Miranda

Time was not critical yet. The duke of Wellington was still in Paris, ambassador to the newly restored King Louis. But once Wellington returned to England, Napoleon’s allies would put their plan into motion.

Ian had pledged to foil the insane plot. Bound by his own private sense of honor, he knew he would not rest until he succeeded in stopping the conspiracy.

Even if it meant filling Miranda’s head and her heart with his lies. Even if it meant a cruel betrayal of her trust. Even if it meant taking her innocence and ruining her reputation.

He pounded his fist into his hard pillow. Surely it wouldn’t come to that. Surely she would regain her memory and divulge the plan before things had gone too far.

When the smoky gray mist of a Scottish dawn tinged the sky, he gave up on sleep. He had lost sleep over only one woman before Miranda, and that was his mother.

For all that Mary MacVane knew or cared.

Shoving aside thoughts of a past he could not change, Ian got up and bathed with water from a basin, then dressed in the black trousers and white shirt Duffie had set out the night before. Soon they would make landfall.

Today Ian would begin a journey from which there was no return. For him, Scotland was a place of memories and madness. Here, his world had been torn to unrecognizable bits by a stranger with greed in his eyes. His soul had been damned by the woman who had given him life.

Once he had escaped Scotland, Ian MacVane had been reborn, a creature of darkness, his past scoured clean through sheer force of will.

Perhaps that was why Miranda held such fascination for him. She had achieved what he had been trying to do all his adult life. She had obliterated the past.

Her means of doing it, however, held little appeal for him. In his soldiering days, he had seen men wake up the day after battle with no notion of the horrors they had seen, of acts that had been committed upon them, of atrocities they themselves had carried out.

At first, the postbattle blankness had seemed a blessing. But the memories always returned in one form or another, weeks or months or years later. Nightmares. Fits of rage or terror. An inability to cope with everyday life. Was that to be Miranda’s fate?

He donned a waistcoat of boiled wool and reached for his gloves. Before pulling them on, he braced his hands upon a sea chest at the end of his bunk and studied them. They were large and squarish, hands suited to the son of a hardworking crofter. Except that the crofter had been murdered in cold blood, his young son sent to toil in Glasgow at tasks so grueling that they were performed only by orphans or slaves.

Ian scowled down at the stub of the last finger on his left hand. The digit had been chopped away at the first knuckle, and the only concession he had gotten after the accident was half a day’s holiday and an extra slice of bread at supper.

Och, how he wanted to forget. Instead he remembered every detail with crystal clarity, as if he were viewing his past through a perfect glass that showed him not only the sights, but the smells and sounds and textures, as well. The reek of soot and blood. His brother Gordon’s bitter curses. Ian’s own horrified screams. The dizzying view of the street far below the rooftop where he had been stranded. The sensation of abject fear that had roared through him as Gordie fell.

He made a fist, hiding his deformity. Then he forced himself to open his hand. Today, no glove. No shoving his hand into his waistcoat à la Bonaparte.

Ian MacVane would return to Scotland as he had left it: maimed and full of rage.

Six (#ulink_f2b4e75f-8e7c-5e42-a8d5-75419ef0f0eb)

On ev’ry hand it will allowed be,

He’s just—nae better than he should be.

—Robert Burns

After the landing, Ian stood on the rocky shore, oblivious to the movements around him, oblivious to the delighted shouts of young Robbie, oblivious even to Miranda, whose presence had consumed him since the moment he had laid eyes on her.

He simply stood, feeling the solid earth beneath his feet and trying to get his mind around the fact that after an exile of fifteen years, he was home. In Scotland.

How much had he changed, he wondered, from that wounded boy, skulking to freedom by hiding in a ship’s hold?

He was staggered by how deeply he had missed his homeland. He drew the feeling in through his pores, and into his lungs with each breath, and the very essence of the land began to pulse through him. This was Scotland, his birthplace.

Here, he had suffered the torments of the damned—but also, in that early misty time of his youth, he had known his greatest joy. Had known the crystal sharp air of the craggy Highlands as he’d raced across the moors after a stray lamb. Had known the sweet, warm scent of a mother and the hearty affection of a father.

Ah, how long ago that had been. The boy who had gamboled through glens and boggy moors, who had fished for trout in the icy streams and chased squealing girls in the kirkyard on Sunday, was as good as dead.

Ian MacVane knew the name of his murderer. Adder, like the snake. Mr. Adder, the sly-eyed Englishman. He had swept like a storm into Crough na Muir, claiming that the crofters were trespassing on his property. And so they were, on land relinquished to him by the laird whom Adder had beggared at the gaming table.

Ian drew in another breath of Scotland. He felt as if he were falling, falling back into the hideous past, squarely into the night Adder and a troop of mercenaries had swooped down upon the croft of the MacVane...

He heard a sound that didn’t belong to the night. Below the living quarters, the cows blew gently in their sleep. Then the sound came again. It was a soft whistle—not an owl or a nightingale, but a human sound. The dog reacted first, leaping down from the loft, yapping wildly.

He heard a sickening thump, and the dog fell silent. By then Ian’s father was up, pitchfork in hand, but it was too late. Too late...

Miranda broke his fall. She did it with something as simple and as complicated as the brush of her hand on his sleeve, a tilt of her head, a querulous smile. “You were a thousand miles away, Ian,” she said. “And it was a sad place.”

He fought the urge to shake her off, to lash out like a wounded wolf, to recoil from her compassion. Instead he managed a wry half smile. “Reading my moods, are you?”

“Didn’t I always?”

“Of course.” Christ, but this was absurd. Inventing a past for them, pretending they had a future.

No one’s future was assured so long as fanatic Bonapartistes kept hatching their plots in England. Ian wondered how the British could be so blind. They and all their allies were convinced that Napoleon would rest content in his defeat in exile. But Ian understood the brilliance and determination of the emperor, the loyalty of his followers. Exile at Elba was surely but a temporary state for such a man. Bonaparte would be back. Already he was coiled like a snake, poised to strike.

Impatience stirred within Ian. He had best make quick work of the marriage—a handfasting would do—and hasten back to London.

“We’ve always been of one mind, lass,” he said, forcing gentleness into his voice as he lied to her. “And my guess is, you’re of a mind for a good bath and a meal.”

“I am.”

Duffie and Robbie had gone on ahead with the baggage. Ian scanned the road that wound up and around the great rising hills. He had not stood on this spot since he was a lad. Yet he knew people would still remember him in the village.

A part of him still dwelt there.

He started toward the settlement, old and tumbled and comforting as a tattered blanket.

After walking along the dusty road for a quarter mile, Miranda stopped him. “Ian.”

“Aye, lass?”

“I don’t remember my own past, save what you’ve told me. But I know nothing of your past, either.”