“What?”
Silently, Aidan took her hand, bringing it to his lips for a brief moment. When he let it go, she hesitated before running her fingertips along his jaw.
“Prickly,” she murmured, and then did it again. The sensation of her fingers on his skin was enough to make him want to pull her to the ground again, to take her and take her until there was no question who she belonged with, to mark her in some way.
The impulse didn't go away, but it subsided until he thought he could speak to her without dragging her down against him again.
“I am pleased you changed your mind.”
He wasn't sure what to expect, but it wasn't a blank-eyed gaze, and the withdrawal of her hand.
“What are you talking about?”
He tilted his head.
“About... being with me. Coming back to Doone Castle with me.”
She stared at him as if he had grown two heads.
“Aidan. I am not doing that.”
“What in all the blazes are you talking about?
“Exactly what I said! Aidan, I never said anything about marrying you! You've done nothing wrong!”
She spun away from him, going to struggle into her dress as he stared after her.
By the time he was dressed, she was walking down the path, and she would have gone all the way back to John and his family if he hadn't grabbed her by the arm and stopped her.
“Let go of me.” Her voice was as cold as the north wind, and she refused to look at him.
“What do you think you're going to do?” Aidan demanded. “You cannot just pretend that what we did didn't happen!”
“That is precisely what I am going to do! Unless Scotland has become a sight more terrible since last I lived there, you have no right at all to tell me who I must marry. You are neither my father nor my laird, so take your hand off of me.”
“Margaret, you cannot simply do as you please...”
She spun on him, so hard that he let her go. Her hair, still unbraided, streamed around her like a fiery cloak, and there were bright red patches high on her cheeks, her eyes sparking like a cat's.
“Like you do? Like Lord Harry Stratham does? Be glad that I cannot, because I swear, I would run you both through and sail across the sea!”
Aidan's face darkened, and he glared at her.
“What the hell does Harry Stratham have to do with this? Were you running from a lover's quarrel? Is that why you had to leave Maras Castle!”
Margaret bared her teeth at him.
“Stop it! You have absolutely no right to ask me questions of any sort.”
“I have every right,” Aidan snapped. “You are hiding things from me, aren't you?”
If he had been honest, he would have admitted that that was a guess, but the stricken look in Margaret's eyes made him still.
“Meggie...”
“Stop calling me that.”
There was something so calm, so very dead in her voice, that he let her go. She felt like someone different all of a sudden, as if she had simply gone from living to dead. The change was enough that it shocked him, and she went to her clothes, dressing with jerky motions that were a far cry from the grace she usually had.
“We are nothing to each other,” she said, and even as Aidan was shaking his head, she was lacing herself up, refusing to meet his eyes.
“We are nothing to each other. We have passed some time together, comforted each other. We have already hurt each other so much, Aidan. I don't want to hurt you anymore, and I don't think you want to hurt me anymore. Just... just stop.”
Something broken and bleeding in her voice made Aidan draw back. She sounded wounded, and the idea that he might have hurt her tore at him. It was that, more than anything else, that told him that this had to be over. They were only going around in circles, and in the end, it would destroy them, as surely as the sun rose in the morning.
“Is this what you truly want?”
He half-expected her to explode at him, to say of course it was, but there was a new resolve in her face even as she turned to him.
“It is the way it has to be, Aidan. And I have never been sorrier for anything in my life. But you know as well as I do that some things must be done no matter how we feel about them. Leave me alone, please. In this matter, we have no choice at all.”
Finally, Aidan nodded. Something cracked inside him that felt as if it would never heal.
When he walked down toward the camp, she followed, and the whole way, he could hear her breath, her step, and never felt her farther away.
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chapter 30
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Margaret felt as if she had sunk into a strange fog, one that affected not her vision but everything else. Once, when she was a young girl, a traveling doctor had had a horror in a large glass jug, suspended in cloudy liquid. She had shivered at the thing inside, with too many limbs and a gaping hole in its chest. Her mother had told her it was only a calf, twinned and born too soon, but she had never gotten over the sadness and the loneliness of that monster, shelved away.
She felt a little like that now, traveling with John, Catherine, and Catherine's boys. Aidan traveled ahead, looping back to escort them for a short while before ranging ahead for hazards. When he was with them, he barely looked at her at all, and though she should have been relieved, she only felt an echoing emptiness when he disappeared into the woods by the path to range forward.
"Are you and your man quarreling?" asked Catherine one day. "He's such a large man, I wouldn't like to quarrel with him."
"No," Margaret said in surprise, and then she checked herself. "We are not quarreling, and he is not my man."
Catherine, who looked stronger the more days there were between herself and the end of her world, snorted.
"When you were carrying on at the ridge after you rescued us? If he's not your man, I should say that you have to do something about it before he ruins you."
