s throat.

  “Swallow, Connor.” Her voice was soft, feminine, comforting. “That’s it.”

  Dr. Blake gave the medicine a moment to work, then began to examine the wound, his poking and prodding causing Connor to groan and jerk awake. “The ball is lodged deep in the muscle. We shall have to cut it out, I’m afraid.”

  “Och, Jesus!” Connor’s face twisted with pain and temper. “I bloody well ken that!”

  Iain sat with his brother while Dr. Blake, with Annie beside him, moved to the next bed to gauge Killy’s injuries. He saw how carefully Annie removed Killy’s shirt, how caringly she bathed the gash in his belly, how tenderly she tried to wake the old Irishman to give him laudanum, and a warm sense of admiration crept over him.

  The apron she wore was stained with blood—the blood of his men—but she showed no squeamishness. Instead, she worked with skillful hands and did whatever the doctor asked without faltering, her brow knit as she bent her mind to the task. Only when she removed the makeshift bandages from Killy’s head and saw he’d been scalped did she show shock. But in the next instant she was washing the wound, spreading a poultice over it, and wrapping it in clean linen.

  Iain’s admiration grew stronger still as she knelt beside Connor and held his hand, murmuring reassurances in his ear, while Iain held him down and Dr. Blake went about the brutal business of digging lead from his shoulder.

  “Squeeze my hand, Connor. “

  “I dinnae wish to hurt you, lass.”

  “You willna hurt me. I am stronger than I seem.”

  And when Connor finally lay asleep and bandaged against his pillow, she returned to Killy’s side to help the doctor stitch his belly, seemingly without taking a breath.

  “She’s a healer, your woman.” Joseph spoke in his own tongue.

  Iain nodded. She was more than that.

  “Why do you keep yourself from her? I watch you and see that you suffer.”

  How like Joseph to see straight through him—the bastard! “It is she who would suffer if I did not. I have nothing to give her—no home, no certain future, a tainted name.”

  “Wastach-qua-am!” It was Joseph’s way of telling him he was stupid as a tree.

  Iain felt his temper flare. “If I were to take her, I would have to wed her, for she is from the white world, and I would not shame her. But we both know there is little chance of my surviving this war.”

  “That is for Creator to decide.”

  “I do not wish to leave her a widow to raise my children alone and unprotected.”

  Anger sparked in Joseph’s dark eyes. “Do you think we—your brothers, your people—would abandon her? I would take her as wife into my mother’s lodge before I would see that happen. No, brother, I think you are afraid to love. But she is stronger than Jeannie, and her heart is true. Look at how she cares for these men—like a mother bear.”

  Blood pounded in Iain’s ears, and he fought to rein in his temper, his control worn to a single thread by exhaustion and weeks of frustration. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “Don’t I? Then perhaps you should listen to yourself. What was it you told her in the lodge? Yes, I overheard. ‘If you stay here, you and I will lie together—as sure as the sun rises.’ What use is there in fighting the sunrise?” Then Joseph reached down and touched Connor’s brow. “How fares the cub?”

  Joseph still used their nickname for Connor despite Connor’s loathing of it—or perhaps for that very reason.

  But Connor was in no shape to argue just now.

  Rattled by Joseph’s words, his blood still racing, Iain looked down at his youngest brother, felt the hitch of fear in his gut. “He’s lost a lot of blood, but they were able to cut the ball out. If the wound doesn’t fester . . .”

  “He’s strong, and if she watches over him the way she watched over you, he’ll be back on his feet and bragging of his scar in a week.”

  Iain nodded. Then he brushed his anger aside and looked into Joseph’s eyes. “None of us would be alive tonight if it weren’t for you and your men. Once again, I owe you my life. Wneeweh.” Thank you.

  “You’ve done the same for me many times. I promise not to keep count if you don’t.”

  “How many men did you lose?”

  “Sixteen wounded. Eight dead.”

  The weight on Iain’s shoulders grew heavier. “I am sorry for them and their families.”

  “They died as warriors.”

  For a moment neither of them spoke.

  Then Iain switched into English. “Wentworth is waitin’ for me, aye?”

  Joseph nodded. “Cooke is on his way to fetch you.”

  It was well past midnight by the time Wentworth and Abercrombie were finished with him. The general had asked him one foolish question after the next, proving how little he knew about forest combat. It had taken more patience than Iain knew he possessed to answer the man’s tiresome qu
eries and listen to his prattling.

