by April Hill
Now, McGregor watched with a sense of satisfaction as Kathy threw her arms around her husband and buried her face against his chest. He could not have imagined a better husband for Kathy, or a more spirited and intelligent wife for Stephen. Even now, with an argument about to erupt between them, he knew that Kathy was glad for the warmth and strength Stephen provided in her life, and for his gentleness now as he drew her close and kissed her.
The moment was short, however, and when the kiss was finished, Stephen pushed her firmly back, holding both her arms, and shook his head sternly.
"We've ridden day and night, Kathy, and every mile of the way, I have envisioned monstrous things happening to you. What in the devil's name made you come here, alone and unguarded?"
Kathy straightened her shoulders, and faced him defiantly.
"You know as well as I the answer to that! I came because neither you nor Duncan would consent to bring me here, as I have begged for at least a year," she exclaimed. "And as you can plainly see, nothing monstrous has happened to me— nothing at all, really." She sighed. "Other than what is no doubt going to happen to me now, unless I can be forgiven my impetuousness." She tried lowering her eyes demurely, with little success. Both men had ridden hard and long to get here, and neither one was prepared to be fooled by the sort of feigned repentance each of them had seen far too many times in the past.
"Aye, and have ye forgotten that before forgiveness must come retribution?" McGregor laughed as he took the reins of Stephen's horse and led it away. Kathy glared after McGregor in the same willful manner she had every time he had dragged her home again after another of her many childhood attempts to reach the very spot where she now stood. She had not given him even one peaceful week since he pulled her from the ruins of Drumannach, but made his life a misery by wheedling and pleading with him to take her back. And her stated intent had always been the same, even as a child—to slay the man who had murdered her parents.
Trying not to kindle the child's unhealthy lust for further revenge, McGregor had told her very little of what he knew of that terrible day—neither the true name of Alric Grymwald, nor the grim details of how her parents had died. Normally not a man given to lies, it had seemed prudent not to provide his would be "Avenging Angel" with too much information. Still, when she was only eight, she had begun to attempt the journey herself, sometimes on foot, sometimes after the theft of a mule or horse from a careless and unwatchful neighbor. And each time, Duncan McGregor had gritted his teeth, sworn mightily, and gone after her, bringing her back kicking and screaming, often before she had even cleared the glen. She had paid for each of these attempts with the hardest spanking and the sternest lecture he could bring himself to deliver to a child he loved so dearly, and whose young courage he admired so deeply.
Kathy Drummond had spent far more hours than most young women did with her backside on fire, or locked in her room to "think on" her crime, but the attempts had continued, and McGregor had always known that when she was old enough, his adopted daughter would succeed in returning to Drumannach. Now, she had done it, and they would have to get her safely away before her presence here was noticed.
At the moment, though, there was the matter of her repeated disobedience, which he knew that Stephen intended to address at once. McGregor led both horses into the meadow, chuckling to himself, while Stephen led the runaway lady around a crumbled outer wall, searching for the ideal spot to attend to his wife's stubbornness. Kathy followed submissively, but looked at them both in the rebellious manner that had grown very familiar over the years. When McGregor had led the horses away, out of earshot, he settled on a rock to keep a wary eye on the ridge of the distant hill while his young companions were otherwise occupied. There was probably no real danger, but it was McGregor's long habit to take no chances when this far south of the border.
Moments later, despite the politic distance he had tried to place between himself and the lady's chastisement, the sounds of a bare bottom being soundly spanked reached his ears, along with several choice oaths from the lips of the always defiant Kathy. McGregor smiled, and shook his head. Both the day and Kathy herself reminded him all too clearly of another spring day, and of another Drummond woman—Margaret, whom he had loved all those years ago. The memories that flooded back were both beautiful, and painful.
McGregor had grown up in Northumberland, among his mother's family, regarding himself as half English, because of a Norman Mother, and half Scot, because of the proud Highland name left to him by his dead father. In his father's time, David of Scotland had united the ravaged country, and extended its borders all the way to the River Tees. Northumbria had been ceded peacefully to Scotland, along with Cumberland and Westmoreland. The border had changed with the political wind, of course, and now, once more, much of his beloved homeland had slipped away to English control. Stupid kings and stupid treaties came and went, and through all of it, Scotland bled.
