Beyond the Highland Myst(31)

"I know," Adam smiled with real pleasure and obeyed her dismissal.

Adrienne squeezed her eyes shut tightly but upon the pink-gray insides of her eyelids shadows arose. Images of being held between the Hawk's rock-hard thighs, wrapped in arms that were bands of steel. His voice murmuring her name over and over, calling her back, commanding her back. Demanding that she live. Whispering words of… what? What had he said?

* * * * *

"She lives, Lord Buzzard—"

"Hawk."

"Both birds of prey. What difference?"

"A buzzard is a scavenger. A hawk selects his kill as carefully as a falcon. Stalks it with the same unerring conviction. And fails as frequently—which is never."

"Never," Adam mused. "There are no absolutes, Lord Hawk."

"In that you're wrong. I choose, I adhere, I pursue, I commit, I attain. That—that, my errant friend—is an absolute."

Adam shook his head and studied the Hawk with apparent fascination. "A worthy adversary. The hunt begins. No cheating. No tricks. You may not forbid her from me. And I know that you tried to already. You will recant your rules."

Hawk inclined his dark head. "She chooses," he allowed tightly. "I will forbid her nothing."

Adam nodded, a satisfied nod as he plunged his hands deep in the pockets of his loose trousers and waited.

"Well? Get thee from my castle, smithy. You have your place, and it is without my walls."

"You might try a thank-you. She lives."

"I'm not certain you aren't the reason she almost died."

At that, Adam's brow creased thoughtfully. "No. But now that I think on it, I have work to do. I wonder… who would try to kill the beauty, if not me? And I didn't. Had I, she would be dead. No slow poison from my hand. Quick death or not at all."

"You're a strange man, smithy."

"But I will soon be most familiar to her."

"Pray the gods she is wiser than that," Grimm mumbled as Adam stalked off into the dim corridor. Night had fallen and the castle lamps were still largely unlit.

Hawk sighed heavily.

"What deal did you make with that devil?" Grimm asked in a voice scarcely audible.

"Think you he may be?"

"Something is not natural about that man and I intend to find out what."

"Good. Because he wants my wife, and she doesn't want me. And I saw her wanting him with a hurt in her eyes."

Grimm winced. "You are certain you don't want her just because she doesn't want you and he wants her?"

Hawk shook his head slowly. "Grimm, I have no words for what she makes me feel."

"You always have words."

"Not this time, which warns me truly that I'm in deep trouble and about to get deeper. Deep as I must to woo that lass. Think you I've been spelled?"

"If love can be bottled, or shot from Cupid's bow, my friend," Grimm whispered into the breeze that ruffled in Hawk's wake when he entered Adrienne's chamber.

* * * * *

In the weeks to come the Hawk would wonder many times why the Rom, whom he trusted and valued, and whom he had thought returned those feelings in kind, had never come to tend his wife during those terrible days. When he spoke to his guard, the man said that he'd delivered the message. Not only didn't the Rom come, they were conspicuously absent from Dalkeith. They made no trips to the castle to barter their goods. They spent no evenings weaving tales in the Greathall before a rapt and dazzled audience. Not one of the Rom approached Dalkeith-Upon-the-Sea; they kept to their fields, out past the rowans.

That fact nagged at Hawk's mind briefly, but was quickly lost in the thick of more weighty concerns. He promised himself he would resolve his questions with a trip to the gypsy camp once his wife was fully healed and matters with the strange smithy were resolved. But it was to be some time before he made the trip to the Rom camp; and by that time, things would be vastly changed.

* * * * *

Adrienne drifted up from healing slumber to find her husband watching her intently.

"I thought I'd lost you." The Hawk's face was dark, glistening in the firelight, and it was the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes. It took her several long moments to shake loose the cotton stuffing that had replaced her brain. With wakefulness came defiance. Just looking at that man made her temper rise.

"Can't lose something you don't have. Never had me to begin with, Lord Hawk," she mumbled.

"Yet," he corrected. "I haven't had you yet. At least not in the sense that I will have you. Beneath me. Bare, silky skin slippery with my loving. My kisses. My hunger." He traced the pad of his thumb along the curve of her lower lip and smiled.

"Never."