Oh, why had she walked so far, and why lingered? Why peered into the peaty-brown pool at the place where he lay? She should have kept to her own patch of ground.
What made him want her gone from here so very badly? She pondered the question even as she trod the path home beside the sparkling burn, in the warm sunshine, past Avrie house with its grim, gray walls, buttoned tight. Why did he despise her so? Her mind worried the question the way a terrier worried a rat. He did not even know her, save as the wife of his friend.
And, for that matter, why had he not been there for Geordie, if their ties remained as close as he claimed? In Dumfries, Geordie had no one but Jeannie’s father and, later, Jeannie herself. Had Laird MacAllister any idea how far his friend had fallen? Did he know how Geordie died?
Well, and he certainly did not seem the man to sit calmly and listen to her explanations. She saw again the flash of rage in those unusual eyes of his that turned them from warm to terrifying. A wild, unstable, and admittedly attractive creature he seemed—undoubtedly every bit as wicked as everyone said. Did he have the right to toss her and Aggie out of the cottage? If so, where would they go in all the wide world?
Disquiet speared through her, and her knees trembled harder. What would she tell Aggie? And how to fight this man, with all his confidence? It seemed the only thing he detested more than Jeannie might be the Avries. Could she seek to band together with them in order to defy him? But the Dowager Lady Avrie was just an old woman, and sick at that.
Yet the Avries might have the wherewithal to hire a lawyer, as Jeannie did not. She resolved to speak with Lady Avrie soon. It seemed her only option.
What had her father always said about highlanders? Angus Robertson, lowland bred and born, had decried his countrymen to the north as undisciplined. “Scratch a highlander, Daughter, and you will find a savage. They might play at being civilized, but do not ever believe it. They sit up there in those mountains and brood about old wrongs while sharpening their swords and dreaming of spilling blood. As for righteousness—their kirk is whatever land they can hold, and the only place they consider holy.”
Jeannie stopped in her trek—or, were she honest, flight—and gazed about herself at the glen. Who could blame a man for believing all this beauty revealed the hand of God as truly as stone pillars and stained glass? Especially a man like Finnan MacAllister, who chose to lie naked in the water and then arose like some hero in an ancient legend.
She saw again the way he moved, and the tattoos that coursed over that body rippling with muscle. Another shiver traced its way up her spine, long and slow—this time caused not by fear but by longing.
Chapter Five
Finnan MacAllister scowled at the page that lay before him, half covered in his own bold, dark hand. The letter to his lawyer, one William Cunningham of Edinburgh, impinged the man to use every legal means at his disposal to evict the Widow MacWherter from Rowan Cottage. Finnan smiled grimly to himself. What sort of monster did that make him, seeking to dispossess a widow and desperate to defeat an aging dowager? The very monster Jeannie MacWherter thought him, no doubt.
He remembered—and not for the first time since their encounter—the way she looked at him, the fear and distrust that flooded those beautiful eyes when she guessed his identity. Oh, aye, they were glorious eyes that had lured poor Geordie to his doom.
But he, Finnan, not the man to fall victim to such charms, meant to serve her as she deserved. He frowned at the paper and clutched the pen in his hand.
Would tossing her out of Geordie’s house do that? Would she not just scuttle away back to the lowlands—admittedly precisely where she belonged—to wreak her deceits on some other benighted man? How would that provide Geordie justice?
Nay, but he wanted her to suffer, needed her to feel what Geordie had felt, the disappointment and betrayal.
He wanted her to experience in full the harm she had done.
He abandoned his letter, arose, and went to the window, where he gazed out. The fine, fair weather of the last two days had flown and rain had moved in. Lowering, gray skies met his eyes, and drops streaked the windows, unrelenting. No matter—the glen always looked beautiful to him, even with the green turf soaking and the mountains weeping down rivulets like tears. This place occupied in full his heart, as a woman might that of any other man.
The thought sparked an idea. He contemplated it, and his vision blurred so he saw his own reflection in the glass, mirrored from the light of the single candle behind him.
Who was he, then? Still the young boy who, dispossessed, had fled unbearable pain with only his father’s sword and used it to make his way in the world? Was he the mercenary who took brass in return for the slitting of throats? The warrior who had stood at Culloden and survived? The madman, as they called him, willing to do what he must to hold this glen?
He had much for which to seek revenge: his father’s death, the loss of his sister. But, his meeting with Jeannie fresh in mind, he longed above all to be Geordie’s avenger.
So, how best to settle the deceitful Mistress MacWherter? There seemed but one way—pay her in kind.
He had little doubt of his ability to seduce any woman. Had he not done so from the borders to John O’Groats? Usually, though, he enjoyed the process. Seducing his friend’s widow would be a far different proposition. Not that he might not enjoy it—in a far different way. He thought again of the curves beneath her plain brown dress, of stripping the fabric away to savor their pleasures, and to his surprise he grew aroused. Aye, well, they said revenge was a dish best served cold—or perhaps flaming hot between the sheets.
What would Geordie think of Finnan taking his woman? It was a line they had been careful never to cross. If one of them had a lass in his eye, the other stayed well clear. But this situation proved far different. This, he would doforGeordie. And for himself.
That thought crawled into his mind on a wave of hot blood. He imagined plunging into Jeannie MacWherter’s heat, seeing her eyes go wide, those lovely lips of hers part as she begged for more. He imagined her handing him her heart on a platter, where he could make it bleed.
He grunted and turned back to the table, took up his letter, and tore it into a score of pieces. He would need no lawyer to settle Jeannie MacWherter’s account.
****
“Will it never stop raining? I swear it is going to drive me mad.” Aggie voiced the belief as she leaned against the window frame and peered out. Jeannie could not imagine how Aggie could see anything through the flowing curtain of water that obscured the glass. “I wish we could go home.”
“It rained in Dumfries,” Jeannie said with forbearance she did not really feel, and glared at the dress she sat mending. Aye, it had rained in Dumfries; she remembered splashing through cobbled streets on errands for her father before he died, or to fetch him from the tavern. At the end, the tavern had been her only destination.
“Not like this,” Aggie asserted.
That was true; Jeannie had never seen rain like that in the glen, elemental torrents that chased any sane person inside.
