Elise by Jackie Ivie Page A

opened her mouth and kept talking.
    “He ... came to me! He wouldn’t leave. I—I didn’t mean it to happen, I swear it!”
    “There’s naught that happens about you that you dinna’ plan, down to every excruciating detail.” He lifted his gaze from where he’d pinned her in place to speak again to the man at her back. “Was there anyone else about, Mick?”
    “I dinna’ see another. She was alone.”
    “No one about? No witnesses?”
    “None.”
    “You were at your post all eve?”
    “Aye.”
    “Then how did he get in?”
    “Stop this! You don’t understand!” Elise burst out, stopping the arguing male voices that just kept getting louder and louder. “He tried to—! He—!”
    “Yes?”
    She had his attention again, and for the life of her she didn’t know why she’d wanted it. There wasn’t a soft bone anywhere on his body. He reached out and lifted the front of her nightgown where it was torn, then put it back on her shoulder, where it stayed plastered to her with the adhesive of drying blood.
    “He wanted to—! He ripped my gown!” She was shaking and sobbing and stammering. It surprised her that he understood.
    A nerve in his jaw tensed out one side, defining the strength and shape of it, as well as every bit of his disgust. Elise recoiled from it.
    “Doona’ you dare leave these chambers.”
    “But I—” she began.
    “That’s an order. Mick?” He was looking over her head again.
    “Your Grace?”
    “Get cleaned off. Burn those. Get that off her, too. Call the guard.”
    He was leaving. Elise watched as the door opened in seemingly slow motion, before slamming shut with a precise cannon-like boom of sound that should have reverberated everywhere, but rather felt like it throbbed in waves to penetrate to where she was still, miraculously, standing.
    “You heard him. Gown.”
    Elise stumbled out of the strange enclosure of Mick’s embrace. Her legs were just as insubstantial and weak as she’d suspected. She went to her knees, and the jolt scraped skin that had never felt the like. Mick didn’t move.
    “You heard him. Gown,” he said again, with the exact same inflection in his tone.
    “I don’t obey him,” she replied to the Aubusson carpet at her nose. That was odd. She had fallen inches away from padded luxury.
    “You will. You heard him.”
    “Stop saying that!”
    “Then give me your gown.”
    She shook her head, denying every blush that heated everywhere on her.
    “I’m to take it from you. You heard him.”
    “You wouldn’t dare.” She whispered the words to the floor.
    “Don’t make me prove it, lass. Gown.”
    “Is ... there a privy closet?” she asked.
    “Yonder. Lift your head. Get me the gown. You heard him.”
    If he said that one more time, she was going to scream all her vexation and anger, rage and shock at him. Elise bit her tongue to still it. Then she stumbled to her feet again. She shouldn’t need the hint. Colin’s bedchamber had the same arrangement as her own.
    She forced her legs to get her around the wooden slatted divider that screened the water closet.
    “I’ve na’ got all eve. We may be caught before I can get them burned. Hurry, lass. Hurry.”
    Elise’s hands belonged to someone else, as did the entire episode. She couldn’t believe the last half hour of her life. She’d killed Roald, and then what had she done? She’d managed to involve the Duke of MacGowan. And then what was happening? He was hiding the crime.
    Elise’s hands shook before her eyes as she squelched the screams that came from being a party to what Colin MacGowan was doing. But what else could she do? Wait for the discovery of the body? And then her blood-stained body in the duke’s chamber? What could everyone say had happened, but a lover’s spat? Or even worse, a fight over her?
    “Doona’ make me come in there,” Mick said.
    Elise gripped her hands into fists, cracking the dried blood, and tried to control her own body. It wasn’t possible.