The Highlander’s Lost Bride (The Highlands Warring Clan Mactaggarts Book 2)

by Anne Morrison

  She glared at him instead.

  “You know as well as I do that there are some things that a person ought to protect, Laird MacTaggart. And if I said I needed to protect myself from you, would you even disagree?”

  He thought about it, finally shaking his head wryly.

  “I might argue, but I would not disagree. All right. But, Margaret, you must realize that a married couple would seem very strange if they did not sleep in the same bed?”

  “Married... what?”

  He sighed, closing his eyes briefly.

  “You passed out, and believe me, in the moonlight, lass, you looked as if you were on death's very door. I pulled you close and once I was sure that you were still breathing, once I knew that you had not actually died, I took Bram toward the road. We might have been safer on the desolate forest trails, but I was surely not going to find any help there, anyone who could offer us real aid.”

  “We might have both been caught! They might have killed you!”

  “Yes, and you might have died from another night in the cold. I didn't see myself as having much of a choice.”

  “Of course, you did!” Margaret burst out. “I would have been fine! I was just overtired and still heart-sore from my father, and everything that has been happening in the past few weeks!”

  “Well, I know that now. And that was what the mistress of the inn guessed as well. She looked at me as if I were an idiot for carrying on the way I did, and she said to let you sleep.”

  “The mistress... what did you tell them about us?” asked Margaret with a surge of worry. “Did you tell her who I was?”

  Aidan shot her an impatient look.

  “Lass, do I look like a fool? I told her we were pilgrims, on our way to Jerusalem.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes. And if anyone asks, you have had visions of Saint Anne since you were a young girl, and finally, the urge to go see the holy places grew to be too much for you. You dragged me away from a comfortable life in the crofts, sold our belongings, and we headed out for Jerusalem a month ago.”

  Margaret stared at him.

  “You came up with all of that?”

  “My brother Reade could obviously do much better, but he is not here right now.”

  “I'm not criticizing. I'm just impressed. You never liked lying all that much.”

  The look he gave her was opaque, and for some reason, it made her feel oddly exposed.

  “You seem to make it necessary. I don't have to do it in most of my life.”

  “Oh.”

  They were silent for a short while, and then she shook her head.

  “I'm being foolish, aren't I, staying in bed like a slug. We should be moving. I can get dressed in...”

  She started to get up, but Aidan simply rolled over and draped his arm over her like some species of large and indolent cat.

  “No.”

  “MacTaggart, what in the world are you talking about?” she asked in exasperation.

  “I'm saying that if we leave here today, we are going to get a few miles down the road and you're going to fall over again. And this time, I may not find an inn so eager to take in pilgrims.”

  “We're not… It doesn't matter. I'm fit enough to leave.”

  “No.”

  “Don't tell me what I am and am not capable of.”

  “All right. Fine. Try to get up.”

  She scowled at him.

  “This is ridiculous. This is simply ridiculous.”

  “Try anyway. Just to shut me up.”

  She shoved at him with an angry sigh, but she found to her frustration that she was barely able to budge him. After a few moments, Margaret flopped back on the bed with an angry sigh.

  “You're pushing me back.”

  “Not really. Not much. You're not going anywhere.”

  From the light sweat on her body, and the way her heart was pounding slightly, she realized he was right, even if she didn't want to tell him so. She opened her mouth to grudgingly concede, but then she realized something she should have realized when she first woke up.

  “Why am I naked?”

  Aidan sighed.

  “Because I didn't want to put you in the clean bed as muddy as you were from the road, and the mistress said she would wash them for me.”

  “You could have at least put a shift on me if you were stripping me,” she said, a high blush coming up on her cheeks. She couldn't pull her thoughts away from Aidan undressing her, pulling her clothes off to reveal her flesh before putting her to bed. She should have been outraged, infuriated, but instead, another kind of heat rose up on her cheeks, making her heart beat a little faster.

  Aidan seemed completely unaware of her conflicted emotions, shrugging as if she were only complaining about not being allowed to leave again.

  “I can get you a shift from your things. Will you lie down and try to sleep again if I do?”

  She scowled at him.

  “Yes,” she said ungraciously, and he rewarded her with an easy smile that took her breath away.

  He went to get her shift, and he hesitated before handing it to her.

  “Do you need help putting it on?”

  “No!” If this went on for much longer, she was going to burst into humiliated flames, she just knew it. “Just give it to me and don't look. Please.”

  Aidan hesitated, and then nodded, handing her the large white garment. He didn't leave the room, but he did go to the window and look out of it as she changed. Blast him, but he was right. Even moving to get the shift over her head left her tired.

  “All right, I'm fine now.”

  “Good. All decent and proper again.”

  There may have been something mocking in Aidan's tone, but she found that she didn't care. It was too easy to simply lie back in the clean sheets, let her eyes drift shut, and drift away into dreams that were at least less disturbing than her life had been recently.

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  chapter 10

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  Aidan had to stifle a smile when Margaret finally descended into sleep, muttering all the while. How in the world had he forgotten how stubborn she could be, how very determined she was to get her own way no matter what it cost her?

