His gaze shifted, and he received the second blow of the morning. This one far more devastating. He felt like he’d been clobbered in the head with a poleaxe; stunned and more than a little dazed, as he stared—gaped probably—at one of the most sensual looking creatures he’d ever beheld.
She smiled, and that clobbered-by-a-poleaxe feeling dropped to his chest. “I’m afraid the idiot is me. I didn’t see the sign until it was too late.”
Ah hell. The discomfort in the room became clear. Although she did seem to be taking the offending words with surprising good humor. Most lasses he knew would be stricken with embarrassment. Instead it was he who felt the heat on his face. “I apologize for my ill-mannered words.”
She waved him off with a deep, husky laugh that made his bollocks tighten. “I’ve been called far worse by my brothers. I’d never seen the game before, and didn’t realize it was so important.”
Sensing she was amused by that fact, he frowned.
His cousin, always the gallant knight, rushed to reassure her. “And I was just assuringLadyMargaret that it was nothing.”
Eoin hoped his eyes didn’t widen as much as it felt like they had at the word “lady.” From the look of her, he’d assumed something else entirely.
Very little about the lass conjured up the image of a lady. Her gown was plain, simple, and cut low and tight enough around the bodice to have made a tavern wench proud.
Her beauty wasn’t quiet and restrained like a lady’s, but bold and dramatic.Toobold and dramatic, the lass would draw attention, particularly masculine attention, wherever she went. Her lips were too red, her mouth too wide, her gold-hued eyes too seductively slanted, her breasts too big—not that he couldn’t appreciate that particular excess—and her hair was red. A vibrant, dark red that wasn’t plaited modestly behind a veil, but rather left loose to tumble around her shoulders in a wild disarray that was more appropriate to the bedchamber than the king’s solar of a royal castle.
Aye, the bedchamber, which is exactly what he thought about when he looked at her.
But probably the most un-ladyish thing about her was the boldness in her gaze. There was no reserve, no modesty, and in a room full of important men, she was perfectly at ease, as if she belonged there. It was bloody disconcerting.
“Lady Margaret is Dugald MacDowell’s daughter,” Bruce added.
The Fair Maid of Galloway? Christ, that explained everything. Eoin had heard of the lass, who was reputed to be every bit as wild, unruly, and outrageous as the rest of her clan. Despite her youth, she lorded over her father’s lands when he was gone like a queen and had done so for years since her mother died. “Maid” was often said with irony, as the lass was reputed to be free with her favors.
Somehow he recovered enough to bow and mumble, “Lady Margaret.”
“This is the young kinsman I was telling you about, my lady,” Bruce explained.
She responded to Bruce with a wry grin, but her eyes hadn’t left Eoin’s. “I think the game was a little more serious than you let on, my lord Carrick.”
Eoin was pretty certain his flush deepened. Bruce laughed. “Everythingis serious to my young cousin here. Don’t pay him any mind. Besides, he should be thanking you.”
She broke the connection with Eoin and turned her slanted catlike eyes to Bruce. One delicately arched brow lifted. “Thanking me?”
Bruce flashed a broad grin. “Aye, for saving him from the embarrassment of losing. I had him beaten, although he didn’t know it yet.”
Lady Margaret laughed and turned back to Eoin. It felt as if every nerve ending in his body stood on edge as her eyes fell on him again.
“Is that so?” If he’d ever heard a more husky voice in a woman he couldn’t recall it. “And do you agree, my lord?”
Margaret didn’t know what to make of the young warrior standing before her. She must admit, she’d been taken aback when he’d stormed into the room just as the other men had been doing their best to assure her that touching the game—thechess—pieces was “nothing.” She didn’t know whether it was his fury or his handsome face, but something had made her heart beat a little faster. All right, alotfaster.
He was dressed in a fine velvet surcoat like the other noblemen in the room, but he might as well have been wearing chain mail and wielding a long broadsword. Everything about this man bespoke warrior. It wasn’t just his size, which was formidable (he was even taller and more powerfully built than the Earl of Carrick), but the fierce intensity that seemed to radiate from him. When he walked, it was with the long, powerful strides of a man ready for battle. With eight brothers, all of whom were or would be warriors, and a father who’d spent the better part of the last twenty years on the battlefield, she recognized the type well enough.
Men—even fierce, angry ones—didn’t usually intimidate her. Usually. But something about seeing all those muscles bunch and the fury burning in his piercing blue eyes had made her pulse dance.
Although as she looked at him, waiting for him to respond, she realized the dancing could be a result of something else. Like maybe the surprisingly silky-looking honey-brown hair—streaked with enough sun-bleached chunks to recall what must have been the blondness of youth—that fell in careless waves to a clean-shaven, squared-off jaw with a slight dent, those striking eyes set below a seemingly perpetually furrowed brow (as if he were always concentrating), and sharp, carefully delineated features so finely carved they could have been chiseled from granite.
Lud, he’s a handsome one. She’d always thought Brigid’s brother, Tristan, the most handsome man she knew, but he’d never made her pulse race like this—even when Tristan was stealing a kiss, which had happened on more than one occasion. He’d also never made her skin prickle with a strange heat. Actually, her entire body seemed to have gone up a few degrees in temperature since he’d entered the room.
The young warrior seemed to be measuring his words carefully. Clearly, he didn’t agree with the young earl’s boast, but also wasn’t going to contradict him in front of her and his men. “I agree the game was almost over,” he finally said.
Dear lord, that voice! Deep and gravelly, it seemed to rub over her skin and sink into her bones.
Bruce laughed and clapped him on the back. “A very politic answer, cousin. But I suspect you know very well you had me trapped. I’d wager you are reconstructing the board in your head right now.”
The young warrior—Eoin MacLean, Bruce had told her—simply shrugged.
