“Would you listen if I read aloud? It’s a grand night for stories, and I’d like to read some of the old Scottish legends.” She held up both hands in a cajoling attitude. “You’ve naught to fear of a lecture from me. But they’re marvelous old stories.”
His dark, intense eyes studied her without blinking. She held her breath. Finally he smiled a little and nodded. “Give me your feet, and I’ll give you my ears.”
When her bare feet lay in his lap and a book of ancient ballads lay in her lap, she had trouble concentrating on the ballads and not her toes. He wrapped his hands around them and stroked the tops with sly, provocative movements. It was amazing that toes could radiate such erotic sensations.
Elgiva sank lower into her chair, her muscles loose and her nerves tickling with pleasure. She opened the old book with the languorous distraction of a sleepwalker and stared blankly at a page.
“Read to me,” he urged in a low, coaxing tone, as if the request concerned a much more personal entertainment.
Elgiva cleared her throat and forced herself to begin. In a soft, melodic voice she recited “The Striking of Tyrdoune,” an epic poem. She read slowly, not only because Douglas’s caressing hands made her feel groggy, but also because she had to translate the Gaelic into English.
She put as much drama into her tone as she could, knowing that his dramatic nature appreciated her efforts. She was right. As Elgiva whispered about the death of Sir Drury in battle and gravely intoned the wizardry of Halifax, she noticed that Douglas’s hands slowed. He clasped her feet around the insteps and only his thumbs made small circles on the tender skin inside the arches.
She glanced up and found him listening with his head tilted to one side and his body posed forward slightly, so that her feet were nestled against his hard stomach. “Go on,” he said immediately, after she wiggled her toes and lost her train of thought. “Reading,” he elaborated, then glanced down at her feet with a knowing smile. “Keep it up.”
Elgiva made a strangled sound of exasperation and returned to her stories. Her voice rose grandly for the wars and dipped seductively for the romances, became angry for the betrayals and light for the elfin mischief. She almost cried when she told how the Scottish clans were broken once and for all by the English at the battle of Culloden.
Elgiva was shivering by the time she reached the epic’s victorious conclusion, with Scotland proud despite all its hardships. The fireplace had gone dark, with only a few embers left glowing from the logs. A small clock on the mantel struck an hour well past midnight.
Elgiva shut the book and anxiously raised her eyes to Douglas’s face. His somber and thoughtful expression buoyed her hopes. “What are you thinking, Douglas? Is it not a grand history?”
He nodded, but arched one black brow. “What? No Kincaids? I expected you to sneak them in.”
“I told you before, they were struck from history.” She flipped through the book hurriedly. “But I’ll find a mention of them in an old song—”
“Stop while you’re ahead, Goldie.” His voice was clipped, but his hands apologized by stroking her ankles. Elgiva looked at him hopefully, but he shook his head. “There was never a clan of Kincaid. That’s why there’s nothing in your book about them. But thank you for the rest. It was wonderful.”
She straightened and pulled her feet from Douglas’s lap before his surprised hands could stop her. “Didn’t my history lesson give you anything new to consider?”
He watched her closely, sensing her change in mood. In a careful, troubled voice he asked, “What would you think if I built a museum and cultural center in the village?”
Elgiva’s hopes crashed. “That wasn’t the intent of the lecture.”
“Ah. It was propaganda then. Goldie, you don’t have to sell me on preserving Scottish history. You won’t believe me, but I’m not going to ruin things here. I’m just going to expose all their charms to the world.”
“ ‘Exposing our charms’ doesn’t sound dignified.” Elgiva knotted her fists in her lap. “Won’t you consider some compromises, Douglas? Such as leaving everyone as they are?”
The astonishment on his rugged face slowly hardened to anger. “You want me to give up and go home and call it a compromise? I tell you what. I’ll buy the estate but I’ll guarantee the tenants five years to find new homes, and I’ll give each one a generous resettlement allowance. And, you can stay permanently. Rent free.”
Elgiva leapt up. “You’ve been fooling me this past week! I thought you were becoming reasonable!”
“To agree to what you want, doll, I’d have to become senile!”