Duncan McGregor was getting old now, in body, if not in spirit. He had been in King Henry's service, and then in Richard's for most of his fifty-nine years, since he was little more than a boy, and on winter evenings, his body sometimes ached with the wounds he had survived in that service. Now, with Henry gone, and Richard dead these three years, Henry's conniving widow and would-be heirs still quarreled over his hemorrhaging kingdom like mongrel dogs tearing at the carcass of a rabbit. Several years ago, McGregor had finally lain down his arms in disgust. The time had come, he had decided, for others to take up the sword for whichever idiot Plantagenet came out on top when all the bloodshed was over and done with. It had been the weakling John who survived the family carnage, after his elder, equally worthless brother Geoffrey managed to get himself trampled to death in a joust.
Richard of England, called by many the Lionheart, had shown himself to be the bravest of warriors, but a poor excuse of a king, squandering most of what his abler father had left. In order to finance his entourage to the disastrous Third Crusade, Richard had managed to alienate his people and virtually empty the treasury, but still, McGregor had followed him. Richard could never have been a King the likes of Henry, but he was the rightful heir to the throne of England, and notwithstanding his own Scottish ancestry, Duncan McGregor's loyalty to England and its anointed king had been unwavering—until John. Weak and unpopular, John was given to spiteful and petty behaviors, and acts of cruelty that made him unworthy of the crown for which he was destined, should Richard fail to return. Falsely declaring himself "regent," John had permitted warring bands of corrupt barons to run rampant over the country. Finally, in disgust, McGregor abandoned ownership of his mother's manor house near Whitfield Moor to a near cousin, and returned, finally and forever, to his family's ancestral holdings across the border in Scotland.
The large, comfortable house rather grandiosely called Castle Gailleann had been built by McGregor's grandfather, and it was there that young Duncan had spent much of his own childhood. When he left England that spring in 1190, and returned to Gailleann, he had taken with him an English woman named Johanna Lachlan, and her only child, Stephen. Duncan McGregor would remain loyal to the Lionheart until the monarch's death, but he would never again make his home in England.
His unexpected late-life responsibility for Kathy had proven as difficult in its own way as war had been, and in his frequent absence, much of that responsibility had been shouldered by Johanna. Left to fend for herself and her child by the same cruel wars that had torn England apart and kept Duncan McGregor away from home for months at a time, Johanna Lachlan had willingly taken the orphaned girl into her own household when McGregor was away, raising Kathy as a daughter and younger sister to her only child, Stephen, six years Kathy's senior.
It had been hard for Johanna, but she had never complained, and for that, among other things, Duncan McGregor loved her more deeply than he had any woman he had known since the death of Margaret Drummond. Johanna was the second woman he had loved, and the first with whom he had found peace. They hadn't married beca
use Charles Lachlan, Johanna's husband, having left England for the Crusades, was thought to be alive somewhere in Palestine, a captive of the Moors. Until there was news of his death or safe return, Johanna would not be free to remarry. For many years, she and Duncan McGregor loved one another, but didn't touch as lovers. A proud and honest man, bound by a code of honor he could not easily disregard, Duncan might never have broken that code, had Johanna herself not come to his bed after several long years.
"Charles is dead, Duncan. I know this, as well as I know anything at all. I was a good and true wife to my husband, as God is my witness, and I honor his memory, but it is time to go on with life, while there is still time for us. We have wasted so many years, my love, and it is uncertain how many more we will have to love one another. I'll not waste another, nor shall you, because of some sense of duty and honor that would in no way honor Charles, and cheat two wounded people of what happiness they can find, together. My son needs a father, and I a husband, if not in the eyes of the church, then in my own heart."
That night, they became lovers, and would remain so until Johanna's death came between them, just after Stephen and Kathy married. Her death was sad, but not unexpected, and Duncan asked that she be laid to rest on a hill near Gailleann, beneath a Rowan tree. As was his custom, Duncan mourned her loss quietly, and continued to care for Stephen as he would a son of his own, as well as a new son-in-law.
