The Devil of Dunakin Castle (Highland Isles) Read online

  “I will check your wound, sir, when I’m finished warming us.” She dodged around Cogadh, reaching out to pat the horse’s shoulder, ducking under his muzzle. She wasn’t afraid of his gigantic war horse, either.

  “I am not a sir,” he said, his voice gruff from yelling in the storm.

  “Give me a name to call you by then,” she said, lowering onto her knees and striking against a small piece of flint to catch on a bit of wool. Luckily, there were dry twigs and peat already inside the small hearth.

  “Keir. Keir Mackinnon of the Isle of Skye. From Dunakin Castle.” He waited. Would she recognize his infamous name? It had been known to steal the breath from people.

  She glanced over her shoulder and nodded to him. “I am Grace Ellington. Since we have both worked hard to save each other’s lives this day, you may call me Grace.”

  “Ye are a Sassenach.”

  “Yes, I’m English, originally from York, but lately from Mull.” The sparks caught on the wool and then the kindling, and she bent low to blow life into them.

  “Aros? Ye are a healer there?”

  She sat back on her heels and added some more dry grasses to feed the little flame. “Yes, and I’m on my way to Barra Isle to help a friend. But first, I must return to Kilchoan to help Thomas.”

  “Your husband?” The word tasted like bile on his tongue. If the fearless lass had a husband, she certainly wouldn’t let him kiss her again. And he’d like to see if she tasted as sweet as he thought when he’d first awoken.

  “No, he is a friend.”

  “A lover?”

  Grace stood to look at him. It was dark with the fire beginning to grow behind her, but he was sure she glared. “A friend. An elderly friend who is married to a lovely, elderly woman back at Aros. He was escorting me to Kilchoan to sail to Barra when he was taken ill. I need to tend him before I continue my journey.”

  “Ye are going to Barra to heal someone?”

  “To help with a birth.”

  He watched from his seat on the bed as she unwound the scarf and slid her wet cloak off her shoulders. Would she be a fragile waif, cold and easily crushed? He watched as she pulled off an overgown, leaving her in a kirtle and bodice that hugged her ample bosom. She turned, and her lush body silhouetted against the fire. Bloody hell, she was all womanly curves, sloping to a middle that was perfect for a man’s hands. She raked fingers through her long hair before the heat of the fire, drying the length. Despite a body perfect for loving, she was more angel than devilish siren. An unwed virgin, perhaps, and someone who would want nothing to do with him.

  The fire lit the small room, and she pulled the blanket from off Cogadh, snapping the melted snow from it and hanging it on a peg. “We should dry everything out.” She dumped the contents of her leather bag on the crude table. “And dine on two oatcakes, dried venison, and a crushed tart.” She looked up, meeting his eyes. “A feast.”

  “Your feast. Cogadh and I can do without.” Deprivation was part of war, and they were both familiar with hunger pangs.

  “Pish. Healing wounds need sustenance.” She walked over to Cogadh and let him sniff her hand. Patiently waiting, she raised her palm, giving his horse ample time to examine her smell. Shifting slowly, his mighty warhorse leaned forward until his muzzle pressed into her palm. “There now,” she said softly and stroked down his muzzle. She held up a bit of broken-off bannock for him to lap out of her hand. “You are a beauty, and I thank you.”

  Keir watched in amazement as she bent her forehead to touch his horse’s. Humph. “I also saved your life,” he said.

  “Yes, you did,” she said, still stroking his horse’s face. She glanced his way. “Thank you.” The fire glowed against her face, revealing the woman’s creamy skin, perfect, straight nose, rosy, round cheeks, and large eyes. But it was the lovely bow of her full lips that caught his full attention. She smiled pleasantly without a hint of fear or lust. Slowly, one of her brows rose, and her smile flattened. “And I saved your life,” she said, dragging out the last of the sentence in a blatant encouragement for him to thank her.

  “I wouldn’t have been bitten if I hadn’t been saving ye.”

  A frown darkened her face. “The limb may still have dropped on you.”

  He shrugged. “I wouldn’t have been near it or on the ground, but even so, I would simply have woken up and gone on my way.”