“You haven’t softened a bit!”
“I could soften, if you’d open this damned cell door. I could forget the part you played in this stupid attempt at coercion.”
“I’ve asked no mercy from you. I want nothing from you but what your cruel Kincaid pride won’t give.”
He got to his feet also, looking frustrated. “I’ve always appreciated people who risk everything for their personal code of honor. I like to think that I’m that way, myself. But unless you let me go soon, you won’t get out of this mess unhurt.”
The cold threat in his voice sent chills down her spine. “Spoken like a mad dog, Kincaid,” Elgiva retorted. “You deserve to wear the colors of your kin.”
She ran to a chest in one corner and shoved the heavy, curved lid open. From inside Elgiva withdrew a magnificent tartan drape. The plaid was dark blue, gray, and white—the colors she’d given him to wear in his sweaters.
Elgiva strode to the cell and shoved the drape at him. He caught it and stared at her in fierce bewilderment. “That’s what you should be proud of, Douglas! That’s the tartan of the Kincaids. I made it for you myself—a great honor, considering how I feel about your clan! They wore that plaid through all the centuries that they protected their homeland. It could be said of us Scots that no matter how much we fought among ourselves, we always banded together to protect each other from outsiders.”
Struggling not to cry with rage, she yelled, “Wear that plaid when you destroy what generations of Kincaids wouldn’t dare to hurt!” She pivoted and went to the hearth. Shom followed, his tail drooping. She snatched her cape from the hearth peg.
“When you can’t admit defeat, you run away,” Douglas protested. “You’d rather walk the moors than stay here and fight.”
She whirled around at the door to the front room. “I’m running from my sadness,” she told him, her voice strained. “Because I wanted to think the best about you.”
He looked at the window near the fireplace. The wind whipped a mixture of sleet and rain against the panes. “If you’re determined to freeze to death, don’t take Sam with you.”
Elgiva tried to ignore the sting of those callous words. She would no longer expect cooperation, sympathy, or honor from Douglas Kincaid. She whipped the cape around herself. “Shom, stay.” The big dog whimpered but sat down.
Kincaid slung the tartan onto his bed. “Elgiva, stay! Come back here and fight, you coward.”
She stared at him in shock. “How do you know my first name?”
“Sam stole your mittens for me! He also brought me your diary. You must have suspected that I’d read it, but you didn’t say anything. You’re glad that I found out how you feel about me! Admit it. You want to be with me, and to hell with what happens to the rest of the MacRoths!”
“I’d rather die! You can dance on my grave!”
She left the cottage and strode into the brutal night. Bitter, she wondered if only foolish hearts and people unhappily in love were willing to brave the darkness outside rather than examine the darkness within.
Six
Elgiva would not leave him there to starve. He’d bet his life on her honor. In effect, he had bet his life on it.
By dawn Douglas’s anger gave way to disbelief and then to alarm. Either she was punishing him and would return when he had shivered and gone hungry for a few hours more, or something had happened to he
r. He found himself worrying more about her well-being than about his own predicament.
Sam had waited patiently as long as he could; now he was desperate to go outside for reasons that had nothing to do with either Douglas or Elgiva’s problems. He sat by the cell, looking up at Douglas urgently and wagging his tail.
Douglas shook his head. “You’re on your own, boy. You’ve got my permission to decorate the front room to your heart’s desire.” Douglas waved a hand in that direction. “Go.”
Sam ran to the other room, but years of strict training were too much for him to ignore. Douglas heard him scratching at the outer door. Surprisingly, the door creaked open. Douglas clasped the cell bars and listened, thinking that Elgiva had returned. But the sound of Sam’s galloping paws disappeared into the sleet-streaked morning, and Douglas heard the unlocked door squeak as it swung back and forth on its hinges.
Where was Elgiva? He stared at the ugly weather outside the cottage window. She was probably drinking tea at a little highland inn somewhere, drinking tea and laughing about his misery. He cursed his concern for her and pulled the tartan closer around his shoulders. The cottage was freezing cold. He wouldn’t forgive her for this little torture scheme.