  I should have told her that I was the one who was hurt. She would have given over in a heartbeat.

  The more cynical part of him wondered how he could still assume she was like that. The Meggie he knew would have responded to someone else's need far more readily than she would have responded to her own, but this woman he was traveling with, he didn't know her at all. At least, that was what he tried to tell himself.

  If she sleeps through the day, and then through the night as well, we should be ready to go north again in the morning. That would be the wisest course.

  He didn't think that the English lord would have found them so easily, especially not if he had been taken in by her trick at the stream.

  Aidan ran a heavy hand over his face. What in the world was he doing?

  The only person he had told about his mission to the South was Reade, his brother, and even Reade, as reckless as they came, had been hesitant.

  "For now. the peace holds. There is nothing to stop you... but are you truly going to do this? After all these years?"

  The doubt in Reade's voice should have given him a pause, but he shook it off then, and he shook it off now. He was cleverer than the English lord he had seen at Maras Castle, and he could fight any Englishman into the ground. He would be back in the North soon, and this business with Meggie would be over with.

  When the thought of being finished with Margaret gave him a feeling of strange dread in his belly, Aidan growled and shrugged it off. Margaret was sleeping easily, and after latching the door behind him, he went down to the common room at the inn. Breakfast was long past, but the girl who swept and cleaned brought him some bread, cheese, and a small pile of pickled vegetables. The food was plain, but he wasn't looking fo
r better.

  The inn was mostly empty except for some weary travelers, and Aidan expected to be largely left alone. He was large and silent, and that usually got him by, but today, however, it seemed as if that wasn't to be.

  A youth came in with a swirl of late autumn wind, more a boy than a man, and he surveyed the room as if he owned it.

  English arrogance, Aidan thought with private disgust, but then to his discomfort, the youth walked straight toward Aidan's table in the back, sitting down beside him as if they were great friends.

  "So good to see you," the young man said pleasantly. "Buy me some food, and we can talk awhile.”

  Aidan growled.

  "I'm not interested in sitting with you or paying for your food. Get out of here before I send you out the door for a vagrant."

  The young man laughed, and a bell started to ring in Aidan's head. He knew that laugh.

  "Why, Aidan, how unkind. And here I had always thought that one could always rely on the friendship and hospitality of the MacTaggarts."

  Aidan looked closer and took in the roundness of the young man's jaw, the curly hair held back in a neat tie, and the blue eyes that had always spelled a certain kind of mischief.

  "Ava Fitzpatrick, what in the blazes are you doing so far south?"

  The bastard girl of Clan Blair grinned at him.

  "Quiet with that name, now, or I'll shout to all the loyal English patriots present that you're the Laird of Clan MacTaggart and likely going to slit their throats as soon as they turn their heads."

  "That would make it easier to slit their throats rather than harder," Aidan said, and then he was grateful that there was no one close to hear them. "But yes, sit. You did a good turn for Reade earlier this year, and the least I can do is stand you some bad cheese and some bread."

  "Beer, too, please. I like to think I helped more than not."

  "Buy your own beer. Reade thinks that one of your men betrayed Elizabeth to Sussex."

  When Reade had gone south to spy on the enemy, no one had suspected that he would bring back a Lowland girl. As it turned out, the Lowland girl was Elizabeth Kendall, a noble-born Englishwoman who was being chased by the sinister Earl of Sussex. Elizabeth and Reade might have made a clean getaway if someone hadn't pointed their destination out to the earl. While Aidan and Reade were both fairly certain that Ava wouldn't have betrayed them to Sussex, the same could not be said for the band of raiders she led.

  She nodded at him, her face uncharacteristically sober.

  "Aye, that's fair. The raiding band's split for the winter, and the two I would suspected of that particular bit of treachery were hanged in Ayr a few weeks ago. I'll buy my own beer."

  Aidan felt a twinge at Ava's casual words. He had killed men in battle and seen them hanged for desertion and treason when Clan MacTaggart followed the Bruce south, but Ava Fitzpatrick was something else again.

  She was a wild thing from a clan of wild things. Clan Blair was a throwback to the old raiding days, when each clan head ruled as a king, and to the blazes with anyone who tried to stop them. When Robert had come to ask for their aid, they sent him away with a laugh. Clan Blair ruled their mountain, and they would fight English and Scottish alike if they were crossed.

  Ava was largely considered a menace in the North, dressing like a man and raiding cattle with her rough band. She had few friends and more outright enemies than not, but she had been fostered for a time at Doone Castle, spending two years running around like a hellion with Reade and Aidan. It wasn't long after their mother had died, and Aidan, much as he wanted to hide it, had a soft spot for the younger girl who had brought some joy to their lives in that difficult time.

  She ate and drank as if she had been starved, and then she wiped her mouth and grinned at him.

  "What kind of hornet's nest have you kicked now, my friend?"

  Aidan scowled reflexively.

  "None. What are you getting at?"

