Chapter Nineteen

“I think he is some better—Danny, I mean. He is asking for his breakfast.” Aggie’s face shone as she delivered the words. Her worry seemed to have cleared like last night’s rain.

Jeannie knew very well Aggie had crept up the ladder to the loft not once but three times during the night. On the last occasion, near dawn, she had stayed and only came down now with the glad tidings.

Jeannie had heard Aggie’s every movement because she had been unable to sleep, her mind too full of images and emotions. How many times had she relived the kiss she and Finnan MacAllister exchanged at parting?

What was a woman to do with such feelings?

“A good sign,” she said now. “Why do you not start the porridge? I will go up and check on him.”

“His fever must have broken, for his forehead is cool.”

Jeannie raised her eyebrows at her maid. How often had Aggie put her hands upon the lad? And could she truly censure Aggie, when she ached to touch Finnan?

“It was a quiet night but for the rain,” Aggie went on.

“Yes.” The storm had moved eastward over the hills before dawn. Beneath its dying rumbles, Jeannie had been sure any number of times she heard Finnan returning, looking for shelter…for warmth.

She went to the door now and drew it open to peer out. The fresh, matchless highland air poured in upon her, so unlike the coal fugue of Dumfries. Rays of sunlight angled over the eastern hills, and mist rose slowly from the burn. It looked like a world newly made, out of which a god might come striding.

One of the old gods, that was—the sort her father used to study in his books—with a rack of antlers on his head, perhaps, or a mane of auburn hair and a body to bring a woman to her knees.

When would he return? And when he did, would he kiss her again?

She had to stop thinking about it. She felt like she had caught Danny’s fever.

Determinedly, she shut the door and turned to find Aggie’s gaze upon her. “Are those men out there?” Aggie asked uneasily.

“I see no one.”

Aggie shivered. “I thought about it all night, them storming the cottage and hauling him away.” She lowered her voice. “He is so brave! Imagine losing an arm and yet going on with such courage.”

“Yes,” Jeannie could only agree.

Aggie stepped closer. “Faith, mistress, I do not know who or what to believe any more. That man, Laird MacAllister, is denounced as wicked, and a traitor, as well.” She widened her eyes. “They say he turned coat at Culloden and helped the British against his own kind. But he does not seem like that when he is with Danny, does he?”

He did not.

“Yon lad adores him.” Aggie jerked her head toward the loft. “Would follow him through fire, I think.”

“We do not know the whole tale.” But Jeannie would like to. “And it is a fatal mistake to judge before knowing all.” That much her father, with his scholar’s mind, had taught her. “Never mind that now,” she went on briskly. “Get Danny fed and go about your day as usual, just in case anyone is watching.”

****

The day proved a long one. Jeannie, following her own edict, worked all afternoon in the yard, weeding and pampering her plants, hands calm but emotions in turmoil. She lost count of how many times she raised her eyes to the path. She dared not look to the hills where Finnan might be concealed, for fear of giving him away. But her tension built as the hours crawled by.

He will come at dusk, when it is safer, she promised herself. Even she could not declare Danny unready to leave. The last time she checked on him, he and Aggie had been chatting away to each other double time, the girl seated by the side of the lad’s cot with idle hands.

Jeannie should have chastised her but had not the heart. Let the lass have her few moments of pleasure, so fleeting. Danny would soon be gone from their lives.

Both he and MacAllister would.

At nightfall, Jeannie went inside to find Aggie preparing supper. Aggie’s cheeks were flushed pink, but that might have been due to the heat of the fire on a warm day.

Or a few kisses might have been stolen in the loft. Who was Jeannie to censure?

Shocked at herself, she told Aggie, “It has been a quiet day. No sign of anyone searching.”

Aggie gave her a bright-eyed look. “And so, mistress, were you on guard as much as at work in that garden?”

Perhaps so, but Jeannie refused to acknowledge it. “We will need those crops if we are to survive this coming winter.” Yet she could not even imagine winter now, or much beyond the moment she next saw Finnan.

Aggie only nodded. “I have supper nearly ready. If Danny’s master does not come for him, shall we keep him here a second night?”

“He will come.”

“Because Danny seems so much improved, yet his fever may yet return. You know how it is with fevers—they do rise at night.”

“I cannot imagine the laird failing to collect the lad.”

