Black Falcon's Lady

  "Another? Who?”

  "Another person to suffer for your irresponsibility," his father blazed. "You're always right, no matter who you hurt! Run off at all hours to God knows where, playing catch-skirt with your rakehell friends, worry Rachel and your sister nearly to their graves, then whisk in as bold as you please, dragging an English chit behind you.”

  "Tell me. What galls you the most, Da?" Tade asked, with menacing quiet. "That she's English? Or that you owe your life to a Wylder?"

  "Damn you—"

  "Damn me? You're the one who holds fast to hell."

  "Aye, and you're the son who should be helping me battle out of it! But no, you're too busy cavorting around like a damned court fool to be bothered. You've shamed me since the day poor Patrick Dugan was dragged away, you and your reckless—"

  Tade's hand knotted, fury searing him as he swung at Kane's bared teeth. He slammed his fist to a halt inches from his father's face, bile rising in his throat. Tade wrenched his fist to his side, his jaw rock-hard as his eyes flicked to Devin's solemn face at the foot of the loft ladder. The quick, hot anger that blazed through Tade's limbs turned to stomach-twisting nausea.

  Had the love he and his father shared crumbled so far that they would charge each other like crazed beasts, tearing where they were most vulnerable? Since the day fourteen years ago when Patrick Dugan had been hauled away, Tade's father had never mentioned the incident. Never torn open that scar. His father had wanted only to heal his pain and the guilt that had threatened to drive Tade past bearing, to wipe from his memory that horrible day, which had been the only other time in Tade's life that Kane Kilcannon had struck him. Tade looked into his father's eyes, eclipsed now by bitterness, and remembered them filled with tears.

  Tade's fist tightened, dropped. "I love you, Da. God knows I do," he said quietly. "But you'd be wise to leave Patrick out of this lest you want me to forget you sired me."

  "Just be certain you do no siring of your own. I saw the way you were eyeing Wylder's wench. Get a bastard on her and he'll think no more of taking the gelding knife to you than to a stallion in his stables."

  The crystal green hardness in Tade's eyes clouded, taking on dark mysteries of forests primeval. "Da, remember the night the Fianna mare came? You tried to guard her. Stone fences, barred gates, even an iron latch on the stall. My stallion, Curran . . . he broke every one of them."

  "Aye. And he was half dead himself when we found the two of them. If his foreleg hadn't healed his pleasure-taking would most like have cost him his life. You have no idea what Bainbridge Wylder is capable of. Stay away from his daughter, Tade. Or by God, you'll be no son of mine." The tiniest quaver in his father's voice made Tade's gaze snap up to Kane's. Astonishment coursed through Tade, mixed with a prickling of foreboding. Fear. His father's eyes held the same fear he had shown when Devin's life had been threatened by the soldiers.

  Tade's eyes widened, but the sight of Rachel's work-worn hands fluttering up to grasp his father's shoulder in a silent plea stilled the questions on Tade's tongue. The soft brown eyes peering past Kane were more vulnerable than he had ever seen them. Tade forced his shoulders to relax, a half-smile twisting his lips as his eyes swept to the proud features so like his own. "You could try to deny me, Da," he said. Turning his back on his father's bitterness and on the silent pain in Devin's face, Tade paced out into the yard.

  The night closed soft about him, the sounds of Rachel drawing Kane to the hearth and the family moving about, fading again into dream.

  A dream so beautiful and winsome that it banished all others Tade had known, leaving in their place visions of dark hair, eyes soft and ephemeral as the mists dancing in from the sea. Tade reached down to finger a pouch secreted beneath the waistband of his breeches. Idly he pulled the leather bag from its place and slipped the laces open. After countless women, bedded and forgotten, it was only now he understood the primal urge that had driven his stallion to batter himself against stone and steel. That craving of flesh too deep to be denied. She called to him, Maryssa, with sirens' songs that he alone could hear. Spells, woven with silken threads that bound but also freed. And he would go to her, he knew, even if Kane Kilcannon chained him in irons.

  Tade touched the contents of the pouch, spilling Maryssa's necklet into his outstretched palm. Moonlight toyed with the tip of one gold wing, the tiny arched neck of a graceful gold swan.

