Читать книгу Highlander Taken - Juliette Miller - Страница 8

CHAPTER TWO

SHAKEN AS MUCH by the stranger’s sudden departure as I had been by all that had taken place before it, I walked unsteadily back to the courtyard. Ann, Agnes and Bonnie were there, and they rushed up to me as soon as I stepped into the light.

“Stella!” Ann exclaimed. “What’s happened? We’ve been calling you. Where have you been?”

I smoothed my hair with my hands, hoping I didn’t look as wild and wanton as I felt. “’Twas nothing,” I said lightly, laughing it off. “I went for a stroll in the gardens.”

The three of them stared at me, knowing full well we weren’t allowed such larkish pursuits, especially alone and in the dark of night. I watched their eyes register my flushed cheeks, my curled and windblown hair, my wide eyes. I was fervently thankful they couldn’t detect the more profound changes in me, or at least I hoped it.

“Whatever for?” asked Agnes.

“I needed some air,” I said. “I wandered too far and the wind blew out the candles. It took me some time to find my way back, is all. I’m fine.”

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” commented Bonnie, leading me back inside, where the noise and light was very nearly overwhelming.

Not a ghost, nay. A phantom.

A phantom, I only now realized, who knew me. He’d called me by my name. This detail felt significant. Had he known who I was, even before my sisters called out to me? He’d said he wanted to see me, to find me—nay, to taste me—once again. I hoped desperately that he would succeed in his pursuit.

But even now, in my sisters’ familiar company, surrounded by people’s chatter and full-on brightness, my encounter with the hidden stranger felt unreal. Had he merely been a figment of my ever-hopeful romantic mind? Maybe I’d dreamed him in response to the heartbreak of recent days. I could justify my revelation as such, even if I could still taste him on my tongue and feel the effects of his touch to my very core. I knew, too, that this memory—real or not—had nothing to do with Caleb. The phantom lover had been too different, in every way. Already, Caleb’s face had faded by the slightest degree. More forcefully, the phantom’s looming outline dominated all thoughts. His tamed strength, his intoxicating scent: these details alone were enough to inspire a lush craving deep within me that very nearly made me moan aloud.

What was happening to me? Had I finally had enough of being put down and held back by my overbearing father, and was reacting with bold, bizarre belligerence? Already, I yearned for more of the stranger, as I had known I would. I felt like running back outside to the secluded garden and calling him back to me.

Instead, I took a deep breath and attempted to calm myself. Passionate, temperamental behavior was punished in our family. The only exceptions to this rule were specific indiscretions that might succeed in landing one of us a wealthy and well-bred husband. Aside from that one allowance, obedience, compliance and reserve were the order of the day. And I had carried out my role with suitable deference, for the most part. My life was predictable and comfortable enough, as these things went. I acted as I was expected to act—as I was forced to act—even if my heart questioned the orders. Why I felt the urge to wander, to run, to shout and to kiss mysterious strangers now, I didn’t know. The steady ground of my world, of late, seemed to be taking on a new inconsistency that possessed all the solidity of quicksand.

With effort, I took my place in my sisters’ circle as we reentered the grand hall. I sipped a cool drink of water and felt better for it. Still, I felt removed somehow. My eyes restlessly surveyed the crowd, measuring, hoping. Was he here in this room? Quite possibly. I studied one man, then the next. But none of them seemed the perfect fit. And, disappointingly, I noticed that almost every single man in attendance wore a belt with a knife strapped to it. These men were warriors. Knives and swords weren’t just their tools; they were their fashion accessories. They were their comfort, their necessity and their way of life. If I was to find my phantom, I would need more helpful clues than a belt with a knife, and a physique that was tall and broad-shouldered. So I was not to get off so lightly.

Still, my eyes roved.

I was distracted then by Maisie as she returned to our group, accompanied by Wilkie, her pale arm weaved decisively through his brown, brawny one. I had not met Wilkie before. And although I didn’t know much about him, I could detect that he seemed tense. His expression appeared agitated, as if his concentration was elsewhere. Maisie’s insistent attention did little to engage him, but Maisie was nothing if not persistent. Admirably so, I thought. She fawned and flirted, softly touching his hair and his face until he relented somewhat, an exhibition I found mildly fascinating. In fact, I was so immersed in watching the exchange that I didn’t immediately notice that someone was speaking to me. I very nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw who it was.