Yet supper time came and went, and Finnan MacAllister did not appear. To be safe, Aggie carried Danny’s meal up to him, and she remained there well after. Jeannie could hear the two of them conversing in low voices, the soft music of Danny’s words followed by Aggie’s familiar tones.

Jeannie, with no appetite of her own, went to the door and threw it open. It must be later than she thought, for soft dark filled the glen, gathered like a living presence.

She stepped outside and quickly shut the door. A faint breeze greeted her, coming from the west, and in the east the stars emerged one by one through the last of the gloaming.

But for the whisper of the wind, her ears caught no sound. She stepped out down the path, enjoying the cooler air against her skin after the close warmth inside.

The glen had swallowed Finnan MacAllister as if he had never existed. What if he were no real man at all, but only a spirit? Immediately, she chided herself for the fancy. That had been a flesh-and-blood man she held in her arms.

She stepped through the gate in the wall and into deeper darkness. The path wound away northward, but he would not come by the path.

She raised her eyes to the hills that lay like the shoulders of great, slumbering beasts. A stream ran through a copse of rowan trees behind the cottage, and it was there she directed her steps. Beneath the branches she stood and breathed in the night.

“Jeannie.”

He materialized beside her, very like the spirit she had just imagined him to be. His warm fingers caught her hands, and all her senses leaped, instantly aware. Suddenly he filled her—the height of him, the nearness, his scent as he stepped closer, coming at her out of the night. She caught a gleam of light from eyes that might belong to a feral beast, and a glimpse of a tattoo as he raised an arm to draw her in.

“What are you doing out here?” he whispered. “It is not safe.”

And what did she care for safety, when he occupied her world? Gone, it seemed, was the practical woman who had striven so hard to keep an ordered household and an ordered life in Dumfries, denying to the world any suggestion her father might be less than he seemed, less than respectable. She had hung on so long. Surely she deserved to let go now, here in the dark.

She raised her face toward him and said, “Fortunate you found me, then.”

He drew a hard breath an instant before he bent his head and captured her lips. It was, Jeannie thought wildly, as inevitable as the tide, as the setting of the sun and the rising of those stars. Inevitable as eating when hungry, or drinking when dry.

Drinking deep.

So did he drink from her, claiming her mouth and making it his to plunder. He kissed her slowly, thoroughly, and with perfect dominance, and before it ended Jeannie clung to him, heart pounding.

“Well, now,” he murmured, his voice a soft caress in her ear. “Never tell me you came out here looking for that?”

Wicked. But she had, she had.

For answer, she kissed him again, reached for him blindly. This time she slid her tongue into his mouth, marveling at the heat of it. She explored the inside of those supple, honeyed lips and stroked his tongue softly. She felt the pleasure of it spear through him, and wondered again what would happen if she applied her tongue elsewhere on his body.

But he broke the kiss once more, and his hands caught hold of her, steadying. “Jeannie, Jeannie, what are you trying to do to me?”

She guessed she had done it already; she could feel him hard beneath his kilt at the place where their bodies met. A rush of victorious gladness possessed her: he wanted her. That he could not deny.

She had no words to ask for what she desired. She had never yet requested it from any man, had been unable to imagine doing so before she met him. Now, though, she suspected she would bargain whatever she must to the devil for but one more kiss.

Yet she had no notion of how a woman seduced a man, only the insistence of her pounding blood.

“Finnan,” she said softly, deliberately. She wished to claim the man to whom she would give herself.

She stepped away, and he let her. Soft starlight, mingled with the last of the gloaming, filtered through the tree overhead, affording just enough illumination as she reached up with unsteady fingers and began to unlace her bodice.

Finnan caught his breath. For an instant he did not move but merely stood there, a perfect silhouette in black and silver.

I must be mad, she thought quite clearly, yet her fingers continued to move without her conscious permission, opening the front of her gown and sliding the fabric back from her shoulders.

She wore nothing beneath, and felt his gaze touch her, tactile as his fingers might be. The soft night air poured over her skin, and her arousal intensified unbearably. Why did he not reach for her? Must she beg?

As if he heard her thoughts, he moved suddenly, jerked to life, and caught her with both hands. His palms slid against her skin, gentle as the air, until they cupped her breasts.

Pleasure kicked through Jeannie, so intense her knees nearly failed her.

But she could not fall; he held her now—his strength and grace suddenly possessed her, and he spoke her name once again, bent his head, and laid his mouth to her breast.