Chapter Thirteen

"I've come to take ye to Edinburgh to be tried as a witch," Walter Gleeb said, "since I cannot do my duty to God and the crown here in this heathen land."

His sharp gaze pierced Tessa as if she were a butterfly being pinned on a naturalist's board. He stepped toward her with hands outstretched. She turned to run but found her way barred by the sea. She looked left and right, spotting two other rowboats moored farther down the rocky coast. Should she flee to one of them? Would Gleeb and his brutes follow?

Gleeb lunged, catching Tessa around the waist. "Let me go!" she yelled, striking out with her elbows.

Gleeb grunted but yanked her off the ground and hoisted her from the rocks back to the dirt. She pried at his solid hold, her nails digging into the fleshy bulk of his arm. He hissed in pain but didn't release.

"Let the lass go," Eagan said, his voice deadly calm. A growl came from the trees as the dogs emerged. Adam followed and yelled a command to stop the dogs from attacking, and Eagan's other three brothers moved forward between them.

Tessa stopped twisting, her gaze fastening onto Eagan as if he were a floating barrel in the open ocean. His brothers faced off with Gleeb's men. The wives must be back in the woods with the children, but Tessa saw Lia holding her bow and arrow, nocked and ready.

Tessa's breath stopped as she felt the sharp edge of Gleeb's knife graze her throat.

"One step and I'll send this witch to Hell right now."

She'd protest she wasn't a witch, but, like so many women before, Tessa knew she wouldn't be believed by the likes of Gleeb. She barely swallowed against the cool blade. Her pulse beat with such fury she imagined her blood pressing against the knife.

"I am Chief Macquarie," Adam said. "And ye and yer men will leave right now."

"Without Tessa," Eagan added.

"By royal writ, I am invited anywhere belonging to the country of Scotland if I believe there is a credible suspicion of witchcraft."

"The lass isn't a witch," Callum said, his gaze on the brute directly across from him. They were of similar build and would cause each other much loss of blood if they clashed.

"I will examine her to see," Gleeb said.

"Examine her?" Eagan yelled. "Ye mean torture her with pins pricked into her skin."

"Demons and witches are clever," Gleeb answered with the self-assurance of a priest discussing original sin. "They appear innocent and weak when they can rise up with spells and witchcraft to attack at any time. The testing keeps the accused under control during the inquiry."

"'Tis foking wrong," Rabbie called from his place next to Drostan. Now they were only outnumbered by one. Except that one of Gleeb's henchmen was leveling a firearm and pointing it at anyone who spoke. That single weapon multiplied the deadliness of Gleeb's side fivefold.

"Unless ye want this woman's blood on your conscience," Gleeb said, "I suggest ye back up and let us leave without harassment. As it is, I'll report how the Macquarie Clan interfered with an official edict about—" His words cut off in a gasp, and Tessa felt his whole body stiffen.

Then Gleeb's hand was ripped away from her throat. Her hands replaced the blade on her neck, and she felt the sting of the shallow cut. A bit of blood smeared on her fingers.

Eagan lunged forward, catching Tessa before she hit the ground. He hauled her up against him, using his arms and body to shield her as Gleeb's men began to slash.

Blast! The gun fired, making Tessa lurch against Eagan.

Loud yells and the cracking metallic sound of blade hitting blade filled the small shoreline, and Tessa turned wide eyes to the scene. Gleeb's men fought, but it looked like they fought each other. The dogs barked but remained by Adam's side, under his control. The Macquarie brothers and Eliza stood back, their faces slack as Tessa watched the battle from the safety of Eagan's arms.

Callum wrestled up from the ground, triumphantly holding the matchlock pistol. Gleeb lay face down across the rocks where he'd fallen, blood pouring from a stab wound in the back of his white tunic.

"Bloody foking hell," Eagan yelled behind her. "Run, Tessa." But when he let go to draw his sword against one of Gleeb's men, Tessa stayed rooted to the ground as she looked at the man dressed in a sea captain's long coat, holding his sword, red with Walter Gleeb's blood.

