Susan Wiggs - Miranda

“Nay, love. This is better.” His hands traveled up and over her shoulders. His fingers threaded their way into her hair, sifting through the curls.

“Now what?” she whispered.

Though he did not smile, amusement glinted in his eyes. “Just keep your head tilted up. Aye, like that.” He bent low, his face looming close, his breath, with the tang of his evening brandy, caressing her. He touched his lips tenderly to her eyes, first one and then the other, so that they were closed. Then he kissed her mouth, softly, tentatively.

“I can stop at any time,” he whispered, “if this makes you uncomfortable.”

She smiled dreamily. “Uncomfortable is not quite the word for what I feel.”

He kissed her again, tugging gently on her lower lip until her mouth opened and she surged toward him, hungry, wanting. The taste and smell of him filled her—sea and leather and maleness, seasoned with the brandy they had drunk after supper. The sensation of kissing him caused passion to leap up inside her until she was straining almost painfully for him.

His hands slipped from her hair and traveled down, tracing the inward curve of her waist and the outward flare of her hip. Then he touched her breasts, hands brushing, fingers skimming the tips. Warmth seared her in places he wasn’t touching, places that begged for his caress.

Then, as gradually and inevitably as the kiss began, it receded. He lifted his mouth from hers, and his hands dropped to her waist.

She kept her eyes closed, holding the moment, hovering in uncertainty and wonder and delight.

“Miranda?” he asked.

She forced her eyes open. She reached up and touched his cheek. His tanned skin was rough with evening stubble. “I feel completely starstruck, Ian. Bowled over like a ninepin. Was it like that for me before?”

“You never said.” His voice sounded gruff and uneven.

“I was trying to remember what it was like to love you,” she said. “But I feel as if I’m learning for the first time.” That something so simple as a human touch could shake the foundations of her heart was a staggering notion. “Ah, Ian.” She spoke his name on a sigh. “You are so good to be patient with me.”

He took her hand, removed it from his cheek and kissed the back of it. To her surprise, his own hand trembled. “You make it easy, Miranda.” She thought she detected a note of bitterness in his voice when he added, “Too bloody easy.”

* * *

Guilt was a new and decidedly unpleasant sensation for Ian MacVane. Yet as he lay awake in his narrow, damp quarters each night of the voyage, he knew guilt in all its sharp and bitter shades.

He was manipulating the feelings of a naive young woman. Whatever else Miranda’s crimes might be, she was innocent when it came to matters of the heart.

But not for long, if they stayed on their present course.

I was trying to remember what it was like to love you. Her words snapped back at him like a lash. She was driving him insane with her unwavering trust in him.

Trust. Miranda trusted Ian MacVane. She was by far the first woman foolish enough to do that.

She wanted memories, and he was giving them to her. False, hollow tales he dredged from his paltry stores of sentiment.

If ever a man had a past that begged to be forgotten, it was Ian MacVane.

Instead here he was building a castle of lies in order to win Miranda’s faith and perhaps, if he was very lucky, find the memories she kept locked away in her mind.

He kept wondering if he should have simply handed her over to Frances. Perhaps that would have been better all the way around.

The morning they’d taken ship, Frances had shown her customary lack of surprise at his flagrant disobedience. She’d even sent him a message in cipher: Perfect, darling. I do so love it when you do something scathingly clever and cruel. Yes, sleep with the girl. It is the best way to—dare I be so tasteless?—get her to reveal herself to you.

At the bottom of her note, he had scribbled a reply in cipher and sent it back to her: When I bed a woman, my dear, it’s for my own reasons, not because anyone orders me to.

Even then he had known he would find a reason. The whole matter was sordid. He had a sudden notion to turn his back on the entire affair, but he knew he would not.

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.