“The morning star was rising when I came to your door.” He spoke the words like poetry.
She folded her fingers together in an attempt to discipline them. “How is it the Avries think they can hunt you like an animal? Are there no laws here?”
“There are, and far older than any known in Dumfries. The land makes our laws; the very hills do. The only right is survival. The land is mine, so do what they will the Avries cannot defeat me.”
Madness, Jeannie thought. Did he really believe such wild assertions?
“If they catch you, what will they do?”
He gave a thin smile. “What I did to their father, and what he in his turn did to mine. But they will no’ find it easy; I will not be caught unawares again. Now are you ready to reconsider and turn me from your door?”
Suddenly restless, Jeannie got to her feet. She took up the poker and stirred the fire, her face turned from him. “Murder does not justify murder,” she said, “even in the highlands.”
“I do not expect you to understand it,” he told her. “But I will fight as I must. This place is my blood and my bones, and that of all those who came before me. All the while I roamed the world earning my way, I carried the love and duty of it, like a second heartbeat.”
All those years he had been a mercenary. So perhaps killing meant little enough to him. It might be as easy as breathing.
He went on softly, “A man must make his way—a lad must, in my case, for I was scarcely more when I began. I left here with little but my father’s bloodied torc, and his sword.”
Jeannie turned her face and looked at him, searching. Could she even try to imagine the life he had led? Could he imagine hers, striving so desperately to hold together the pieces of a life already shattered?
Geordie had carried that same sense of fierce endurance beneath his pain and regret. She sensed no regret in this man, however.
“And how do you see all this ending?” she challenged. “They dispossessed you and your family, you murdered their father, so now they would kill you, as well. Will you live like a hare in the hills forever?”
“Better a hare free in these hills than a man anywhere else. But nay, ’twill not be forever. Only until they are driven back out of the glen.”
“Or dead.”
“Or dead.”
A chill traced its way up Jeannie’s back. Wicked to speak so casually of such an eventuality. The worst of it was she believed him.
“And what about Aggie and me,” she asked, “caught in the middle of it?” She could not hide in the hills, and she had nowhere else to go.
He, too, got to his feet and approached her. Before she could think to protest, he reached out and captured her hands.
And oh, the warmth of his touch went through her, chased like fever up her arms, heated the breath in her lungs, and rose straight to her head. It kept her motionless as he stepped closer and looked her in the eyes.
“I would remind you, Jeannie MacWherter, I am a man who keeps his promises.”
And his threats. That she believed.
He stepped still nearer; now she could feel the heat of him all up and down her body. “And have I no’ promised to keep you safe?”
“You promised that to the ghost of my dead husband.” She said it wryly, combatting the feelings that assaulted her.
“A sacred vow, for Geordie and I are bonded even beyond the grave.”
And so would he take what even Geordie never had? Jeannie had pitied Geordie MacWherter, relied on him, perhaps even felt for him sincere affection, but nothing that would persuade her to take the big, bluff highlander to her bed. Now, though, the impulse stormed her like a gale wind.
She had managed to live twenty-two years without experiencing this sharp and wild desire. Why now?
“And,” she asked, her voice faltering as she gazed into his eyes, “how do you mean to protect me while fighting for your own life, and Danny’s?”
“One thing I learned all those years roaming the world was how to fight. Trust me, Jeannie. Once I take you under my protection you are safe, you are mine.”
Did she move still closer then? Did she truly lay the palms of her hands against the warmth of his chest?