"Father?"

He wore his ice-hard frown, his dark eyes glittering like a clear, star-filled night sky. "Ma fille," he said. "I've come for you." Chill bumps swept across her skin from head to toe.

Without any other words, her father strode to her, yanking her away from Eagan's side to stand before him. Her father had just saved her again, this time from the witch hunter.

She twisted toward the Macquaries, her arms out. "Don't shoot. He's not with Gleeb. He's my father."

"Father," she said, glancing up into Captain Lemaire's stern, focused face, "these are friends I've made on the isle. They aren't with the witch hunter."

Her father murmured in rough French behind her; the vehemence more than the curses made it sound like he hated Eagan's family. It sent a nauseating chill through her.

Her father's black eyes turned down toward her. He smelled of the open sea and tar and some spice. "We are leaving now."

"Nay!" Eagan yelled, stepping forward.

She'd been waiting for her father for over a year, every day watching the horizon for the sign he'd not abandoned her again. But now… Leaving like this wasn't right.

Boulders weighed down her stomach so much that if she were to find herself suddenly in the sea, she would certainly sink to the cold, dark bottom.

Her father's voice boomed out. "Claudette Tempest Ainsworth is my daughter and lawfully under my protection. She's coming with me now."

"Non, mon père. I must say farewell," she said in rapid French.

All traces of the earlier laughter from the glen and the warmth of the sun had transformed into an eerie, stilted silence as the Macquaries stared with widened eyes.

"Get into the rowboat. We leave now," her father ordered.

"Now?" Tessa's heart squeezed. She thought of her sweet fawn and the six-toed cat that she cuddled with. And then there was Eagan, the honorable, pleasure-giving, adventurous lover and kind man.

"Immédiatement."

His men lined up on either side of him. Two of them held muskets ready against their shoulders. They had killed all of Gleeb's men with little blood loss and looked to be ready to end the lives of all the Macquaries.

"The Macquaries are our friends, mon père."

"Nay, Tessa," Eagan called across to her. She turned, her breath catching. Eagan's teeth showed as he spoke, his lips slightly rolled back. His nose wrinkled as he held his sword before him, staring over her head at her father as he spoke. "Captain Claude Jandeau is no friend of ours."

…

Blood pounded in Eagan's ears as if the sea raged inside him. He kept his gaze on Jandeau, the French pirate loyal to no one but himself and his greed. The madman who'd tried four other times to steal away the wives of his brothers along with children and defenseless women who would be raped and sold to brothels if they survived.

Furious bewilderment shot pain through Eagan's head as the blood thumped in his ears. Captain Claude Jandeau was Tessa's father?

Impotent rage swirled like a wicked storm in his gut. Of all the lasses he could become entangled with, he'd spent the last amazing weeks with Jandeau's daughter. Had the pirate left Tessa on Wolf Isle to ensnare Eagan?

"A father who uses his daughter as a shield," Eagan said, trying to keep his voice even. "Ye bloody foking coward."

Tessa stared at him with wide eyes. She shook her head. "Captain Claude Lemaire is my father, Eagan. Everyone put their weapons down." But no one relaxed.

Eagan's blood thrummed with violence and dread. "Tessa, I don't know if Jandeau is your father or not, but the man behind ye is not a naval captain for King Henri of France. At least not an honorable captain. He's a pirate who sells women and children as slaves, or worse."

Eagan remembered her tale of salvation, of how Jandeau rescued her when she was nearly starving after her mother died. Then he'd brought her to Grissell for safekeeping. Jandeau was the man that Tessa had watched for every day upon the rocks, her eyes scanning the horizon for his ship, her sorrowful song lamenting his absence.