  “Arrogant,” she mumbled and returned to stir up the fire. “You’d be a large, plaid-wrapped icicle, frozen until spring.”

  “Ye’ll find Cogadh is as arrogant,” he said as she fed his horse another bit of bannock. “He just doesn’t talk.”

  “Maybe you should follow his example.”

  Keir snorted and felt his mouth curve into a grin. The lass was feisty, like his sister, Dara.

  “What does his name mean?” she asked, taking an iron pot from the hearth.

  “Cogadh means war in Gaelic.”

  “You named your horse ‘war’?” She looked at him like he was insane. “When he was a sweet foal, toddling around the pen, nuzzling his mother to nurse, you named him ‘war’?”

  “My sister called him Little Laoch when he was a foal. It means Little Warrior.”

  Grace patted Cogadh on his hindquarters and shook her head. When she opened the door, the wind blew about the room, killing the warmth. She scooped up snow with the pot and slammed the door. “God’s teeth, we aren’t going anywhere tonight.”

  She sounded furious and forlorn at the same time. It was fortunate she could not read Keir’s mind. Snug up in a dry, warm cottage with a lass as brave and beautiful as a goddess, Keir couldn’t remember a more promising predicament.

  Chapter Four

  “You are hot,” Grace said, her palm flat on Keir’s forehead.

  “’Tis better than dead cold,” he said, eyes closed, but a grin transformed his serious face into something more playful.

  She snorted and laid a damp piece of her torn smock on his forehead. “Too hot leads to dead cold.” Grace had boiled the snow and washed his wolf bite, as well as the shallow wound on his horse’s hock. She had some honey and several bulbs of garlic, so she mashed and mixed them together to make a poultice. “I need to pack your leg and wrap it.”

  With a flick of his hand, he yanked off the blanket that she’d been tucking and raised his kilt. Grace’s cheeks flamed at the sight of his muscular thighs, the kilt barely hiding his manhood, which she remembered only too well. “Thank you,” she said and patted his hand to get him to drop the plaid.

  Reaching back, he cradled his head so that his elbows jutted outward, making his biceps strain against the linen of his shirt. Lowering her gaze to his wound, she dabbed globs of the honey-garlic mixture onto each of the puncture holes and gashes from the wolf’s teeth. “’Tis a good thing for you that I don’t believe in men turning into werewolves. Else you’d need to worry about me planting my dagger in your heart when you fall asleep.”

  “And ruin all your hard work at keeping me alive?” he asked.

  Lifting her kirtle, she used the dagger to start the tear of another round of somewhat clean linen fabric. The warrior shifted and cracked his eyes open at the ripping sound. “Ye’ll have little left of your smock by the time we are healed,” he said, his low voice strumming a warm path through Grace. It was an intimate voice, as if they were lovers, and he was imagining her out of her smock.

  “Be happy I have it, and wasn’t instead running about the forest naked,” she murmured, bending closer to work the cloth under his thigh, which seemed as thick with muscle as a tree trunk. “Else you could have bled to death.”

  “Ye would be an angelic, ice-blue, naked icicle,” he said.

  She turned her head to look up at him from her bent position and paused, caught by his stare. The fire crackled in the hearth, while the blizzard whipped around the eves. Nothing else stirred. Even his horse had closed his eyes, dozing while standing near the door. “You called me an angel when you woke.” She should look awa
y, finish the wrapping, but she wondered what thoughts might twist inside him. His dark eyes were mesmerizing.

  He shrugged. “I thought I was dead,” he said. “And ye have the look of one.”

  She straightened up. “You thought you were dead, and you kissed me? Sinfully kissed me.”

  “Aye.” He lowered his arms.

  She raised an eyebrow. “So, that is what you plan to do when you reach the gates of Heaven? Kiss an angel and hope God doesn’t throw you down to Hell?”

  A lazy smile curved his mouth. “If a kiss from an angel tastes as good as ye, I’d gladly risk damnation.”

  She exhaled a laugh in a huff and shook her head to look back at his swollen leg. “You are definitely feverish, Keir Mackinnon.”

  “I wasn’t when I kissed ye,” he said, his eyes closing.

  Tying the ends of the poultice, she stood. “I will say a prayer for your sinful soul.”