  Wentworth had finally brought it to an end. “It seems clear, Major, that this was an attempt to lure you and your men to your deaths. Once again, your Stockbridge allies have proved their worth. I shall make a point of thanking Captain Joseph personally. You are dismissed.”

  Grateful for the feel of cool air on his face, Iain strode across the dark and silent parade ground back toward the hospital.

  So far, he’d lost ten men. Lucas. Billy Maguire. Phinneus. Caleb. David Page. Charles Graham. Richard. Old Archi. Malcolm. James Hill. But more than twenty had been injured, seven of them gravely. How many would die still?

  Weariness and grief pressed down upon Iain, an almost unbearable weight. His legs felt leaden, his soul barren. For three years, he’d ordered men into harm’s way. For three years, he’d watched as good men were broken on the field of battle and perished. For three years, he’d killed, sending other men’s brothers to their graves.

  What would it be like to feel earth on his hands once again instead of blood? To see crops newly sprung from the soil, not freshly dug graves? To hear the bleating of newborn lambs rather than the cries of the wounded and dying?

  He’d agreed to fight this war to save his life and those of his brothers. Instead, he’d consigned them all to a living hell. Would it have been so much worse to take the noose?

  He quietly opened the hospital door and saw Annie at Killy’s side, easing a spoon between his lips. She looked utterly worn, lines of fatigue on her face, dark circles beneath her eyes. He wished she’d never seen any of this, yet he couldn’t deny she had a gift for nurturing the sick and the injured. Hadn’t he known she was a brave lass from the first moment he’d seen her?

  Annie set the spoon aside, picked up a cup of cool chamomile tea, and held it to Killy’s lips. He’d always been so kind to her, watching over her, telling her stories, making her laugh. Now he lay near death. His belly was cut so deeply she’d seen his entrails. The hair and skin from the top of his head had been sliced away, some warrior’s grisly trophy.

  She held his head as he drank, then laid it gently back on the pillow, ignoring her own weariness and the pounding in her skull. How could she give in to such weakness when so many brave men lay terribly injured and in need of comfort? Some of them might not live to see the dawn.

  “Just rest now, Killy.”

  She heard the front door close and looked up to see Iain walking toward her. She forced herself to smile, gave Killy’s hand a squeeze. “Look who’s come to check on you.”

  She could feel Iain’s soul-deep weariness from across the room. She saw the despair in his eyes, in the tight lines of his face, in the heaviness of his step.

  And she thought she understood.

  These were his men, his friends, his family. He’d lived with them, broken bread with them, fought side by side with them for three years. Now some were lost, while others were suffering, holding on to their lives by a thread. And like a true Highland laird, he felt responsible for them all.

  Her heart ached for him.

  He knelt first beside Connor, who was sleeping deeply. She saw him pull the small wooden cross from inside his shirt and mutter a prayer, his brow furrowed with emotion. Then he kissed the cross, dropped it back inside his shirt, and crossed himself.

  Strange that she no longer thought of him as Catholic. Certainly, she hadn’t forgotten, but oddly, such things seemed not to matter the way they had back in Scotland. What had changed?

  He stood, felt his brother’s forehead for fever, then strode over to her and crouched down beside Killy, a forced smile on his face. “Well, old man, now we ken what the Abenaki and the redcoats have in common—they cannae tell you from a dead man.”

  Annie was shocked by his words and might have pulled him aside to chide him had she not seen the weak smile on Killy’s pale face. Iain knew the mood of his men better than she.

  “Some whoreson stole my scalp, Mack, and I’m after gettin’ it back.”

  “You’ve got to get back on your feet first, aye?”

  Dr. Blake emerged from the back room. “Major, I’m glad to see you. I was hoping you could escort Miss Burns to her cabin. I hate to see her walk through the fort in the dark alone, and I can’t leave my patients.”

  Surprised that the doctor was trying to send her away, Annie was on her feet. “But you’ve so many wounded. You need my help tonight of all nights.”

  Dr. Blake gave her an indulgent smile. “The colonel has assigned a couple of ensigns to assist me through the night. You’ve been quite helpful, but you’ve done enough for one day. I would do you a disservice if I repaid your kindness by allowing you to exhaust yourself. Wash your hands, set aside your apron, and go rest.”

  “But I know what the men need. I know their hurts. I’ve been wi’ them since they came in. I am no’ so tired I cannae—” She felt Iain’s hand on her elbow.

  “Come, Annie. The doctor’s right. You’re fallin’ down on your feet. Let me get you home.”