Questions bombarded him, but they fell away in light of his need to stop Jandeau from taking Tessa away. The infamous pirate had a new crew after they'd set his second ship on fire when he'd abducted Drostan's wife, Lia. But like a plague, the man kept rearing back up to threaten the Macquarie Clan. And now he was taking away the woman that Eagan… What? Found immense pleasure with? Laughed with? Considered taking with him? Bloody hell. She could be with child!

A bastard born will doom Clan Macquarie.

"Ye're outnumbered, Jandeau," Adam called out, and Eagan noticed the wives and the unmarried women had come from the forest, too, some holding daggers and some holding large throwing rocks that Anna had them practice with daily.

"I will put this blade through your skull," Eliza said, aiming to throw her sgian dubh. "You know I can."

Lia didn't bother to say anything but loosed her arrow at one of the two crewmen holding muskets. A strangled sound came from him, the heavy weapon dropping as his hands rose to the arrow's fletching feathers, the shaft embedded through his throat. He dropped to his knees on the rocky shore and fell over.

"I said I'd kill you if I ever saw you again," Lia called unrepentant.

Before the second gunman could discharge his musket, Beck shot his own musket, hitting the other man's weapon and making a small explosion that knocked the man backward and destroyed his firearm.

"Throw!" yelled Anna, and fist-sized rocks shot through the air, hitting several of the men. One hit a pirate's nose, and blood gushed from it. Another rock bludgeoned a pirate's jack, making him double over and fall on the ground. Adam released the wolfhounds, who leaped at two men running forward with curved swords slicing the air. The men stopped in their tracks as the dogs' front paws slammed into their shoulders, toppling them.

Jandeau dragged Tessa backward toward the two waiting rowboats. Eagan re-sheathed his sword, drawing his sgian dubh from his boot. With a lunge and flick of his wrist, he threw the blade, and it stuck into Jandeau's forearm. If he grunted, Eagan couldn't hear it over the yells from the battle.

One pirate was dead, and the other six had scurried about, ducking from Lia's quickly releasing arrows and the rocks that whizzed through the sea breeze. Two of the fiends were now under the two-hundred-pound dogs. Eagan dodged another man battling Callum with a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other. At the last second, Eagan threw his leg out, tripping the pirate, and kept running. Jandeau dropped his arm, the blade protruding. It was all Eagan needed.

Eagan reached Tessa, grabbing her to him.

"No," she yelled, the words cutting through him as if she'd wielded a knife. Tessa's face snapped back and forth between Jandeau and Eagan.

"He's not what ye think," Eagan yelled over the chaos. This was no time to talk about all the sins the infamous, foking-lucky-to-be-alive pirate had committed against men, women, children, and probably animals.

Her face was tight with indecision when it turned to him. "He's my father. I know it to be true." Her hand went to her locket. The small birdcage shape was a lump under her smock. He'd never looked inside it. Was there a picture of Jandeau there? Daingead, he should have looked inside!

Jandeau wiped his blood off the sgian dubh, seething rage darkening his tanned face. There was no time to convince her. Eagan lifted Tessa off the ground, setting her over one of his broad shoulders, and turned.

"Put…me…Putain, Eagan…put…me…down!" she yelled as he ran toward the forest, his shoulder probably ramming into her middle, making it hard for her to talk. The rest of her furious words came out in French. But he didn't stop, not even when she kicked her legs.

One watching without knowing who the players were in this horrid act might think him the villain, stealing the daughter away from the father who'd come to retrieve her. I'm not the villain . He'd seen what Jandeau did, how he stole innocents, using them for grotesque pleasure and profit. Tessa needed to hear the truth before she chose to go with him. Would Eagan let her walk away with Jandeau if she chose to? He couldn't even think about that without wanting to roar.

Eagan ran through the woods, the well-hewn muscles in his legs churning to push them as far from Jandeau and his men as he could get Tessa. Before he reached the meadow, Eagan heard Jandeau's chilling words behind him.

"I will return for my daughter, and she will come with me, or all of your Macquarie sons and daughters will be slaughtered."