There was no mistaking the pleading look in his eyes. Eyes the exact same dusky blue shade as hers. Eyes that had for too long looked both haunted and hunted. She would almost swear the tremor in his hands had decreased since the earl had signed over the settlement. She hadn’t seen him reach for the flask he always kept tucked in his waistcoat pocket even once since she’d accepted the earl’s proposal.
In his encouraging smile, she caught a glimpse of another man—a younger man with clear eyes and steady hands whose breath smelled of peppermint instead of spirits. He would swoop down and whisk her up to his shoulders for a dizzying ride, making her feel as if she was queen of all she surveyed instead of just a grubby toddler with skinned knees and a snaggle-toothed smile.
She also saw something in her father’s eyes that she hadn’t seen for a very long time—hope.
Emma turned back to her bridegroom, squaring her shoulders. Despite what the onlookers might believe, she had no intention of weeping or swooning. She had always prided herself on being made of sterner stuff than that. If she must marry this earl to secure the future and fortunes of her family, then marry him she would. And she would strive to be the best wife and countess his wealth—and title—could buy.
She was opening her mouth—fully prepared to promise to love, cherish and obey him, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, till death did them part—when the double doors of iron-banded oak at the rear of the abbey came crashing open, letting in a blast of wintry air and a dozen armed men.
The abbey erupted in a chorus of startled shrieks and gasps. The men fanned out among the pews, their unshaven faces grim with determination, their pistols held at the ready to quell any sign of resistance.
Instead of fear, Emma felt a ridiculous flare of hope ignite in her heart.
As the initial outcry subsided, Ian Hepburn boldly stepped into the center aisle of the abbey, placing himself between the forbidding mouths of the intruders’ weapons and his great-uncle. “What is the meaning of this?” he shouted, his clipped tones ringing from the vaulted ceiling. “Have you savages no respect for the house of the Lord?”
“And which lord would that be?” a man responded in a Scots burr so deep and rich it sent an involuntary shiver down Emma’s spine. “The one who formed these mountains with His own hands or the one who believes he was born with the right to rule them?”
She gasped along with everyone else as the owner of that voice rode a towering black horse right through the doorway of the abbey. A shocked murmur went up as the wedding guests shrank back into their pews, their avid gazes reflecting equal parts fear and fascination. Oddly enough, Emma’s gaze wasn’t transfixed by the magnificent beast with its gleaming barreled chest and flowing ebony mane but by the man straddling the steed’s imposing back.
Thick, sable wings of hair framed his sun-bronzed face, presenting a startling contrast to the frosty green of his eyes. Despite the chill of the day, he wore only a green and black woolen kilt, a pair of lace-up boots, and a sleeveless vest of beaten brown leather that exposed his broad, smooth chest to the elements. He handled the beast as if he’d been born to the saddle, his powerful shoulders and well-muscled forearms barely showing a strain as he guided the horse right up the aisle, forcing Ian to stumble backward or be trampled by the animal’s deadly hooves.
From beside her, Emma heard the earl hiss, “Sinclair!”
She turned to find her elderly groom’s face suffused with color and twisted with hatred. Judging by the ripe, purple vein pulsing in his temple, he might not survive the wedding, much less the wedding night.
“Forgive me for interrupting such a tender moment,” the intruder said without so much as a trace of remorse as he reined his mount to a prancing halt halfway down the aisle. “Surely you didn’t think I could resist dropping by to pay my respects on such a momentous occasion. My invitation must have been lost in the post.”
The earl shook one palsied fist at him. “The only invitation any Sinclair is likely to receive from me is a writ of arrest from the magistrate and a date with the hangman.”
In reaction to the threat, the man simply arched one bemused eyebrow. “I had such high hopes that the next time I darkened the door of this abbey, it would be for your funeral, not another wedding. But you always have been a randy auld goat. I should have known you couldn’t resist buying another bride to warm your bed.”