  She had raged at him when he had torn it from her neck at the Devil's Grin, the blue-green sparks flaring in her incredible eyes. Yet he was certain she had not linked the rakehell Tade Kilcannon to Donegal's Black Falcon this night. Tade's lips tipped into a ghosting of smile. Aye, if she had, she'd most like have dragged Rath to him and helped the cursed bastard knot him in ropes.

  But in those moments within that dingy alehouse, when he had first held the golden swan in his hand, he had seen a treasure far greater in Maryssa Wylder's upturned face. He had seen there the fiery woman within her, a woman secreted behind her innocence and the timorous quivering of her sweet mouth.

  What mysteries held her captive? What sorrows kept her chained? Chains. Such fragile chains. Tade stared at the delicate golden links pooled against his flesh, and wondered if he could free her.

  Chapter 5

  Maryssa pressed her face against the mullioned glass window. The night breeze trickling through the open casement tempted her with the wild, sweet scent of mountains and the subtler fragrance of freedom. She shut her eyes, letting the cool winds soothe her eyelids, still burning from tears. Tears shed alone, into an unfamiliar pillow in a room she belonged in no more than the house full of love and children she had left the night before.

  The elegant bedstead, dripping rose velvet, seemed to jut its spiraled bedposts toward the ceiling in disdain, while the barefoot, beribboned damsels frolicking across the cream silk wallpaper mocked her with their hand-painted smiles, smug in their fairy world of castles and blossom-starred meadows. What could they, with their angel-kissed faces know of the pain of being unloved? Of being so awkward and plain that even her own father viewed her with contempt?

  Gingerly, Maryssa traced the line of her jaw. The lower edge still swelled against her fingers, but the burning pain had faded into a dull throb. Her throat tightened. "Father, I almost thought you feared for me.” Maryssa whispered the words aloud as she dashed away the tears that spilled over her lashes.

  For all his anger, her father had seemed almost glad to see her when Rath had brought her to the door of the castle. His wig had been swept from his balding pate, tossed in a rain of white powder onto a chair in the entryway. His face had been trekked with new lines that seemed to grow deeper still as Quentin Rath had regaled him with the tale of her "rescue."

  The tiniest hope that her father cared for her a little had lightened Maryssa's heart, until suddenly Bainbridge Wylder's voice had cut Rath off in mid-sentence, his jowls washing the dull red Maryssa knew marked barely checked fury. "Kilcannon?" he had roared. "You found my daughter at the house of Kane Kilcannon?"

  Even now, a day later, Maryssa flinched at the memory of her father's reaction. He had unceremoniously escorted Colonel Rath to the door, not even waiting for the servants to fetch the man's cloak. The stunned colonel had scarce had time to pull his buttocks from between the heavy wood panels before her father had slammed them shut behind him.

  And then—Maryssa winced as her trembling fingers tightened involuntarily on her jaw—then her father had spun on her, furious past all bounds of reason.

  "Kilcannon!" he screamed. "Not in Ireland a week, and already you're whoring with a cursed Kilcannon!"

  "No, father."

  "Don't deny it! You're dragged home in strange clothes after being closeted half the night with Kane Kilcannon's spawn and you expect me to believe he touched you not at all?"

  "He didn't! His whole family was there." Her pleading explanations had been dashed from her lips by a blow that sent her reeling against the entryway's stone wall. She had known her fathe
r expected her to crumple to the floor, to cower from him as she had in the past. But she only stiffened her spine against the smooth stone and set her mouth hard against the tears that threatened to come.

  Bainbridge stalked up, his face savage as he caught her jaw in a brutal grip. "If you so much as look at a Kilcannon again, girl, I swear I’ll blind you myself! And, by God, you'll thank me for being so lenient. No lineage in Ireland is tainted with as many blackguards as the Kilcannons’s. Their poison spreads from one end of this infernal island to the other, and they would like nothing better than to spill it upon the man who finally bested them."

  "Bested?" Maryssa had echoed, remembering how Kane had known who she was though he had never seen her before, remembering Tade's face when he'd heard the name Wylder. "You do know them, then?"