  She tried not to feel slighted or hurt as Iain led her from the hospital and through the silent and sleeping fort, but she couldn’t silence the petulant voice in her mind. If Dr. Blake planned to stay up all night to care for his patients, why couldn’t she? Had she not proved to him she was capable of making a difference? How could a couple of ensigns who didn’t know each man’s needs comfort them as well as she?

  But beneath her irritation, fear lurked, niggling at her belly. If Dr. Blake didn’t see her help in the hospital as vital, how would she persuade Lord William not to send her to Albany?

  When they reached Iain’s cabin, they found it dark and the hearth cold. Annie lit candles while Iain set about building a fire.

  “Dinnae be fashed, lass.” Iain’s voice startled the silence. “He didna send you away because he doesna esteem your skills. He’d be a fool if he didna see you’ve talent wi’ the sick and wounded.”

  After three weeks of enduring the sharp edge of his tongue, Annie hadn’t expected gentle words from Iain. She looked over at him where he knelt adding another log to a small blaze. “’Tis kind of you to say so.”

  “Nay, ’tis the truth. ’Tis grateful I am for your care. I’ve no doubt you’ve saved lives.” The golden firelight made his face seem impossibly rugged and handsome, but when he turned his head to look at her, his eyes held deep weariness and sorrow.

  Her heart sick for him, she dipped a cloth into the water left from this morning, squeezed it out, and went to kneel beside him. “’Tis naught compared to what you’ve done for me.”

  Then she pressed the cool cloth to his cheek and, wishing she could wash his anguish away, slowly wiped the sweat and gunpowder from his face.

  His gaze met hers, and he spoke, his voice ragged. “Take heed, lass. Are you certain you ken what you’re doin’?”

  Chapter 21

  It was her tenderness that broke him. He might have withstood a grenade attack. Or a blow from a tomahawk. Or a charge with fixed bayonets. But he could not hold out against the soft touch of her hands, her feminine gentleness, the simple compassion in her eyes.

  What use is there in fighting the sunrise?

  He raised a hand to her face, traced his thumb over the rosy apple of her cheek. Then he slipped a hand into her tresses, ducked down, and took her lips with his.

  It might have been weeks of unspent desire. It might have been the day’s brush with death. But the moment his lips touched hers, his hunger for her flared like tinder. He crushed her against him, plundered her mouth with his tongue, kissed her until his lungs ached for breath.

  With a little feminine cry, she leaned against him, parted her lips to accept his invasion, answering the roughness of his passion not with a maid’s shyness, but with a woman’s need.

  She was solace. She was beauty. She was life.

  And he wanted her.

  But not like this. Not on the dirty floor as if she were some tavern whore.

  With experienced hands, he
loosed first her gown, then her stays and petticoats, and he let them slide to the floor about her knees, leaving her clad only in her shift. Then, without breaking the kiss, he lifted her trembling body into his arms, carried her to the bed, and stretched himself out above her.

  She arched against him, whimpered, her hands sliding over his shirt as if seeking skin.

  In one motion, he broke the kiss, sat back on his knees, pulled his shirt over his head, and tossed it aside. Then, still wearing his breeches, he rested his weight on one arm, took both her hands in one of his, and pressed them against his bare chest. “Take what you want, lass—whatever you want.”

  She met his gaze, her eyes filled with trepidation—and hunger.

  Then he spoke the words he feared would one day consign her to grief. “As God is my witness, Annie, I swear I will marry you.”

  Her eyes widened with astonishment. “D-do you really mean that?”

  “Aye, mo ghràidh. I willna forsake you.”

  With a little whimper, she shifted her gaze to his body, and with a look of feminine longing on her sweet face, she slid her fingers through his chest hair, grazing his nipples with her thumbs, tracing the outline of his muscles with her palms.

  He held himself still above her, gave her time to explore him. And just as it had done in the sweat lodge, the feel of him seemed to inflame her. Her skin flushed pink. Her breasts rose and fell with each rapid breath, and her body trembled.

  But if touching him stirred her, it almost killed him. Each brush of her fingers sent jagged bolts of heat to his already throbbing groin. He wanted to rip her shift from her body, spread her thighs wide, and push past the barrier of her purity to claim her once and for all. But this was her first time, and he did not want to hurt her.

  Unable to keep himself from her any longer, he lowered his head, kissed the satin swells of her breasts, nudging the cotton of her shift aside to reveal their puckered pink crests. And then he feasted, sucking her nipples into his mouth, teasing them with his tongue, tugging them to tight peaks with his lips. “Does that feel good, a leannan? Mmm, I can see it does.”