  “Good,” he murmured. “For God doesn’t listen to my prayers.”

  She frowned. “God listens to all prayers.” Taking the dry leaves of feverfew, Grace added them to some melted snow in a small crock and set it on the smoldering coals. She needed to get it into Keir before his fever grew out of control. Once the storm blew out, she must try to hike back to Kilchoan to find help and see to Thomas. Hopefully, the maid was tending him.

  Grace took the shovel for the ashes to the door. A horse in the house, good God. Forcing her overused muscles into more action, she scraped the refuse, shoving the mess out the front door before struggling against the wind to shut it again, lowering the bar. She turned to lean against the door, breathing heavily as her eyes went back to the bed. Gone?

  “Keir?” she called and stopped when she heard the obvious sound of him urinating in the privy pot set in the back corner. “Oh,” she whispered and turned to face the door. What had she gotten herself into? A blizzard, wolves, a heated kiss from a stranger, and now mucking out a house occupied by a horse named War and a man who had no modesty. She’d asked for an adventure, and God, or Satan, had provided.

  “Ye can turn back around now, lass,” he called, and she heard the creak of the bed.

  Grace retrieved the crock from the coals with her gloves. “I have some brewed feverfew for you to drink,” she said and stopped, her eyes taking in the sight before her.

  Keir sat up in the bed, the blanket over only his feet. He’d taken off his linen shirt and leaned against the wall at his back. Broad shoulders, thickly muscled arms, and his entire toned chest lay bare, down past his navel where the low edge of his kilt wrapped his narrow waist. Dark swaths of pigment painted his one arm from shoulder to elbow in pointed curves around his biceps like intricate blades. Grace swallowed and walked closer, noticing the scars lining his physique.

  In the dim light, she hoped he couldn’t see the blush that rushed up her neck and into her face. She was a healer, after all, and shouldn’t be affected by the sight of a man’s naked body. “’Tis hot,” she said, but he took the crock, holding it around the rim.

  Grace watched as he lifted it to his beautiful lips and sipped. “You should drink it all to help bring down your fever.” Her gaze fell on his chest and shoulder where more dark marks lined up in rows that ran down his right side. She blinked, leaning in. “Are those…crosses?”

  He swallowed. “Aye.”

  She bent to look closer at the small, simple marks of gray and black. “You have been…branded?” With crosses, hundreds of them, in lines running down the side of his torso and across his hip to sweep along his back where she couldn’t see. She noticed other designs on his chest, too, under the light sprinkling of hair, over his heart.

  “Not with fire, but with ink,” he said. “They represent those I’ve killed in battle.” He drank the rest of the feverfew.

  “So many?”

  All teasing from earlier had vanished, leaving a hard, hollow look to his glassy eyes. “Five hundred eighty-seven.”

  Grace’s entire body tensed as they stared at each other in the shadows. She was face-to-face with the most lethal person she’d ever known. Only the memory of him throwing down his sword to save the wolf pups, by not killing their parents, allowed her to inhale. “Five hundred eighty-seven men?”

  “One woman,” he said, sliding a finger down his side to a white cross on his hip bone. “She was a warrior from the Isle of Lewis. Fierce.” He said the word with respect.

  “Oh,” Grace whispered. “You…have been a warrior for a long time.” Five hundred eighty-seven people. The little crosses printed permanently on his smooth, tan skin took on the solemnness of a battle memorial. Bloody hell, that’s exactly what it was.

  “Aonghus Mackinnon took me into battle starting when I was sixteen.” His finger slid up to his shoulder, resting on a cross at the top. “My first kill was an Irishman warring with the Macleods for money, a mercenary.”

  “You remember him?” she asked softly.

  His eyes were dark in the shadows. “I remember them all.”

  She let her gaze slide down the line of crosses. Finger extended, she touched one with the tip. “This one then?”

  He looked down. “That row, and half the next, was a battle at Kyle of Lochalsh, inland from Skye, about seven years ago. A raid to repay a raid on Skye.” He turned to lean his head back on the wall and closed his eyes. “That particular warrior was old, no teeth, but still very brutal. He died well.”