  "There's something going on, men searching through the villages, talk about the border. It's very quiet, and the English soldiers I've talked with don't like it at all. Something is happening."

  Aidan shrugged, though there was an uneasy tickle at the back of his head. The English lord, Norwich, was looking for Elizabeth, but if so, why wasn't he trumpeting it to the four winds? It was to their benefit, but Aidan wasn't sure he trusted it.

  "I'm just in the South to see about some trade with the Lowland clans. It has nothing to do with me."

  "And here I thought that if there was trouble around that a MacTaggart would surely be the cause."

  "What you thought, I wouldn't feed to a blind mule," Aidan said with a slight smile. "It has nothing to do with me, Ava."

  She nodded affably enough, and then she paused.

  "Something else I meant to tell you about. There's apparently someone in the North asking about Maisie."

  Maisie was Aidan's fosterling, a small and shy girl of seven. How she had come to be with Clan MacTaggart, and how he had come to care for her was not something he cared to share with a magpie like Ava Fitzpatrick, however.

  He only shrugged.

  "They can come ask if they like, but they may not get the answer they want."

  Despite the fact that Ava was such a strange and wild thing, it felt good to speak with someone from the North, someone who understood.

  He was in better spirits when he made it back up to the room he was sharing with Margaret, her fresh clothes in hand.

  After he had checked twice to make sure that the latch was drawn, he hesitated.

  It felt like the worst kind of slug to be abed while the sun was in the sky, but the traveling had wearied him, as had his worry for Margaret.

  Well, it isn't as if we're not traveling at night anyway. Stripping down to his shirt, he crawled into the bed with her. They were meant to be man and wife, after all, and she could hardly complain they were indecent, given how clothed they both were.

  The moment he settled into the bed, Margaret shifted, coming closer to him and throwing a possessive arm over his chest. She frowned in her sleep, a small line between her brows. Aidan couldn't resist touching that line gently, first with his fingers and then his lips. When he pulled back, he wondered if her face had relaxed a little, if she slept a little easier.

  Get well quickly, little one. I need to get you to safety and then be done with this.

  Even as he drifted off to sleep, however, Aidan wondered how in the world he was ever going to be done with Margaret Barton.

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  chapter 11

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  When Margaret woke up, it was dark again, but she could tell that something was different. Her body felt better, as if a small but nagging pain that had been dragging her down for ages was gone. She reluctantly admitted that Aidan had been right.

  She hadn't just been afraid and exhausted from their flight from Maras Castle. In some ways, it felt as if she had been tense and nervy ever since before her father died. She knew in her heart that the old man wanted to provide for her. She knew that he had loved her. However, the truth of the matter was that she was a bastard, brought from the North and likely more Scottish than anyone preferred. The truth was that no matter what he did, there would always be gaps that she could fall through.

  Then Harry had appeared, and things went from bad to worse. She wasn't sure she ever slept more than ten hours in three days, and that was even before he had made his offer known.

  She glanced down at Aidan, who was sleeping deeply next to her. She wasn't sure she had ever slept as well as she did when she slept next to him, not since she had come south at any case.

  Margaret was struck by the stillness of the moment. Ever since she had come across him in the chapel, things had been moving too fast—too many swords, too many dangers. There had been no time to simply sit together, indoors, warm and dry.

  In repose, Aidan looked younger than his thirty years. There was a dark scruff
on his face, which probably drove him mad. Like many men in the North, he preferred to be clean-shaven, unlike the English, who cultivated mustaches and beards in sometimes wild patterns.

  His hair was as dark as charcoal, and after a moment, she gave in to the temptation to touch it, to smooth her fingers along the sleek strands at his temple and over his forehead. The scar under his eye was fainter now, white instead of the livid red she remembered, and smaller, but she thought that it was likely he would wear it all his life.

  Handsome. However, there was something lacking in the word.

  It wasn't just a physical beauty that Aidan bore. The things that drew her to Aidan, most of them, could not be seen. It was in the strength that he had gained from hard work and defending his clan, it was the steely soul that lived inside him. Aidan would die before he gave an inch. Like the mountains he came from, there was something terribly unyielding about him, capable of withstanding whatever forces were leagued against him.

  Aidan was a man with a place in the world, and that place was defending those who looked to him for protection and leadership.

  She felt a pang of guilt at that, because she had always known that she was drawing him away from his duty and his place. He marched to war when his king called, and he defended his people as he saw fit. And she had pulled him away from all that.

  "I am not easy for you. I'm sorry."

  "Don't be."

  She wasn't sure how truly surprised she was to find him awake and watching her. He had dark lashes, long and thick, and as her mother would have said, wasted on a boy. His eyes, however, were the mostly lovely green she had ever seen.

  Would his children have them, too, or would the color be lost to a more common brown or blue?

  Was she still feverish to be thinking something like that?

  Aidan didn't move, still watching her closely.

  "You must know by now that you cannot make me do anything I do not wish to do, lass."

  "I know nothing of the sort," Margaret said with just a hint of bitterness. "You can be compelled by honor, duty, and guilt..."