  "Kane Kilcannon would not be likely to forget my face, you may be certain. Or yours." The final words were softer and cryptic, as Bainbridge released her chin with a jerk, turning to retrieve his wig from the chair. He tore at the stiff black ribbons, rending them as if bent on destroying something more threatening than pomatum and flour. "Do you think Sir Ascot Dallywoulde—an English knight—would stoop to taking some Irish barbarian's leavings? That is, if Dallywoulde decides to have you at all."

  Maryssa started to speak, but her father glared her into silence. With a snort of disgust, he flung the ruined hairpiece into the corner.

  "It just so happens that a missive arrived from Dallywoulde after you went dashing off. He is doubtful as to whether even my properties are worth bearing a—how did he say it?—an ill-mannered bluestocking for a wife. Before this year is out, he intends to sail for Nightwylde to examine what benefits he would reap through binding himself to you. We can hope he will arrive around All Hallows Eve. And you, daughter, will meet him with what paltry feminine wiles you possess burning as bright as the peasant fires decking the hills."

  A sick feeling had gnawed in the pit of her stomach. "Sir Ascot has a great penchant for fires, Father," she returned with a spark of defiance. "But only when they consume innocents."

  "Then he'll have little use for you, considering how you've disgraced yourself. But I'll make certain you understand what sentence awaits you if you dare make a fool of me again. You will remain under lock and key until I decide you are fit to be released. You may discover just how little you like being totally alone. For if you fail to lure Ascot to the altar, I'll see to it that you never set foot outside that chamber again. Mark me. You will finish out your life locked away where you can humiliate me no further."

  Grasping a handful of her sleeve, her father had yanked her up the stairway and shoved her into her room as though he would hurl her from his life if he could.

  Maryssa shivered, dropping numb fingers to the cool stone window ledge as she remembered the sound of the bar crashing down across the door, the noise echoing through the bedchamber like the slamming of the lid upon a coffin.

  Defiance had crumbled into dread, dread into nightmarish fear as hours had passed in which she detected not so much as the stirring of a servant on the other side of the heavy oak panel. No one had bothered to light a fire on the stone hearth, and not so much as one taper pierced the darkness that pressed around her from all sides.

  When night fell again, she had all but embraced the birdlike maid who skittered into the room bearing a tray of food and two silver branches of blazing candles.

  Only then had her fear changed to resentment, and she had cried in frustration at her own helplessness to battle her father, cried for the love she had tasted at the Kilcannons' before it had been snatched away.

  Maryssa hugged herself, pressing her arms against the thin lawn of her night rail. The sharp tang of moors and meadow flowers wafting over her carried with it memories of a man's face, its planes and angles carved with the same dangerous beauty as the wild lands over which she had ridden.

  She shivered, but the tingling sensation that crept over her skin had nothing to do with the coolness of the night wind. It was the image of Tade that set her blood to racing. His grin flashing, his silky mane knotted at the nape of his neck in delicious contrast to the warm, corded column of his throat.

  Through everything that had befallen her this week past—her encounter with the Black Falcon, the cruelty of her father, her terror in the midst of Colonel Rath's raid—the thing that remained imprinted upon her senses most acutely was the feel of Tade Kilcannon's naked flesh pressed against her and the shape of the lips that had tempted her beyond reason.

  "As though I could tempt any man," Maryssa muttered to herself, whisking a wayward curl over her shoulder. The rich tresses cascaded down her back in a warm, satiny curtain, their tips brushing the gentle curve of her derriere, yet the picture she presented as she turned and caught her reflection in the looking glass across the room did nothing to cheer her. When her father decided to release her from her room, it would be to entice Ascot Dallywoulde to take her to wife. There would be no handsome rake with crystal green eyes to slip the formal wig from her hair and unpin the dark mysteries beneath.

  Instead there would be bony hands, icy hands using her to beget an heir.

  Maryssa turned around, forcing her thoughts away from Dallywoulde's blade-sharp features. No. She wouldn't think about that now.

