Fairy Tale by Jillian Hunter

the cleft of her breasts. Yes. Anything to divert the conversation from the painful topic of his past.
    “What’s at the end of this thing then?” he asked in amusement, oblivious to the confusion that gripped her. “No, let me guess. It’s a peat-bag crystal you wear for luck. Or a chicken bone blessed by your mystical uncle.”
    Marsali held her breath, her emotions churning, as he slowly drew the cord from between her breasts. The nerve of him. The slow glide of silk began to tickle her skin. The length of the summer. The words surfaced through the fog that had invaded her mind, cold spears prodding her into tense expectancy. That was what he had said. He had no intention of staying at all. His beauty had betrayed her. The corrosion that had eaten away at his soul years ago had destroyed every last bit of decency in him. Clearly she could not count on him to save the clan.
    He sat up, unaware of the emotional battle she had fought in the space of a few seconds, his face intent on the silver object that hung on the end of the cord.
    “Ah, it’s a Celtic cross. My God, these are real rubies.” Incredulous, he practically yanked her neck off trying to get a closer look. “I’ve seen this before, haven’t I?” he said slowly, sounding puzzled.
    “How should I know?” she said through her teeth, annoyed at his stupid preoccupation with a piece of jewelry.
    He raised his head, suspicion burning in his eyes. “Where did you get it?” he said coldly.
    Marsali refused to answer him, too enmeshed in her own misery to bother. She couldn’t understand the fuss he was making over a family heirloom, and at the moment, her personal disappointment in him overrode the urge to care. Let him think she had stolen it during a raid. He didn’t give a damn about the castle or his clansmen, which he treated as unwanted possessions. The years had only hardened him. She did hate him, after all. She hated everything he represented.
    “This necklace belonged to very dear friend of mine, Marsali.” His eyes bored into her like strands of blue ice. “In fact, he was the only man I left behind whom I could call friend. He carried this cross with him everywhere because it had belonged to his young wife.”
    Marsali looked up slowly, his words penetrating her anger. “The wife he mourned,” she said, intrigued by the depth of emotion in Duncan’s voice when only a moment earlier he had been so detached she could scream. Aye, there were feelings in him, all right, but he guarded them behind a thorny wall of indifference, which a person might never pierce. She could not understand why he had spoken of her father with an astonishing affection, even reverence.
    “How do you know about his wife?” He nudged her face into the moonlight with his knuckles, the cross pressing into her chin. “How did you come to be wearing this?” he asked gruffly.
    Again she was tempted to let him believe her a common thief, but the bruised anguish in his gaze stopped the impulse. “It … it was my mother’s.”
    “It wasn’t.” He swallowed, his eyes searching her face in stark denial, almost a plea. “Tell me you’re lying. You are lying.”
    “Papa asked me to wear it always when he went off that last time with your father,” she whispered dryly.
    Duncan slowly drew his hand away from her face, stricken by the truth he saw in her defiant loveliness, unprepared for the joke that Fate had executed at his expense again. To seduce the orphaned daughter of the one person who had helped him salvage what scrap of human dignity his stepfather had not thrashed out of him. He took a breath, the self-contempt that rose in his throat thick enough to suffocate him. Why had he come back? Even a damned dukedom wasn’t worth the price of this emotional torture.
    His embittered laughter broke the silence that had fallen. “Now I know why you se emed so familiar, Marsali. Now I know who I saw every time I looked in your face. Sweet wee Marsali. Dear Jesus,