"Ye dinny believe me?" Connor growled as he slammed the tankard down on the table. With his free hand, he plowed his fingers through his dark, shaggy hair. "I'm not in love."
"If ye say so." A grin tugged at one corner of Ella's mouth. The gesture suggested that she didn't believe him for a second, as did the flicker of amusement he saw flash in her wide blue eyes. She gave his shoulder a light slap. "Och! Connor, dinny look so distraught. Truly, it no longer matters if ye love Gabrielle or nay. Ye made such a disaster of proposing that there is no chance she'd consider wedding ye now." She pursed her lips and frowned thoughtfully. "'Tis a stroke of luck that Robert Carey had to stop here on his way to Edinburgh for a fresh mount, aye? If he'd passed us by, ye'd ne'er have learned so quickly of Elizabeth's passing, and by the time ye did find out, 'twould have been too late, ye'd already have been wed to the cursed Sassenach wench."
The fingers of one hand curled around the bowl of the tankard while the finger of his other tightened around the handle. Had the molded pewter been made of less sturdy stuff it would have snapped off with the force of his grip. "Ye forget me reasons for wanting to wed her in the first place. I want a son. An heir will assure that Colin can ne'er get his conniving hands on Bracklenaer."
"I forget naught," Ella replied, ignoring the reference to Connor's twin instead of allowing him to change the subject, the way she'd a feeling he'd intended it to do. "And I'm of a mind that neither will Gabrielle. Especially after ye explained it to her in such a"—cough!-—"succulent and gallant manner."
"I was being honest with the lass, 'tis all."
"Were ye?" Ella rested the knuckles of her fists on the table and leaned toward Connor until they were on eye level. "Were ye really?"
"Are ye suggesting otherwise?" he asked tightly.
"What I be suggesting is that there's a fine muckle of good, healthy Scotswomen who'd be overjoyed to share yer name, yer bed, and yer bairns. Gabrielle Carelton may have been needed to settle our feud with the Maxwell, howe'er she isn't the only woman who can supply ye with an heir. Since yer qualifications are so ver basic, would not any woman do the job nicely?"
"I dinny want any woman, I want—!"
"Exactly." Ella's smile was irritatingly broad, the gleam of triumph in her brilliant blue eyes unmistakably bright.
The thickly uttered Gaelic curse that he tossed at his cousin's glorious red head was much more colorful.
Chapter 15
"Colin? Colin Douglas, are you down here?" Gabrielle called out as loudly as she dared. She stood poised in a doorway that, from what little she could see, led on to a dark, narrow hallway. How far the hallway extended, she'd yet to discover. The light from the sconce she'd stolen from an upstairs hallway extended only so far and, first, she wanted to be sure the man she sought was even down here before searching further.
She hadn't retreated to her room—nay, it was not her room, it was The Black Douglas's—after quitting the hall, but instead had roamed aimlessly throughout Bracklenaer's twisting corridors. Her thoughts had been focused inward, tumbling painfully over each other as she replayed the encounter with Connor in every minute, painful detail, not on where she was going. Without intending it as her destination, a moment ago she'd arrived at the narrow, steep stone steps leading down to the dungeon.
It had taken less than a minute for her to come to a hasty decision, and barely thrice that to retrace her path, retrieve one of the wall sconces, then hurry back and carefully navigate the treacherously steep stone stairway.
Gabrielle now stood at the bottom of the stairs. She leaned forward, straining to hear a reply, even a distant one. She heard naught but the clatter of her own heart pounding like thunder in her ears.
A frown creased her brow and her fingers tightened around the sconce's chilly metal handle. If Connor hadn't dispatched his twin and Roy Maxwell down here to the dungeon, where would he confine them?
The question had no more entered Gabrielle's mind when it was chased away by a sudden, unexpected flicker of movement.
Her attention jerked in that direction. The movement had come from in front of her, from somewhere down the narrow, pitch-black hallway. In the twisting shadows, at a point just beyond the flickering bath of sconcelight.
She heard a faint rustle of sound, then... aye, right there, it moved again!
Her knees rattled together beneath the rose brocade skirt; they felt weak, watery, threatening to buckle from beneath her as she lurched back an instinctive step. Her fingers trembled around the sconce's handle. Squinting, her gaze tried and failed to pierce the thick, concealing shadows.
"Hello? Is someone there?" Gabrielle called. She winced to hear the high, shaky quality of her own voice bouncing off the hallway's chokingly close stone walls.
Without warning, a man stepped from the clinging darkness and into the shimmering ring of pale, orangey-yellow light. The click of his boot heel atop ice-cold stone sounded startlingly loud.
The breath Gabrielle had been holding rushed past her lips in a sharp exhalation.
"Ye look shocked," Roy Maxwell observed as he hoisted higher the plaid strip tossed over his left shoulder. His green eyes sparkled in the flickering light. She detected an insolently mocking grin cutting between the thick fullness of his red mustache and beard. "Were ye not looking for me?"
"No, I—Where's Colin?"
"Och! lass, cease yer search. The mon is long gone."
"G-gone?"
"Aye. He left the second we broke out of that thing The Black Douglas calls a cell. Truth to tell, the door was as flimsy as the guard who stood outside it. Neither proved a worthy match for the likes of a Maxwell, don't ye ken?"
The fingers of Gabrielle's free hand fluttered nervously at the base of her throat. "You're escaping!"