For the first time since he’d muscled his way into the abbey, the stranger’s mocking gaze flicked toward her. Even that brief glance was enough to bring a stinging flush to Emma’s fair cheeks, especially since his words held the undeniable and damning ring of truth.
This time it was almost a relief when Ian Hepburn once again sought to impose himself between them. “You may mock us and pretend to be avenging your ancestors as you always do,” he said, a sneer curling his upper lip, “but everyone on this mountain knows that the Sinclairs have never been anything more than common cutthroats and thieves. If you and your ruffians have come to divest my uncle’s guests of their jewels and purses, then why don’t you bloody well get on with it and stop wasting your breath and our time?”
With surprising strength, Emma’s groom shoved his way past her, nearly sending her sprawling. “I don’t need my nephew to fight my battles. I’m not afraid of an insolent whelp like you, Jamie Sinclair,” he snarled, marching right past his nephew with one bony fist still upraised. “Do your worst!”
“Oh, I haven’t come for you, auld mon.” A lazy smile curved the intruder’s lips as he drew a gleaming black pistol from the waistband of his kilt and pointed it at the snowy white bodice of Emma’s gown. “I’ve come for your bride.”
Chapter Two
AS EMMA GAZED INTO the stranger’s glacial green eyes over the mouth of his pistol, it suddenly occurred to her that there might be worse fates than agreeing to wed a doddering old man. The thick, sooty lashes framing those eyes did nothing to veil the unspoken threat glittering in their depths.
At the sight of the pistol pointed at Emma’s breast, her mother clapped a hand over her mouth to muffle a broken cry. Elberta and Edwina clutched at each other, the clusters of silk violets on their matching bonnets trembling and their blue eyes wide with shock, while Ernestine began to paw through her reticule for her smelling salts.
Her father leapt to his feet but made no move to leave the pew. It was as if he was frozen in place by some force more powerful than his devotion to his daughter. “I say, man,” he barked, steadying his hands on the back of the pew in front of him, “what in the devil is the meaning of this?”
While the minister backed toward the altar, deliberately distancing himself from Emma, the earl lowered his clenched fist and slowly shuffled backward, leaving a clear path between Emma’s heart and the loaded pistol. Judging by the expectant hush that had fallen over the rest of the guests, she and Sinclair might have been the only two souls in the abbey. Emma supposed some response was required of her as well—that she ought to swoon or burst into tears or plead prettily for her life.
Knowing that was exactly what the villain probably expected her to do gave her the courage to tamp down her own budding terror and stand straight and tall, to lift her chin and meet his ruthless gaze with a defiant glare of her own. She dug her fingernails into the bouquet to hide the violent quaking of her hands, crushing the lingering perfume of the heather from the crisp blooms. For an elusive second, another emotion flickered through those frosty green eyes—one that might have been amusement… or admiration.
It was Ian Hepburn’s turn to march past his uncle, his dark eyes smoldering with contempt. He stopped a healthy distance from the man on horseback. “So now you’ve sunk to defiling churches and threatening to shoot helpless, unarmed women. I suppose I should have expected no better from a bastard like you, Sin,” he added, hissing the nickname as if it were the vilest of epithets.
Sinclair briefly shifted his gaze from Emma to Ian, his grip on the pistol unwavering. “Then you’re not to be disapp
ointed, are you, auld friend?”
“I’m not your friend!” Ian shouted.
“No,” Sinclair replied softly, his voice tinged with what might have been either bitterness or regret. “I suppose you never were.”
Even in retreat, the earl remained defiant. “You’re living proof that it takes more than studying at St. Andrews to turn a mountain rat into a gentleman! It must gall your grandfather beyond measure to know that sending you off to university was such a waste of his precious coins. Coins no doubt stolen from my own coffers by his motley band of rabble!”
The earl’s insults didn’t seem to faze Sinclair. “I wouldn’t exactly call it a waste. If I hadn’t gone to St. Andrews, I might have never made the acquaintance of your charming nephew here.” That earned him a fresh glare from Ian. “But I will make sure to give my grandfather your regards the next time I see him.”