“Are you enjoying your evening, Miss Morrison?” Kade Mackenzie’s voice was deep and inflected with raw, dark energy. Of course I couldn’t help considering the shape and height of him, to compare it against the fresh memory of my hidden stranger. But he was too tall, I thought. And something about his movements seemed too quick.

He couldn’t be the one, I felt certain. The scent wasn’t quite right, mingled and subdued by the pressing crowd. And he hadn’t used my first name. He probably had no idea which Morrison I was.

Instead of the enveloping calm I’d experienced in the stranger’s embrace, and despite the relaxed, festive mood of the scene, the air between us felt charged, as though laced with a barely restrained warning. I could sense even more strongly at this close proximity that Kade was a man with an unpredictable nature. The glint in his eyes seemed to confirm my estimations while also suggesting he was having no difficulty reading every nuance of my tangled unease. Again I thought about fleeing somewhere, anywhere, as quickly as I could. But it was this almost-teasing edge to his manner that held me in place. I felt mildly irked by the nudging humor in him, as though the obvious fact that he was making me nervous was entertaining to him.

He had asked me a question, and was waiting for my reply. I had to concentrate for a moment to recall it. A simple, meaningless pleasantry. Are you enjoying your evening, Miss Morrison? The polite thing to do would have been to lie, especially considering it was his family that was hosting the event. Instead, I heard myself saying, “Not particularly.”

It was then that Kade Mackenzie smiled, just slightly, at my response. And it occurred to me at that moment that, while Wilkie was the famously good-looking brother, Kade was equally striking but somehow too complicated in expression to be conventionally handsome. His looks were dominated by reckless layers of the unknown. “She has a seraphic face,” he commented, “a body that could reduce a grown man to tears, a corralled feistiness that shines through nonetheless, lightning-quick reflexes—if what is heard is to be believed—yet her manners leave something to be desired. How very interesting. I’ll admit, you’re not quite what I was expecting.”

Despite my layered reservations, I almost smiled, simultaneously miffed and flattered by his offhand description. I couldn’t help asking it: “And what were you expecting?” The admission that he had been expecting anything at all seemed to confirm that Kade Mackenzie had gone out of his way to approach me. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. Apprehensive, certainly. The thought of being conquered by this specimen of virile ferocity was more than I could grasp in my current state.

He took a moment to respond, and when he did, I noticed the deep, distinctive huskiness of his voice as he spoke. Oddly, there was a comforting edge to the rough, quiet timbre of it that was not dissimilar, I couldn’t help but consider, to the hushed murmur of my hidden stranger. Let me take you. “What I was expecting was a quaint, moderately pleasing heiress with a penchant for insolence. The insolence is true enough. Heiress, aye, although the wealth on offer is somewhat overstated, we have reason to believe. As for the other details of the expectation, trust me when I assure you they were entirely inaccurate. Absurdly so.”

I could only stare at him, agog at his confessions. I thought he might have just given me a very solicitous compliment even as he also might have insulted me, but, in fact, I couldn’t be entirely sure either way. Whatever his meaning, it was clear enough that he was taking pleasure in his attempt to confuse me. And he was coming quite close to succeeding. But I was already riled enough by the recent difficulties of the life I was being forced to lead. So I decided not to give him the satisfaction. “If you find me quaint and insolent, then perhaps you should seek out the conversation of someone more pleasing to you.”

At this, he smiled widely, his white teeth gleaming against the bronze glow of his face and his hair. He folded his arms across his broad chest and leaned a shoulder against the stone wall in a languid, insouciant movement that brought to light his sparked arrogance and his easy confidence. He possessed an odd combination of wicked appeal and pronounced, daring impulsiveness that infused me with an unusual anxious thrill. His eyes never left me. “On the contrary, I find insolence in women very intriguing—it happens to be an affliction that I’m able to cure almost entirely under the right circumstances. And if you’d been paying attention, you would understand that I find you quite the opposite of quaint. I can think of several other words I might use to describe you, aye, but even those seem lacking. Give me a minute to think of something more precise.”

I wanted to ask him what those words were, of course, but I could see that he was playing with me, and expecting my curiosity to get the better of me, so I waited, watching him study my face. Disconcertingly, the effects of his comments and his smile burrowed into me, touching the shadowy, sensual effects of my encounter with the garden stranger. I tried desperately to distract myself, to tone down or ignore the light swell and the heat of my most private vulnerabilities, but my body had other ideas. I felt my cheeks flush and my breath quicken, and I looked away from him. I was surely going mad. I took a deep breath, willing myself not to burn under the heat of his blazing attentions.