Douglas lifted the end of the tartan drape and gazed at it in bitter consternation. Of course she was lying about there being a Kincaid clan. He studied the material closer, noting the skillfully woven cloth and perfect handwork around the edges. Doubt nagged at him. She’d gone to a lot of trouble to make him believe a lie.
What if nouveau riche Douglas Kincaid, a poor kid from the streets of Chicago, actually had a heritage that rivaled the proudest and the oldest in the Anglo-Saxon world?
He shook the sentimental thought away and began roaming around his cell again. An hour later Sam returned at a gallop and crashed to an undignified stop against the bars. He threw his head back and barked like an addled puppy.
“Quiet,” Douglas ordered. Soft yips replaced the barking. Sam rose and planted his front paws on the cross bars. His whole body wiggled with impatience, and he looked at Douglas with pleading eyes.
Douglas stared at him worriedly. “Did you find her? Is something wrong with Elgiva?”
Sam howled. Douglas didn’t know if the retriever’s strange behavior had anything to do with Elgiva’s disappearance, but it seemed likely. He looked around desperately, then snapped a hand toward the fireplace poker. “Fetch!”
On the stone wall of his cell was a rectangle of mortar and new rock where the window had been filled. Perhaps he could chip through it. Sam scrambled over to the poker, bumping a footstool on the hearth. The stool crashed to its side. A small drawer popped open under the upholstered top.
Out fell a large ring bearing a key.
After a stunned second, Douglas pointed at it instead. “Fetch! Get the key ring, Sam! The key ring!”
Sam brought the footstool, dragging it by one leg.
Douglas took a calming breath and pointed toward the hearth again. “Fetch!”
Sam brought a piece of firewood.
After five more tries, Sam brought the ring. Douglas took it, reached around the bars of the cell door, and slid the key into the lock. With a soft, well-oiled click, it turned. Douglas rammed the door with his shoulder. It snapped open.
For the first time in almost two hundred and seventy years, a Kincaid was free on the moors of Talrigh. In the best tradition of his ancestors, he immediately went to hunt down a MacRoth.
Half-conscious from fatigue and exposure, Elgiva barely knew when Sam returned. He had come once before, she remembered dimly, as she lifted her head from the soggy ground. Her head bumped a tree limb and she winced in discomfort. The drenched hood of her cape clung to the sides of her face like blinders. Her forehead met Sam’s cold, inquisitive nose and warm tongue.
“Shom,” she croaked, wondering how he’d gotten out of the cottage, but too weary to care. She rested her head on the icy, matted grass again.
Suddenly Sam’s snuffling nose was replaced by a hand that jerked her hood back and checked the pulse point on the side of her throat. Elgiva frowned in groggy confusion.
The hand left. Someone began tugging on the tree limbs that pinned her down. Didn’t the someone know that it was a good-sized tree that no person of ordinary strength could budge? Hadn’t she tried for hours to crawl out from under it?
This someone was obviously not ordinary, because the tree began to move. Elgiva stirred weakly and tried to shift her numb, water-logged body. Soaked with rain, the wool cape was a mantel of lead that clung to her possessively.
The hand returned. It brought a second hand with it. Together they pulled her from under the limbs and turned her to lay on her back. She covered her eyes against the sleet. A long, thick arm went under her shoulders and pulled her upward, then cradled her head against a broad chest. The hand pushed her matted hair back and stroked her face with gentle fingers.
Elgiva squinted up to see if she could recognize the good Scot who’d come to her rescue. Instead she found the rain-slicked frown of Douglas Kincaid.
From her garbled description Douglas finally determined that as she had walked through the small ravine last night, the tree had fallen from a soggy bank above her. When he explained the method of his escape, she watched him with grim, exhausted eyes.
Carrying her, he headed back to the cottage. Douglas kept glancing down at her, fear a tight knot inside his chest. Her fair complexion was ashen, her lips blue. Her hands shook violently and her teeth chattered even though he’d wrapped her in the tartan drape he’d been wearing.
