Claimed By a Scottish Lord Page 13

  Except time and the whims of fortune had changed his life. He was not the man he had once been when she had asked his help to save her from a marriage to his father. And Ruark made it a rule never to play another‘s game again.

  As his thoughts turned to Rose, ensconced not so far from his own chambers in the east wing, he knew only that he had already decided the fate of Hereford‘s beautiful daughter.

  Chapter 8

  Descending the path to the stable, Ruark still wore a leather jack and the red-and-hunter-green plaid, border-raiding attire, reminiscent of a long night of drinking with his men. The rain had dissipated just after dawn, but under the plum trees, the ground was still damp. Ahead of him, a half dozen stone buildings appeared out of the early-morning mist.

  The stable block and distant carriage house was Angus‘s dominion here at Stonehaven, a man in whose capable hands every Roxburgh earl of the last four decades had entrusted the care and breeding of his horses. Ruark was no different.

  As he entered the stable, all around him the air was redolent of sweet hay, saddle soap, and linseed oil, and the ever-present pungency of manure that one found with a careless step. The grooms and younger stable lads mucking the stalls looked up as he strode past them, his thick boot heels echoing on the flagstone floor. He carried a note in his pocket that Colum had delivered to him shortly after Duncan left this morning. Ruark‘s ally, friend, and second-in-command, Colum was one of the few men Ruark trusted with his life.

  Colum had returned during the night. He had a room at the house but rarely used it.

  Nor, being British, did he take part in ceremonial or clan activities, preferring to bide his time in more favorable pursuits. Thus, Ruark found him asleep on a pile of straw spooned with a naked woman. They lay tangled in woolen blankets. The light picked out their shoulders and the curve of the woman‘s breast.

  No matter the place or the circumstance, Colum managed to find a woman. But even with his angel‘s face and crown of golden curls, he looked nothing like the gently born solicitor he was when Ruark rescued him from a press-gang ten years ago near a dockside chophouse in London.

  Ruark made no attempt at stealth as he knelt next to the two sleeping forms. Colum slept with a ten-inch dirk beneath his head, and as many a man had discovered, he took exception to being abruptly awakened. But then so did Ruark.

  ―Bloody hell, Ruark,‖ Colum mumbled without opening his eyes. ―You couldn‘t allow me an hour‘s respite?‖

  Ruark rubbed the soft fur of an orange tabby that had run up to him as he crouched in the straw. ―I need you to take Friar Tucker a letter.‖

  Colum disengaged himself from the sleeping maid and focused a jaundiced eye on Ruark‘s face. ―Did we not just return from the abbey?‖ he kept his voice low. ―Did I not just spend two days searching the rocks beneath a waterfall for your blood-spattered remains? Did I not just spend those same two days trying to evade a platoon a‘ dragoons chasing the thief who stole their captain‘s horse?‖

  The girl stirred, burrowing her head into the blanket. Ruark picked up the tabby and nodded toward the door. Throwing back the covers, Colum reached for his shirt and breeches. He dressed in seconds, then jerked on his boots. He grabbed his sword and baldric and followed Ruark out of the stall.

  Giving the feline one final stroke, Ruark set it down. ―Duncan left an hour ago for Alnwick Castle. He is bringing terms to Hereford.‖

  Ruark withdrew a letter from inside his shirt. ―With as fast as news travels, Hereford may well know that we have his daughter before our dispatch reaches him. If she is as valuable to him as I think she is, we won‘t be riding with a contingency of men anywhere. He will be coming to us. I need you to give Tucker this letter before that happens.‖

  Colum reluctantly accepted the letter as one might a smelly boot. ―Will Tucker read this before or after he does something contrary to his Christian beliefs, as in, takes a dirk to my heart?‖ he said in a low voice.

  ―I suggest you make sure ‘tis before. I need to know if what Tucker said to me back at the abbey still stands. He will know to what I refer.‖

  ―Aye, your concern for my welfare ever endears you to me.‖ He studied the letter. ―Have you had a sudden change of heart?‖ Colum said, when he recognized Ruark‘s intent. ―The doors at the abbey are not that thick. I heard much of what was said in that room. Including the part where you told Tucker you would never join Kerr and Lancaster blood in marriage. Unless there is something else to which Tucker referred?‖

  ―Give Tucker that letter.‖

  Colum wrapped a hand around Ruark‘s arm. ― ‘Tis no simple matter here, Ruark.‖ His hushed words came out in a rasp. ―The girl is not of age. Hereford will merely have the marriage annulled and gleefully bring you up on charges of rape. She may be long lost, but she is still the daughter of an English earl and ‘tis English law that binds you in this matter. You would need Hereford‘s permissi—‖

  ―Do tell. I do not need a lecture about the marriage act and English edicts. She is valuable to Hereford. Therefore she is valuable to me.‖

  ―Bollocks. Gold is valuable to Hereford. This is madness. Make the exchange and be done with this. You never planned to remain at Stonehaven when this was over. By your own words you came back to make Jamie your heir. Why do you care?‖ Colum‘s eyes narrowed.

  ―You actually want the girl,‖ he said in a loud whisper. ― Christ! Have you already bedded her?