“Am I making you nervous?” he asked softly, his lingering smile irritatingly perceptive.

“Nay,” I said somewhat indignantly, albeit breathless, although he clearly was.

I met his eyes with cautious curiosity. I wanted to disengage myself from his arresting countenance but could not. Inexplicably, he was devastating me with a tumult of crashing, unknowable regrets and empty wishes. The search of his focus seemed to illuminate everything I had ever aspired to but had never, either through circumstance or from fear, been able to attain. Freedom. Choice. Love. Real happiness. I could not explain how this rugged stranger was able to expose such deep, suppressed feelings in me, as though he held the key to hidden recesses of my psyche that even I had not explored. Kade Mackenzie frightened me, aye, but there was more to it than that; his effect on me was acute, as though his own reckless tendencies were impacting me, and guiding me. Under the animated weight of his attentions, I felt I was losing control.

“Or am I affecting you in some other way?” he said, leaning closer. “Some wholly unexpected, visceral inclination that has you, in this very moment, questioning all your powers of resistance?”

How did he know that?

It wasn’t him I felt the need to resist, I assured myself. I was overcome by my encounter in the secluded garden. I was suffering under the effects of the ale perhaps, or I was flushed and disoriented from the night air.

Kade continued, his voice low, his words meant exclusively for me. I watched his enigmatic, seraphic face as he spoke, with undue absorption. “And that’s not the extent of it, I’m guessing. There’s more to it, is there not? A wandering, restless hunger newly inspired, as it just so happens, here and now. As soon as you saw me, it would appear.”

“You flatter yourself,” I said quickly, hoping to break this connection in any way I could. Through rudeness, or any other means—it didn’t matter, as long as I could somehow contain my composure and stop myself from doing something entirely inappropriate, like taking his hand and leading him into a quiet alcove. To let his influence arrest me and free me in any way it would. But I would only have been trying to recreate my illicit encounter with the garden phantom, I knew. Either way, I clasped my hands together behind me and made a point of neither reaching for nor even appreciating the invitingly thick locks of his richly colored dark hair that hung almost to his shoulders in shiny disarray.

He was toying with me, overflowing with charm, assured as he was of his own allure. An allure, to be sure, I wanted nothing to do with.

Kade’s flashing eyes, as though reading my thoughts and finding reason to believe he was responsible for them, gave the impression that he was similarly affected, as though he might strike out at any moment, or indulge a wicked temper or start a fight. Each prospect, to me, was more daunting than the last. And even if I had seen a glimmer of amusement in him that I might not have expected and was undeniably drawn to, I couldn’t shake the desire to distance myself from him, and quickly. He was too intense, too fiery, too confident, too masculine, too everything.

Fortunately, a commotion caused our circle to disperse. It was Wilkie who was causing a scene. He had, at some point during my distraction, removed himself from Maisie’s grasp. Now he was some distance away, and holding the arm of Angus Munro in a viselike grip, pure fury written on his face. And Wilkie’s other arm was slung possessively around a young woman I did not recognize. She had white-blond hair and eyes that were green even from a distance, attributes that made it clear that she hailed neither from the Mackenzie clan nor Munro. Her look was decidedly foreign, exotic even, and she was—it had to be said—devastatingly beautiful. I couldn’t help but marvel at the shimmery fair colors of her, emphasized further not only by the pastel-pink shades of her dress, but also by Wilkie’s black-haired and stormy-eyed counterpoint. Her slender body was pushed up scandalously close to Wilkie’s, and her face, as she gazed up at him, clearly shone with a complete and unwavering adoration.

Angus was released and dismissed by Wilkie, and took his leave, retreating to the buffet table, still rubbing his wrist. And any questions the crowd might have had about the fair-haired girl were written most painfully across Maisie’s face. Who was she? And why was Wilkie embracing her in this way and with a look on his face as though he was not only enraged and somehow anguished, but also utterly love-struck?

Before any such questions could even be asked and without so much as a backward glance, Wilkie disappeared with his willing captive up the grand staircase of the Mackenzie manor.

Maisie wasn’t the only one who was distraught at this unexpected turn of events. The gravity of Wilkie’s connection to the mysterious young woman had been apparent to all of us. And, while none of us knew quite what to make of the scene we had just witnessed, I had a distinct feeling that the consequences of that scene would extend beyond Wilkie, beyond Maisie and somehow to me. As though to confirm my anxious suspicion, Kade Mackenzie’s narrowed and unyielding stare speared me with its thoughtful, wicked intensity, and I could read there my worst fears.