When Stephen was still a boy of twelve, he and Kathy had played together, with Stephen always taking the role of her knight protector— over Kathy's bitter protests. By fifteen, though, he had lost interest in her, except as an annoying "little sister" who persisted in tagging along after him. At eighteen, he had joined Duncan in Richard's service, and while he was away, there was little time to think about the girl he still regarded as a sister.
But when he returned, twenty-four years old and a full knight, Kathy was seventeen. In his absence, the annoying little sister he remembered had changed. She had acquired a slender, lissome grace when she moved, and full, rounded breasts that strained at her bodice when she laughed. Having expected the gawky child he had left behind, Stephen was taken aback by her appearance. There was a soft swell to her hips, and her radiant copper hair had grown long enough to fall to her waist in thick waves. Ever the tomboy, Katherine seemed unimpressed by the dramatic changes in her body, but those changes drew Stephen's immediate attention.
He also found, to his surprise, that while she still acted the tomboy at times, Katherine had been awaiting his return not as an affectionate little sister, but as a healthy, lusty young woman who believed that she had been waiting entirely too long— a woman eager to begin life, and love, anew.
Too eager, as it happened. Stephen had been back in the village no more than two weeks when Joanna appeared at Duncan's door before dawn with the news that Stephen had not come home at all the previous night. A quick inspection of Kathy's room revealed her absence as well, and within the hour, a flushed and disheveled Kathy was apprehended trying to slip back through her bedroom window. Duncan McGregor was waiting, with a dark scowl across his worried brow and a handful of birch switches in hand. Ordered to bunch her skirts around her waist, Kathy was then dumped unceremoniously over the end of her own unslept-in bed, to yelp in genuine anguish as her thighs and calves suffered a robust thrashing. Yet, even as she clenched her teeth and groaned, and when the sting of the switching was at its worst, McGregor knew what Kathy knew—that she would slip out again, whatever the price.
At twenty-four, Stephen Lachlan was too old to take a strap to, although McGregor would have done exactly that if he had been able to get his hands on the despoiler at that moment his wrath was at its peak. The despoiled young lady, meanwhile, had accepted her chastisement with rare good humor, and while she did rub her freshly striped thighs with annoyance, she hadn't appeared to be at all upset about the recent loss of her maidenhead. An irate McGregor strode from the house in search of the despoiler himself.
Joanna met him at the cottage door, trying not to smile at the look of him.
"Good morrow, again, Duncan McGregor. Will you have a cup of tea, then, after your morning's exertions?"
"I will not!" McGregor roared. "Where is that scoundrel son of yer's? I'll have a word with him, or knock his damned head off! I've not yet made my mind up, which."
Johanna sighed. "He's not here. He's already gone to Kathy. It appears we're to have a wedding."
"The devil we are!" Duncan bellowed. "Kathy's not yet eighteen, for God's sake!"
"I was but fourteen, when I married," Johanna observed.
"That was a different time," he growled, "and ye well know it. Kathy is to go to the Benedictines, to study."
"She doesn't want to go to school, Duncan. She wants to marry Stephen, and stay here, in the village."
"She'll want what I tell her she wants, or have a strapping she'll not soon forget!" he roared.
"And if she's already with child?" Joanna asked, quite reasonably.
McGregor blanched. "Then she'll await its arrival with her rump on fire for nine months," he said grimly. "And go to school with a bairn at her breast if she must— but she will go to school!" I'll not see Kathy waste herself."
But very soon, with Kathy coyly refusing to say whether or not she was carrying a child, Duncan was forced to reluctantly agree to a marriage. He could no longer risk the wait to find the truth of the matter. And then, oddly, with the ceremony finally arranged, he found himself breathing a vast sigh of relief. He would have this girl—a girl he loved like a daughter, but who had given him even more gray hairs than his many epic battles— off his hands.
And as he had expected, there was no child. He had been outfoxed, yet again.