Margaret stirred uneasily, but Catherine took her hand. The soldier's wife was younger than she was, but Margaret felt oddly immature next to her, unaware of the mysteries of pregnancy and marriage and love when Catherine seemed to know them intimately.
"I'm sorry. I misspoke. I should know that there's no such thing as a ruined woman, only men who try to ruin them. If you like, sleep next to me, and we can both send him packing if he tries anything."
"No! That is, no, everything we have done together, it has been... I have wanted it. But it is difficult. He's the Laird of Clan MacTaggart. We can have nothing more to do with one another."
Catherine tilted her head in confusion.
"And so, who are you, with your clothes once so fine, that you cannot hope to be with him?"
Margaret pinched a fold of her own dress wryly. It had once been quite lovely, and it was still sound, speaking to the good wool and firm linen thread that had been used to make it. It was splattered and stained with mud now, lank and tattered, but Catherine was right. To wear a dress like that, Margaret would have had to have been a lady or a thief.
"I'm a bastard," she said finally. "And half-English besides. What would he have to do with me? I have been told once that I was not suited to marry a laird. I do not need to be told again."
The humiliation from that meeting had been on her mind more often as they traveled north, and she had come to realize that it was something that had lived inside her for years. Not all the love her own father had given her could salve it, nor all the beautiful dresses in the Lowlands.
She had thought then that Catherine might understand, but the other woman only shook her head.
"Did he tell you that?"
"No." If he had, Margaret wouldn't have called him to the South if they had been threatening to burn her at the stake. There were some things that her pride could not bear. If it had broken like that, she would have become someone else entirely, someone she could not even recognize.
"This someone
who told you such a thing. Is he or she still alive? Still a force in this world?"
"No." If the old Laird MacTaggart were still alive, he would still rule over the clan, that much Margaret was sure about.
"Then what does it matter? Something like that, I would get from the man himself, and nothing else."
Margaret opened her mouth to object, but then after a few moments, she closed it again.
"It's too difficult to explain," she muttered. How in the world could she tell this woman that Aidan was only offering to marry her from pity? He had taken her maidenhead, and his honor would not allow him to do otherwise.
Catherine offered her a wry smile.
"People often say it is too difficult to explain when they are hurt or embarrassed, and I have no desire to hurt or embarrass you. I would not see you injured for all the world after what you did to help me and mine, but oh, Margaret, I do not want you to look as lost as you do."
Catherine grabbed her up into a tight hug, and no matter what dark thoughts the woman had brought up in her mind, Margaret was grateful. Too often these days, her thoughts were bound up in darkness and grief, and the only thing that she could focus on was going home, to the cottage she had shared with her mother, to a time when things hadn't been so terrifying and so hurtful.
"I am fine. I promise," she said. "And Aidan is a good man. He would not hurt me for all the world. It is only that we are so very different, and this journey is all there can be for us. Whether I live in Scotland or England, no matter that my blood is as much Scottish as it is English, there can be nothing between us. It is better this way."
Catherine gave her a look, but out of respect, she did not say anything else.
Margaret told herself that she believed her own words, that she had to believe them, but when Aidan rejoined them again, watching her with his green eyes, she knew that what her mind understood and what her heart would accept were two very different things.
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chapter 31
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Aidan couldn't keep his eyes away from Margaret whenever he was in camp, so the easiest thing was to simply not be in camp. Because there were the two boys and because John was an old man who had already been pushed past the point of endurance once in the last few days, they couldn't be pushed so very fast.
Sometimes on Bram's back, and sometimes on foot, Aidan ranged ahead and through the countryside to the east and west, searching out problems as an army scout would have done. It was important work, but he knew that it was not just necessity that prompted him to do it.
Every time he looked at Margaret, it seemed as if his body were full of something he didn't dare examine so closely. It was difficult not to reach for her, to draw her close, and more often than not, it had nothing to do with passion.
The passion, at least, he understood. She was a beautiful woman, and the longer they traveled together, the more it felt as if he was truly seeing her. The pampered English lady fell away to reveal the vital woman she was underneath, steady-eyed and with the strength of the mountains in her soul. If he had seen her at a fair in the summer, he would have thought her beautiful, perhaps even sought her for some sport in the night, but she was Margaret, his Meggie, and it went far beyond that.
It felt, he decided one rainy morning, as if he had somehow allowed his heart to go wandering around outside of his own body without him. Looking at Margaret filled him with a deep longing and also a kind of fear he was entirely unused to. He was a soldier, and he ruled over his people. Fear was to be expected, but he was expected to overcome it. He was afraid of many things, of plague, of war, of commands he would have to refuse to follow because of the human cost of them.
He was not ready for the stab of fear that he sometimes felt when Margaret walked by him avoiding his gaze or worse, meeting it and looking right through him.
