No Other Woman (No Other Series) Read Free

feelings so acute.
    Of desire so fierce that it had become like a flame, destroying his ability to think.
    A sound, he heard a sound, a whisper on the air behind him and then...
    Pain!
    Shocking pain, striking him so suddenly. Sharp, horrible, excruciating, at the back of his head. Sensation that had been unbearably sweet was now unbearably vicious. Staggering.
    Paralyzing.
    He thought he saw her. Her eyes, sky blue above his. Her face. Angelic in its beauty.
    Then the bitter realization hit him. The MacGinnises never would have confronted him face-to-face. They knew his temper, his sense of honor—and his strength.
    Just as they had known his weakness. Shawna.
    Oh, God, never again.
    No, never, for seduction had not been their true intent, he saw with startling clarity. Their true intent had been murder.
    Suddenly he realized that the burning pain in his skull had been caused by something other than the blow to his head.
    He was surrounded by heat.
    And fire.
    Oh, God, yes. Fire! Flames, shooting all around him. And he couldn't move, couldn't twist or turn, he could only feel the bursting agony within his head. He could see nothing except for the shooting red tongues of flame that rose against the blackness.
    No, more.
    He could see what a fool he had been. And that he had been betrayed. Oh, God, yes, with what must be his dying breath, he could see so clearly what a fool he had been and that she...
    Aye, she, had damned him. To all the fires of hell.
    Horses neighed and shrieked; from somewhere in the darkness of a never-ending pit, he heard her, heard her screams, rising, sweeping, tearing from her throat...
    Then, despite the flames and the heat, darkness began to encompass him. The void of death would come to claim him before the searing fires of hell and damnation reached out to fire his soul again... Blackness settled upon him.
    And all around him the flames continued to rise, until the crackle of the blaze rose to a roar. And the fire consumed the night.

 
     
     
    Chapter 1

     
    Castle Rock
    The Highlands
    Fall 1875
     
    Night had fallen. Mist was rising over the moors, and a strange golden moon sat high in the night sky. Shawna could see the moon through one of the ancient arrow slits in the tower office wall as it played a spectacular game of hide-and-seek with the clouds. It was a fey moon, glorious, mysterious, the type that gave the Highlands a reputation for strange powers, a hint of magic, a haunting beauty.
    She should have been asleep, but Mark Menzies had sent her a message, begging a moment of her time when his work was done. She sat behind the giant oak desk in the office, listening intently to his words. He was the foreman of the coal miners, and a good, fine man.
    "The men will not go into the left tunnel, milady; they are convinced that there is evil within."
    Shawna nodded. She well understood his words. They were all Christians in this parish in the Highlands, but they were a people quick to believe in the power of myth and spirits, and she wouldn't force any man to work against his fear. The mining business was dangerous enough without adding a man's spiritual torment to the brew. "Perhaps," she suggested, "the men will not be so uncomfortable if we have the Reverend Massey bless the opening of the new shaft...?"
    "Perhaps," Mark said without conviction. "They claim they hear hangings and the like. They think that something dangerous may reside within the earth, something we don't know so well as men, don't understand, and should not taunt." He was a big man, broad-shouldered, craggy-faced, with gray-dusted long hair and lines grooved into a face made handsome by integrity and pride. Shawna had liked him all her life; she had only come to know him well in the last five years. What the people in this part of the Highlands referred to as The Fire had taken place five years ago. Laird Douglas's elder son David had died in it and the laird had begun to spend more time in America, placing his castle