  “And the marks running down your arm?” she asked, peering at the dark, smooth marks curving along the muscles of his shoulder and mountainous biceps.

  “To remind people who I am.”

  “Who are you?” she whispered.

  His eyes opened to meet her stare. “The Devil of Dunakin Castle.”

  “Oh.” Grace’s mind churned through images she’d seen of devils. She felt his forehead, sliding her hand up to touch the spot where the scalp wound had scabbed over. “No horns? Maybe a forked tail painted down the back of a leg?”

  The hard lines of Keir’s mouth relaxed, followed by the quake of a chuckle in his chest. “Nay, not yet, but I could talk to Brodie to see if he could do it.”

  “I think it will be hard enough to get into Heaven with five hundred eighty-seven crosses on your body. Horns and a forked tail might doom you beyond redemption,” she said.

  A grin spread across his lips. “Especially when I’m kissing an angel first thing.”

  “Exactly.” She pulled the blanket up higher over his kilt and stomach. “When you first woke up out there in the snow, before you lost your mind and kissed a strange woman—”

  “Who was lying on top of me.”

  She ignored his comment. “You said…‘I am dead. Finally.’” She paused, watching his face. Firelight and shadows played along his sloped nose and darkly chiseled features. “What did you mean by ‘finally’?”

  His grin faded. “When a tree falls on a man, it can make him think and say odd things, lass.” She met his stare, waiting, but he closed his eyes and worked his way back down the bed to lie flat.

  She stood up. “Tomorrow you will need to teach me how to set a trap.”

  “Aye, milady,” he answered, his voice thick with the beginnings of sleep as he turned toward the back of the room.

  Grace traced, with her gaze, the rows of crosses that extended around his side onto his back. He’d memorialized the lives he’d taken, using his own skin to mark their passing. A chill spider-walked along Grace’s spine, and she wrapped her arms around herself as she went to tend the fire. The Devil of Dunakin, a warrior who remembered those fallen. Powerful and obviously fierce, but with a heart of compassion for a family of wolves out to kill him. A man willing to help a woman stranded in a blizzard.

  She looked to his horse, War, who blinked at her with large, dark brown eyes. “You deserve a rest,” she whispered to the animal, her gaze shifting to the man in the bed. “You and your warrior.”

  …

  Keir ached. He knew this ache, the pain of resolvin
g infection and the stiffness from lying in bed. It ran through his body, weakening him, and he hated it. Weakness was not allowed. Only strength honored his clan. He’d rather die than be weak. However, he’d been in this position often as he healed from battle wounds, and knew that the fastest way to regain strength was to let the healing take place. But it made him sour.

  He opened his eyes to a gray dawn light filling an empty cabin, and the snowstorm came back to him. Keir pushed up onto one elbow and exhaled in frustration at the ache running down his back muscles and the throbbing pain in his thigh. Where was Cogadh and the woman, Grace?

  Keir wiped his brow and looked at his hand. Wet. His stomach growled, and a wave of thirst made him rub a hand over his dry lips. All good signs that his fever was ended.

  A sound outside the unbarred door caught his attention, and the door opened. “Bloody, blasted snow,” Grace murmured as she pushed into the cabin, striding directly to the fire to drop her load. Stretching her back, she turned toward him, her breasts jutting outward with her arch, and gasped. “You’re awake.” Throwing off her gloves, she rushed over, hair standing on end from dragging her scarf away.

  Her golden-brown hair flew about as if lightning lit her from within. He raised his palm to feel the brush of the ends. “Your hair, lass, seems to be alive.”

  “What? Oh,” she said and almost hit him as she ran her free hand over her head. “’Tis from the scarf.”

  He sat against the wall at his back, the ache in his thigh reminding him why he had slumbered instead of completing his mission. “The blizzard blew out,” he said. “As did my fever.”

  Grace studied him. Even with her hair sticking out at odd angles, her high cheeks, flushed pink from the cold, and her brilliant blue eyes made her the bonniest lass he’d ever seen. “Yes, the blizzard stopped trying to topple this cottage. But your fever…” She touched his head and then his chest. He looked down at her small hand, flattened over the tattoos emblazoned across his heart. So soft. Most women were afraid to touch his markings.