So this brigand had lived among civilized folk for a time. That would explain why the roughest edges had been polished off his burr, leaving it even more dangerously silky and musical to Emma’s ears.
“Just what do you plan to do, you miserable pup?” the earl demanded. “Have you come to hasten your own inevitable journey to hell by murdering my bride in cold blood on the altar of a church?”
Emma was alarmed to note that her devoted bridegroom didn’t look particularly dismayed by the prospect. With his title and riches, she supposed it would be a simple enough matter for him to procure another bride. Ernestine and Elberta were both nearly old enough to wed. Perhaps her father would be allowed to keep the earl’s settlement if he offered the man a choice between the two girls so the ceremony could proceed without further interruption.
After they’d mopped up her blood, of course.
A nervous hiccup of a giggle escaped her. She had avoided swooning or begging for her life only to end up skating dangerously near to hysteria. It was just beginning to occur to her that she might actually die here at the hands of this merciless stranger—a virgin bride never knowing true passion or the adoring touch of a lover.
“Unlike some,” Sinclair said with pointed politeness, “I’m not in the habit of murdering innocent women.” A tender smile curved his lips, more dangerous somehow than any sneer or glower. “I said I’d come for your bride, Hepburn, not that I’d come to kill her.”
Emma read his intent a heartbeat before anyone else in the abbey. It was there in the squaring of his unshaven jaw, the tension that rippled through his muscular thighs, the way his powerful fists wrapped around the beaten leather of the reins.
Yet all she could do was stand rooted to the flagstones, paralyzed by the raw determination in his narrowed gaze.
Everything seemed to happen at once. Sinclair dug his heels into the horse’s flanks. The beast lurched forward, eyes rolling wildly, nostrils flaring. It came charging down the aisle of the abbey, heading straight for Emma. Her mother let out a bloodcurdling scream, then slumped into a dead faint. The minister dove behind the altar, his black robes flapping behind him like the wings of a crow. Emma flung her arms up over her face, bracing herself to be trampled beneath those flashing hooves.
At the last possible second, the horse veered to the left while Sinclair leaned right. He wrapped one powerful arm around Emma’s waist and swept her into the air, tossing her belly-down across his lap as if she weighed no more than a sack of wormy potatoes and knocking the air clear out of her. She was still struggling to catch her breath when he wheeled the horse in a tight circle, forcing the beast up on its hind legs for a dizzying pirouette. As those deadly hooves pawed at the air, Emma sucked in a breath that was sure to be her last as she waited for the horse to topple over backward and crush them both.
But her captor had other ideas. He sawed at the reins with brute strength, using sheer mastery to force the creature to succumb to his will. The beast let out an earsplitting whinny. Its front hooves came crashing down, its iron shoes striking sparks off the flagstones.
Sinclair’s strong voice carried, even over the shrill shrieks and frantic shouts of alarm echoing off the vaulted ceiling. But his words were meant for the earl alone. “If you want her back unharmed, Hepburn, you’ll have to pay and pay dearly! For your own sins and the sins o’ your fathers. I’ll not return her to you until you return to me what’s rightfully mine.”
Then he snapped the reins on the horse’s back, sending the beast charging back down the aisle of the abbey. They thundered through the doorway and past the crooked gravestones of the churchyard, each of the horse’s long, powerful strides carrying Emma farther away from any hope of rescue.
Chapter Three
EMMA COULD NOT HAVE said how far or how long they traveled. Each bone-jarring jolt of the horse’s hooves against the frozen turf scattered more of the amber-tipped pins her maid had so painstakingly secured in Emma’s unruly curls as she had sat before the mirror that morning. Before long, the tumbled strands were hanging in a blinding curtain around her face.
She had only the vaguest impression of other horses surrounding them, other hooves pounding the ground in a rhythm as relentless as their own. Sinclair’s men must have leapt upon their own horses outside the abbey and joined their reckless flight.
They were moving far too fast for her to put up any sort of struggle. If she tried to fling herself off the horse while it was in mid-gallop, the fall would snap every bone in her body.