He knew that he could not live like that, and he further knew that she was right. There was no law in the North that could command her to stay with him, and if he forced her, even his own clan would take against him.
Aidan knew that all he could do was to keep his distance and concentrate on his return home to Doone Castle and his own life there. It was past time when he saw to his own people. It was time for him to be their laird, to look after their needs.
It might even, he thought reluctantly, be time to do as the elders of the clan had been saying for some time and to find a wife.
The thought stung like seawater in an open cut, but the truth often did.
One night, however, he had come to the fire to warm himself and found Margaret rubbing her ankle, a distressed look on her face.
"What's the matter?" he asked, settling next to her.
She shot him a slightly apprehensive look.
"I was chasing Callum this morning, pulling him away from what I think must have been a hornet's nest, and I tripped.”
"Callum?"
"Catherine's younger boy. Don't be so cross with him, he didn't know any better, and when he realized I had fallen, he helped me back to the trail."
Aidan scowled.
"I am not angry with him. I am angry with you. Why didn't you say something earlier? You could have been up on Bram."
"I can't ride while everyone else walks! If anyone should be riding, it's John or..."
Aidan sighed, brushing her off.
"All right. I will not scold you for it."
"That's a surprise. You usually love scolding me," she said, and the slight smile in her voice tugged at him, made him want to smile, too.
"Ah, well, scolding isn't so bad if it actually gets the job done. I couldn't change your mind, could I?"
"Not at all, I'm afraid."
"Well, there it is, then. Here, let me see your foot."
Reluctantly, she sat back against the tall stones that sheltered their fire and lifted her foot so he could set it against his thigh. She gritted her teeth while he gently felt her ankle, but to his relief, while it was swollen, it didn't seem broken.
"Here. This will help."
He found a strip of cloth from his bag, winding it tightly around the swollen part of her limb. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her relax a little, her eyes fluttering closed before they opened again.
"Thank you. That will help, I think."
"Good."
She paused for a moment.
"Can I have my foot back?"
"If you can take it back."
She glared at him, but then, when he ran a gentle finger along the sole of her foot, she giggled, stifling her laugh with a guilty look at the family that slept close by.
"Aidan!"
"All right, I'm sorry."
He let go, but for a moment, she didn't move away.
Aidan became suddenly aware of her leg, exposed to the knee and propped up on him, Margaret leaned back on her elbows, her hair loose around her face. She watched him with something almost slumberous in her eyes, and in that moment, the most natural thing in the world would have been to kiss her, to pull her in his lap and remind her of how good they could make each other feel.
Something primal in Aidan told him that she would have let him, and it was almost too much to bear. He would have taken her again, if the past hadn't reared up to remind him of what it was, how it had ended.
I'm certainly not a stupid man, he thought angrily. Surely, I can learn what she wants and does not want.
"Margaret," he said, his tone flat, and with a blush on her face that told him she was thinking along the exact same lines as he was, she drew back.
"Thank you, Aidan," she said, her voice as proper as any village priest could wish.
"You're always welcome, Margaret," he replied, and he went to find his own bed.
At various times through this journey, he had wished it over with, and he had wished that it would last forever.
The time for that was over, however. The next day, they crossed into MacTaggart lands, and by that evening
, Doone Castle was in sight.
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chapter 32
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Doone Castle was unexpectedly majestic. Margaret had only seen it in passing two or three times on her way through the Highlands before, and somehow, she hadn't remembered how it had sprawled elegantly in the shadow of Crinnan's Mountain, cradled in the curve of the nearby river.
"Is that the home of Laird MacTaggart?" Catherine asked, holding her two sons close to her.
Margaret nodded.
"It's very beautiful. Ancient. They don't build them like that much anymore."
"No, newer fortifications are taller and don't require walls that are as thick as Margaret is tall," Aidan said wryly, but she could hear both pride and love in his voice. The castle was as much a part of him as his eyes and his hands were, as close to his soul as his sword was always close to his side.
Aidan found some crofters who were more than willing to take in Catherine, her father-in-law, and the children. There was space to spare, and it sounded as if the harvest had been a good one.
Catherine curtsied to Aidan, which brought about some confused looks and giggles, but she drew Margaret in for a tight hug.
"You were kind to me, and I know that you were the real reason that we were not all butchered. Be kind to yourself, and when it comes to the laird..."
"Catherine, please..."
"When it comes to your laird," she continued relentlessly, "only be sure that you know what it is you truly want. He may be as proud and stubborn as a wolf king in his lair, but I think, no, I truly do believe, that he will follow you."
"Be well, Catherine," Margaret said with a smile she wasn't sure she could really feel. "Take care of yourself, and if you ever need me, please come find me."
The Highlander’s Lost Bride (The Highlands Warring Clan Mactaggarts Book 2) Page 15