They were nearly two miles from the cottage. Douglas had to stop and rest for a minute during the long trek back. Sitting down on an outcrop of rock, he tucked the tartan closer around her. His breath shuddered from more than exertion—what if she were seriously hurt? Though the sleet had made a wet, icy prison of his sweater and trousers, he shivered because of what she’d suffered during the past six hours. He lifted her and walked on, Sam trotting beside him.
“I w—weigh almost t—twelve s-stone,” she whispered. “Y–you c—can’t carry me the whole w—way.”
“Since I don’t know how much twelve stone is or are, you’re in luck.”
“N—not l—luck.” Her voice was woozy and weak. “F-failed. All is l-lost.”
“Well, that’s gratitude for you. Do I look as if I’m escaping? You don’t see me running off and leaving you to freeze, do you?”
“N—no g—good to you f—frozen. N—no revenge in th-that.”
“Right. I want you alive and worried senseless about what I’m going to do to you. Now pipe down.”
He held her a little closer to his chest and angled his head over hers to protect her face from the sleet. This was an unusual and caring form of revenge, and they both knew it.
Shock and defeat crouched in the back of her mind like wolves waiting to attack, but Elgiva was too dazed to acknowledge them. Every bone in her body seemed to be rattling against the others, and only one thought penetrated the fog in her mind: She had to get warm.
Once inside the cottage Douglas lowered her to the hearth and quickly built a fire. While he ran to turn up the gas heaters, she tried to stretch her hands toward the flames, but her strength gave out and she tumbled sideways. Sam, dripping wet and cold himself, flopped across her and licked her face.
Immediately Douglas returned, pushing Sam away and lifting her into a sitting position again. He stripped her cape off and looked at the soggy sweater and skirt underneath. Elgiva heard him mutter something dark and anxious sounding. He’s afraid, she noted in amazement. She’d never imagined him being worried for her sake.
She smiled at him groggily as he undressed her. One minute she was sitting on the hearth encased in freezing, wet wool; the next she was sitting on the hearth stark naked, and Douglas was scrubbing her with a towel. He carried her to bed and shoved her under the covers, for which she was ecstatically grateful. She made soft, mewling sounds of appreciation
and burrowed into a cocoon of feather mattress and muslin sheets.
Not long afterward her cocoon was invaded by a second caterpillar.
Elgiva hesitated, then gave up and huddled against Douglas’s body. He wrapped his arms around her. She didn’t mind that he was naked too. He was fantastically warm and furry, and that was all that mattered when her teeth were clattering like castanets.
He threw a leg over her and drew her against his torso and thighs. The heat began to return to her skin as he rubbed her back and buttocks vigorously. Grasping her hands from where she’d tucked them against his chest, he blew on the icy fingers, then impatiently shoved all four fingers of one hand into his mouth and sucked them for a minute. He repeated the technique on the fingers of the other hand, and Elgiva decided with fuzzy objectivity that her fingers now felt wonderful.
“Get into your tent,” he ordered gruffly, and from somewhere he produced her nightgown. Elgiva refused to lift her arms from the sheltering heat of his body, so finally he slid the gown over her head and pulled it down, leaving her arms inside.
Abruptly he dove under the covers. Elgiva had her legs drawn up. He curved himself around them and nestled her chilled feet into the hollow of his stomach. Her shivering toes curved downward, and he jerked them up again. She heard a muffled protest, something about his Popsicle.
As he scrubbed sensation back into her feet she bit her lip to keep from crying out in pain. Finally he covered them with a pair of her bulky wool socks, and she relaxed as if unwound.
He stretched out beside her again. She felt his fingers stroking her face, then his breath as he blew on her skin. When he warmed the tip of her nose between his lips, she opened her eyes and stared at him in sleepy, nearly cross-eyed fascination. True to Douglas Kincaid’s nature, his first aid techniques were commanding and bawdy, but irresistible.
He rubbed a towel over her head, then bundled it around her damp hair. She felt his tongue covering each of her earlobes with delicious heat. Elgiva sighed when he put his arms around her again and angled one leg between her knees. His mouth touched hers; he kissed her very gently, then pulled her head into the crook of his neck.