Her undignified position would have been even more precarious were it not for the large, warm, masculine hand firmly anchored at the small of her back, shockingly near to the gentle swell of her rump. Its steady pressure was all that was keeping her from flopping around on her captor’s lap like one of Edwina’s beloved rag dolls.
Even with that dubious protection, there was still no guarantee the horse’s next leap wouldn’t splinter a fragile rib or bash her skull wide open on one of the tree trunks leaping in and out of her frantic vision. As the landscape raced by with dizzying speed, blurring before her eyes, she could feel the muscles shifting in her captor’s powerful thighs. He drove the horse through thickets, woodlands and across open ground as if he and the creature were one.
As the beast’s hooves left the mossy turf and launched them into flight, sending them sailing across a deep ravine, Emma choked out a strangled scream and squeezed her eyes shut. When she dared to open them again, they were skirting the outermost edge of a steep bluff. She caught a dizzying glimpse of the glen below and the rolling foothills crowned by the crenellated stone towers of Hepburn Castle. Her fear deepened to an icy dread as she realized just how far they had already journeyed from both the abbey and civilization.
They rode for so long she wouldn’t have been surprised had they arrived at the gates of hell itself. But when Sinclair finally hauled back on the reins, slowing the horse’s gait to a bruising trot, then a swaying walk, it wasn’t the sulfurous stench of brimstone that made her nose twitch but the crisp aroma of cedar.
Emma wasn’t sure what she expected to happen upon their arrival at their unknown destination but it certainly wasn’t to be dumped unceremoniously to her feet. As Sinclair swung one long leg over the horse’s back, regaining his own footing with effortless grace, she stumbled backward and nearly fell. Her legs felt weak and rubbery, just as they had after her papa had taken the family yachting at Brighton the summer before his luck at the faro tables had taken a costly turn for the worse.
She regained her balance only to find herself standing in the middle of a spacious clearing vaulted by a moody gray sky and ringed by a lush coppice of evergreens. Their feathery branches softened the sharp edge of the wind, making it sigh instead of roar.
Here, where the very air smelled of freedom, she was more a prisoner of circumstance than ever before.
With their grueling journey at an end, she should have felt some measure of relief. But as she shook her tangled curls out of her eyes to confront the man who was now the master of her fate, she feared she was about to face a reckoning of another kind.
; He stood on the opposite side of the horse, his deft hands unfastening the brass cinch holding the saddle in place. The sable wings of his untrimmed hair had swept down to cast his face in shadow, veiling his expression.
Emma stood there in an agony of suspense as he dragged off the heavy saddle with an effort betrayed only by the bulging slabs of muscle in his upper arms. He tossed the saddle on a nest of pine needles before returning to tug the bridle from the horse’s sleek throat.
His men had drawn up their own horses at a respectful distance and were dismounting with equal ease. Although a few of them were bold enough to cast her sidelong glances and murmur amongst themselves, it was almost as if they were aping their leader’s indifference.
Emma could feel her apprehension beginning to harden into anger. She had expected Sinclair to terrorize her, not ignore her. He was going about his mundane tasks as if he hadn’t just brutally snatched her at gunpoint from both her wedding and the bosom of her family.
She stole a glance behind her, wondering if he would even notice if she whirled around and sprinted for freedom.
“I wouldn’t try it if I were you,” he said evenly.
Startled, Emma whipped her head back around. Sinclair was running a brush down the horse’s quivering flanks, all of his attention seemingly focused on his task. It was as if he had divined her thoughts and the direction of her glance with some sense deeper than either hearing or sight.
She still felt a satisfying twinge of triumph. At least she’d proved he wasn’t as oblivious to her presence as he was pretending to be.
“As your hostage, isn’t that what I’m obligated to do?” She struggled to keep the quaver out of her voice. “Try to escape your villainous clutches?”
He shrugged one powerful shoulder. “Why squander your efforts, lass? You wouldn’t get ten paces before I stopped you.”
“How? By shooting me in the back?”