  Hell, Ruark . What did she do to you when you followed her into that river?‖ He burst out in a laugh. ―I‘ve not seen you hold a tendre for a female since that old cat that used to roam the hold and bring mice to your door as an offering of her fondness for you.‖

  ―Fook you, Colum. I am in no mood for your humor this day.‖

  Ruark was in no mood for a bloody lecture on his motives. He didn‘t need to tell Colum a thing. Hell, he couldn‘t explain half of it to himself, especially after a night of drinking. Except he was coldly sober.

  Colum tucked the letter in his shirt. ―What if Hereford denies the girl as his daughter?‖

  ―Anaya Fortier saw Roselyn Lancaster last night and confirmed that she is the image of her mother, Elena. We have the right girl. But something does not feel right. I have my suspicions Hereford has known from the beginning where his daughter was. I just don‘t know what Tucker has over him. Hereford would never have allowed Rose to remain at the abbey.‖

  ―He would have if he spent most of his life at sea and it suited him to let the world think she was dead. Many men send their daughters to convents.‖

  Not Hereford.

  Colum left for Hope Abbey and Ruark returned to the manor. Having dismissed the staff earlier, he found the dining hall empty. He walked past tables piled high with plates and glasses, empty whisky bottles, wine, and half-filled mugs of stale ale on his way upstairs to his room. The dull light of a new day pressed against the tall windows in the gallery and somewhere Ruark heard the chime of a clock nine times. But as he entered his chambers, his mind returned to Rose and the problem she presented him.

  Maybe Colum was right. He wasn‘t in his right mind. He had not returned to England to acquire the responsibilities of a wife or an estate.

  He had planned to return to the Black Dragon and to the sea. He had not wanted Stonehaven‘s responsibilities.

  For his entire life, events and people had dictated and shaped the way he lived. Only when he‘d lived on the sea had he truly been free. Now he was back in Scotland, thrust back into a world he‘d not known just how much he‘d missed until he arrived on her windswept shores. He‘d told Rose the truth when he had said he believed in very little, but something had changed inside him since he‘d returned to the abbey as old yearnings and wants began to push through the holes in his heart, the way bilge water pushed through rotten oakum that plugged the deck of his ship. He recognized the danger of sinking.

  And he recognized that Rose was the lightning rod at the center of gathering storm clouds.


  One did not go into a storm with a leaky vessel. The Black Dragon had barely survived more than one squall, while under press of canvas, that snapped rigging and nearly laid her on her beam ends like so much flotsam. Until now, he had survived everything fate had thrown at him.

  Was he making the wrong choice here?

  He walked to the dresser and opened the top drawer. He pulled out the neatly bundled letters tied with blue ribbon, all the letters Jamie had sent him, scribing bits and pieces of his life with boyish pride and how he waited for the day he would be able to join Ruark at sea and be just like his older brother.

  What kind of example had he ever been to anyone?

  ―Does Julia know you‘ve kept Jamie‘s letters?‖

  He turned toward the voice. Mary Duff, his housekeeper, stood in the doorway of his bedroom.

  Ruark retied the ribbon and replaced the bundle in the upper drawer. ―I am sure I have you to thank for seeing that these found me,‖ he said.

  ―That lad saved every trinket ye ever sent him. Ye can thank Duncan that your father never found out. This whole business has been unnerving fer us all.‖

  Mary was a gray-haired woman, as stout of body as spirit, with a bearing to match the steel in her eyes. She had practically raised him after a long illness killed his mother. She wore a white apron pinned to her woolen plaid skirts, still too clean to have just come from the kitchens. That, and the fact that she had followed him to his dressing room, gave Ruark pause as he dropped into a plum velvet chair to remove his boots.

  He leaned an elbow on his knee. ―I am bloody weary. If something other than need to turn down my bed has brought you to these chambers, it can wait. I intend to sleep all day and into tomorrow morning.‖

  ―I thought ye might have a mind to know, I found some of your mam‘s older clothes for Lady Roselyn,‖ Mary said with disapproval in her voice, clearly blaming him for their guest‘s disheveled state upon her arrival.

  Ruark rose to his feet and yanked the loosely knotted cloth from around his neck. ―You know enough of a woman‘s needs to see to hers, Mary.‖

  ― ‘Tis not as if she has an abundance of appropriate clothes.‖

  ―Then bring a dressmaker out here,‖ Ruark said. ―You have never needed my permission to do what you see fit.‖

  ―She has refused to eat.‖

  Ruark did not take Rose for being nonsensical, and perhaps he was too exhausted to worry over her starving herself. Hunger was an ugly, violent thing with which to contend. ―She will eat when she is hungry enough.‖

  ―Aye, mayhap, she will. Mayhap she won‘t. She is convinced someone will poison her. I do no‘ blame her either, seein‘ as how she was treated last night. She has no‘ spoken except to ask that we leave her alone. Last night she put a chair to the door only to remove it long enough this morning for me to arrange a tub be delivered. The child is frightened.‖

  Ruark doubted it, but who was he to tell Mary that Rose was no child.