  From a shelf of books in the corner she plucked a volume of myths. She took up a branch of candles and set it atop the small table beside the bed, then burrowed beneath the coverlet, propping her shoulders against cloud-soft pillows to lose herself again in fanciful worlds of myth and magic. But as she read the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, it was she who sobbed for love lost, and when Persephone escaped the gates of the underworld, the face of the lord within tugged at Maryssa's soul with eyes as warm and green as the spring to which the goddess fled.

  Maryssa raised her eyes to the candle flames that flickered, danced, and flirted with the night. If a Hades with dark, silken hair, and bronzed, chiseled features looked upon her with the longing her imagination had stroked into those crystal green eyes, she would forsake the earth forever, and welcome the darkness that was his.

  She looked at the moonlit window, suddenly frightened by her thoughts. The image of running into the night, of welcoming arms catching her up, spinning her around, shifted to a vision of ghostly shapes, souls forever lost, dragging her down into nothingness.

  "I would," she said aloud in defiance. "If he loved me, I would follow him to h—"

  A sudden scraping sound on the wall outside made Maryssa jump. The book tumbled from her lap and slammed to the floor with a bang she was certain could be heard all the way to the stable yard. Her gaze darted to the locked door, then back to the window. She caught her lip in her teeth, not breathing, not moving.

  What could be out there? Some kind of animal? A brigand? Or a being of another age, still roaming the halls that had sheltered it? Surely no mortal could reach so high.

  A scream choked in Maryssa's throat as the night itself seemed to vault through the window, cloak-shrouded shoulders silhouetted against the mullioned panes. She leaped from the bed, the sole of one bare foot skimming the slick pages of the open book that now lay on the floor, its leather binding skidding out from beneath her.

  She screamed as she plunged headlong toward the terrifying apparition. Gloved hands shot out to catch her. She struggled and fought as she crashed against the shadowed form, but instead of the misty softness of a specter, the fingers that closed over her mouth were very much alive. The hard plane of a masculine chest broke her fall, a warm, muscled chest that smelled of mountains.

  "Had I known you'd be this happy to see me, I'd have climbed up hours ago." The jaunty voice was accompanied by a laugh as a finger hooked under her chin, tipping her head back to meet Tade Kilcannon's laughing eyes.

  "How did you . . . What did . . . do you want?"

  His mouth split in a grin, boyish, disarming, and devilishly hopeful. "Would you believe I came to steal a kiss from a beautiful lady?"

&nb
sp; "No."

  The green eyes widened at the tinge of defensiveness in Maryssa's voice. She tore her gaze from their questioning light, the feel of his perfectly honed body through the thin lawn of her night rail demonstrating far too clearly that his words could be nothing but jest. She tried to evade his grasp, but the arm resting lightly around her waist tightened.

  "Then would you believe I came to return these?" He jerked his head toward the floor beside the window where a bundle, neatly done up in a muslin bed sheet, lay on the carpet.

  "What?”

  "Your clothes." He arched one roguish black brow. "You left them in my bedchamber."

  "It was not your bed—" Maryssa blustered, embarrassment firing her cheeks as the laugh lines bracketing his mouth deepened.

  "More's the pity." He affected such an air of rueful resignation that, despite herself, Maryssa felt the beginnings of a smile toy with her mouth. "Go ahead, make jest of my plight," he accused. "With all the competition I have at home, I can never sneak a lady up the loft ladder. Everyone stops to admire the baby, and before I can turn around he's charmed them till they'll spare me not another glance."

  Easing from the arms that were much too inviting, Maryssa walked to the bookshelf and traced the golden mane of one of the unicorns in its carved rosewood frame. "Somehow I doubt you have much trouble enticing women to forget themselves in your quarters."

  "Aye, the most beautiful ladies in Ireland line the streets begging for my favors. They hurl themselves at me at the most inopportune times—in the market, on the highways. In my bath." Maryssa gasped at his unabashed arrogance, spinning around to see Tade's eyes snap emerald with devilment. "If I didn't have Rachel to drive them away, they'd probably rob me of my senses. You have no idea how tiresome it is." His gaze dropped slowly; the cocksure grin began to fade, then melted into quiet, heavy longing as his eyes trailed down the flowing white of her night rail. "You have no idea," he repeated softly.