The marriage had been a colorful one from its outset. "Colorful" was the best word Duncan could think of to describe the first six months, when Kathy had stormed back at least once a week to declare that Stephen Lachlan was a damned fool, or a bleeding tyrant, or a witless, dunderheaded ass. As McGregor had predicted, Kathy was not finding her new role as a wife, with its traditional duties, to her liking.
One morning, after yet another quarrel with Stephen, she arrived at Duncan's door, carrying two bags of clothing, along with her cherished longbow and quiver. "I have decided to come back, and live here at Gailleann, with you," she announced, explaining that Stephen had suggested quite firmly that she might wish to spend a few minutes each day in the kitchen, improving her cooking skills, and that he would like—at least occasionally—to find his supper on the table when he arrived home.
"Ye will not, by Heaven!!" McGregor thundered. "Ye've a husband now, girl, and a home o' yer own, and I'll not have thee back here, bag and baggage, after I've been all these long years getting rid of ye'. 'Am mach ort, ye crabbity caile!' Out ye go, ye ill-tempered wench! Go hame and put supper on, or take the consequences— but leave an old, weary man in peace!"
When Stephen appeared, searching for her, though, Katherine had already unpacked her things and placed them back on the shelves of her former room. He found her at the rear of the house, in the garden, practicing her skills with a longbow.
"I have decided that I do not wish to be married, Master Lachlan," she said haughtily, as Stephen sat on the wall and watched her marksmanship with poorly disguised pride. "You had best find yourself another woman to serve as your drudge and a scullery maid. A woman willing to bow and scrape to your whims, for I am not that woman."
"It is you that I love, Kathy," Stephen said patiently. "And you know very well that you love me."
"Be that as it may— and I am not admitting that what you say is true, only that I fell victim to my woman's heart for a brief moment three months ago. Since we became man and wife, you appear to have once again become the same overbearing, annoying person I knew as a brother, who would have me obey your every command, to sit on your lap and follow along at your heels like an obedient and well-trained spaniel. But as you can plainly see, I am not cut out to be a spaniel. I am
a woman, fully grown, with a mind and purpose of my own."
Tiring of the discussion that appeared to be going on endlessly in his garden and disturbing his nap, Duncan McGregor summoned Stephen inside for a bit of advice.
"That is an intelligent but uncommonly stubborn and irritating woman out there, Stephen Lachlan, what we call in Gaelic a 'besom,' and she'll keep bein' stubborn and irritating, and give ye'nothing but trouble until ye take her firmly in hand. She was stubborn at six, when I found her, and she's not changed a whit since. 'T was ye that insisted on wedding her, and taking her into ye'r bed, so it's ye'r turn to be irritated, and mine to finally have some much-needed peace.
"Now," he continued, "I would very much appreciate it if ye'd tak' yer' irritating wife and go hame, but before ye go, I'll give thee this advice— to use, or not, as ye see fit. Katherine Drummond Lachlan has a very hard head, and ye'll soon learn that she responds to no reasonable argument whatever, when it does not suit her. If ye wish to grow peacefully old with the wench, ye'd had best learn when to take a strap to her bottom when it's called for. And I promise ye it will be called for—more often than ye'll believe."
"For God's sake, Duncan," Stephen protested. "You cannot truly be suggesting that I beat the woman I love!"
"Beat! " McGregor shouted. "Not beat, ye dunderhead, but wallop! My God! I begin to think Katie is right about ye.' Skel', in Gaelic if ye will, or strac. Wallop, spank, paddle, whatever ye wish to call it, the advice'll be the same. Get a stout strap or hairbrush, or a switch— a slatag—and keep it close at hand. And when she behaves thus, take her across ye'r knee and wallop the devil out of her disrespectful backside, until it's sae sair an' teth' she canna' 'dean suidhe! So sore and hot she's unable to sit down!"
Stephen laughed. "Come, Duncan, my friend, you and I both know that Kathy would swim the channel, walk all the way to Rome and wrestle the Pope himself to the ground for a divorce or annulment, were I to do such a thing."