  The scent of apple blossoms filled the bathing chamber as steam from a hot bath dissipated in the air. There was one window in the room, high on the wall that was now Rose‘s prison. She could see a bright patch of blue sky beyond, yet the glittering morning held nothing familiar to her that spoke of home.

  She sat on the rim of a beautiful porcelain tub that had been delivered to her room earlier. She had never bathed in anything larger than a wooden hip tub before. With her calves submerged, she dribbled droplets from a sponge across her arms and breasts, careful of the wound on her outer thigh.

  Last night, she had fallen exhausted into bed, curled into a ball, and slept.

  She had not cried, and she did not cry now. She sat in the liquid warmth, thinking about her mornings at the abbey and the settled peace and safety of all that she had left behind.

  She wanted to slide beneath the surface and experience the sensation of hot water enveloping her. But for her injury, perhaps she would have.

  Already she regretted sending supper and breakfast away. With the exception of the bread Rose had taken off the supper tray last night, she‘d had very little to eat or drink in days. But there was nothing to be done for it. She had seen the hate in Lady Roxburghe‘s and Duncan Kerr‘s eyes.

  Knowing something of medicinal herbs, Rose knew of a hundred ways a person could make another suffer without actually killing.

  She had never been the object of hatred before. Last night, standing in the dining hall, the object of aversion and scorn, she had hated Roxburghe for bringing her to this point and putting her in a position to feel such wretched shame, when he was the very devil himself all the way up to his silver earring.

  As she scrubbed her arms and rinsed the sweet-smelling soap from her limbs, she swore she would not think about the other woman downstairs who said she knew Rose‘s mother.

  Or the way Roxburghe had held her in his arms and why, despite her scrubbing, she could still feel his touch on her body. She dug her blunted fingernails into the sponge, remembering she had dug them into Roxburghe‘s back that dark, stormy night in the glade as passion had consumed her. Had she left her mark on him? Would he remember her after she had gone from here?

  She could not change anything now no matter how she wanted to forget it.

  No doubt ’twill prove a grave dishonor to the noble Lancaster name when people learn the warden’s daughter was ravished by a barbaric Scotsman.

  The terrible words came back to swallow her now in her wretched despair as she struggled to buoy her thoughts and make sense of the last few days.

  For she could not deny that Roxburghe had seen something of her heart when she had not. She could not deny that she had known about her inheritance years ago while looking for a book in Friar Tucker‘s library. Or that there were even darker forces inside her that she did not understand.

  Something that was her own brand of vengeance against her father, a man whose actions had sent her mother to a cold, icy grave, and who now drove the passions of those here at Stonehaven.

  But whatever her reasons for giving Roxburghe her innocence, he had been perfectly at ease with ravishing her. In her defense, his skillful kisses and hands had wrought the passion she had given him, and she believed that no sane woman could have resisted him. So perhaps, in the end, they had each taken from the other what they wanted, and it did not matter the reasons.

  When Rose finished washing, she pulled a fresh-scented linen towel off the stool and stepped out of the tub. Last night she had combed the snarls out of her hair and plaited its length. It fell over her shoulder in a thick rope as she propped a foot on the tub and dried off in front of the stove. The injury had bled much and she was upset that she had somehow managed to tear one of the stitches. She felt dizzy and weak, partially from lack of food. The wound needed light and dry air to heal and so she left it unwrapped as she slid a nightdress over her head and felt it float down her body in a whisper of air.

  Rose had met Stonehaven‘s stout housekeeper only briefly this morning when the footmen had delivered the tub. She had remained long enough to give the servants instructions and promise to find something suitable for her to wear, then Rose had asked them all to go away and leave her alone.

  Turning from the tub, she caught her own reflection in the long cheval looking glass as she tied the laces. The garment Mrs. Duff had brought her barely covered the soft swell of her breasts, though it must have belonged to someone else tall, for it reached her ankles and wrists with a brush of white lace. Her pale skin in contrast to the bright green fabric held a beckoning luminosity in the light and Rose ran her palm absently down the smooth, shiny cloth. She had never seen fabric that could catch the firelight yet feel like cool water against her skin. She had not known that something so simple could make her look so astonishingly beautiful, and as she looked at herself in the glass, it was almost an affront to her that she should not look worn and despoiled from the trauma of her abduction and ravishment.

  Intent upon the unhappy discourse of
her thoughts, she did not at first see that there was someone else in the looking glass with her.

  Roxburghe leaned his shoulder against the door connecting the bathing chambers to her bedroom, and she spun around, her first instinct to snatch back the towel, but it lay across the tub.

  Even with his face half bathed in the shadows cast by the firelight in the other room, she had the vague impression he had been watching her for some time. He wore the red-and-green plaid she‘d seen on his family coat of arms. With a day‘s growth of beard shadowing his jaw and his silver earing glinting in the light, he looked as disreputable as if he had been up all night plotting and planning murder and mayhem.

  He folded his arms. ―So you believe my household wishes to poison you.‖

  Freeing herself from his gaze, she tried to step around him only to find his arm blocking her path. ―I believe I consider these quarters sacrosanct from your intrusion, my lord.‖