His Wicked Highland Ways

by Laura Strickland

Stuart, fit and strong, drove his head into Finnan’s chest. Finnan fell back, and his skull hit the stones of the floor. For an instant, blackness swam behind his vision. The sounds behind him—unseen and terrifying—gave him the impetus he needed to tighten the chain around Stuart’s throat and press the point of the knife beneath the man’s ear.

  “Call off your wife,” he grated. “Call her off, or you die.”

  Stuart stared into Finnan’s eyes, and Finnan experienced a thrill of recognition. Many long years had hatred ruled his life, the need to avenge his father and regain ownership of this beloved place. It had formed and perhaps even warped the man he was. But now he knew Stuart for kin, and to his own surprise did not want to let his blood.

  “Deirdre!” Stuart hollered.

  But the ugly sounds of two women struggling failed to cease.

  ****

  Jeannie’s skin stung in half a score of places where Deirdre had slapped, clawed, or caught her with the edge of her blade. Facing Finnan’s sister felt like being snared by one of the sudden, violent highland storms from which there was no escape. Jeannie knew herself badly overmatched; she had not the nature nor the recklessness needed to prevail. Her small dirk seemed inadequate against the longer blade in Deirdre’s hand, and fear for Finnan drove her, rather than hatred such as her opponent held.

  Hatred and madness.

  For she did not doubt she faced a madwoman. And she knew, too, that the rational, civilized woman from Dumfries did not lie far beneath her own surface.

  She whirled and tried to stay out of Deirdre’s reach as the blade struck out again. Her skirts tangled about her legs, and she very nearly stumbled. She knew without doubt if she fell she would die.

  “Deirdre!” Stuart Avrie bellowed. Deirdre’s only response was a flicker of her eyes. She never looked away from Jeannie.

  How long could Jeannie last? She asked herself the question. How long before the others in the house—Trent Avrie, the guards and hirelings—heard the sounds of confrontation and came running?

  She turned again, foundering, as Deirdre lunged, stepped back, and barely caught herself. A terrible smile spread across Deirdre’s face, and the light in her eyes intensified.

  She thought she had won.

  “Deirdre!” This time Finnan called out. “Look at your husband. I ha’ finished it!”

  Deirdre spun, the stained blade held before her. Jeannie allowed herself to look at Finnan for the first time.

  Ankles still shackled to the floor, he crouched above the body of Stuart Avrie.

  Deirdre gave a cry; the dreadful, stained blade dropped from her hand. She fell to the floor and then crawled across the stones—much as Jeannie had earlier—to her husband. When she reached him, she covered his body with her own and went as still as he.

  She loves him after all, Jeannie thought in amazement. Despite how she had come to be his wife, despite the supposed hatred and desire for revenge that existed between them, they had bonded on some deep level.

  She is not so different from me.

  Jeannie raised her eyes to the face of the man she loved—her heart, her reason for drawing breath. Emotions shadowed and brightened his features as he looked at his sister, not the least of them tenderness.

  “Here, Deirdre.” He reached out torn and bloody hands to capture his sister and lift her head. “He is no’ dead. Do you hear me? No’ dead—you have him yet. Deirdre, lass, let this madness be done. I am sorry for all you ha’ suffered and all I did not do to save you. But in the midst of it you have found your heart.” He glanced at Jeannie. “As have I.”

  Deirdre said nothing. She turned her eyes back to her husband, marked his closed eyes, the blood on his face, the shallow rise and fall of his chest.

  “Lass,” Finnan said, “we are all of one blood, and there is enough room here for each of us. Forgive me?”

  Chapter Forty-One

  The gloaming came down softly, light hanging long in the western sky, with air soft and kind as a blessing. The stones of the garden wall, firm behind Jeannie’s back, still retained the warmth of the day, and not far off the burn, tumbling over the stones of the ford, sang a song wild and sweet.

  Not as sweet, though, as what Jeannie could feel emanating from the man beside her.

  In the east, away over the hills, the first star appeared in the sky. Jeannie made a fervent wish on it and, as if he heard, Finnan’s fingers tightened on hers.

  Almost, she did not want to speak and break the spell, so wide and deep. She did not care if she ever emerged from this place where she rested, one in which Finnan MacAllister loved her and nothing in their world could change.

  Yet things must be said. So many of them crowded Jeannie’s mind she did not know how to begin.

  Finnan spoke before she could. “This is gey peaceful. You know that first day when we met, I was lying in that pool trying to learn some wisdom from a trout.”

  “Eh?” Jeannie turned her head and looked at him. The hazy twilight blurred his features and nearly erased the new wounds he wore.

  Finnan MacAllister, as she knew, bore wounds in plenty. But her eyes could see nothing but perfection.

  He gave her the smile she loved, the one that turned her bones to water.

  “They will speak to you, you ken, if you lie very still and keep the proper frame of mind.”

  “Still, and naked?”

  The gathered light glinted in his eyes. “That too. The trout did speak to me. He urged me to choose peace.”

  “An uphill battle on the part of the trout.”

  “Aye, so. I did not imagine such an elusive thing would ever be available to me. I did not know then I needed only choose love over all else. You taught me that, and far more bonny than any trout.”

  He leaned toward her, cupped her cheek and very gently laid his lips on hers. Jeannie’s heart leaped and sped helplessly, as it would forever when she touched this man.

  “It needs only for you to forgive me,” he whispered then.

  “I already have.” Surely he had sensed that, back in the library at Dun Mhor.

  “Aye, but I find it hard to reconcile how any woman, be she angel or otherwise, could put aside what I ha’ done. Jeannie, I tore your heart out—I hurt you the worst way I could, and on purpose. I chose hate and vengeance even over what I felt for you.”

  “But you chose love in the end, over everything—even your hate for the Avries.” Now she kissed him so softly their lips barely made contact. “Just tell me one thing: is it over? Can we believe Deirdre’s heart is truly altered?”

  “Nay.”

  She started. “No?”

  “Yet I think we can believe Stuart’s is. He, as much as I, wishes an end to the killing and strife. I slew his father, even as his father slew mine. What good will it do to keep that battle alive?” Finnan’s fingers caressed Jeannie’s face softly. “I suspect he was driven to the worst of his actions by two women—his grandmother and his wife. Like me, he knows we are of one blood. Our families lived here in harmony for centuries. Why not again?”

  “But Deirdre?”

  “It shook her, thinking she had lost Stuart. It seems she is very like me after all, and I know how I felt, thinking I might lose you.”

  Again his lips brushed hers softly, the merest whisper of sensation.

  Third time is the charm, Jeannie thought fervently. Only let the spell hold and last all our lives. For this man carried as many charms about him as battle wounds.

  “Will you be able to forgive her? She took a knife to you in hatred.”

  “Nay, not in hatred: in hurt and fear. If I cannot forgive her, Jeannie, how can I forgive myself? I carried that same bloody banner so long. And it almost cost me everything.”

  Jeannie drew a breath that seemed to fill her whole body, gazed into his eyes, and said, “I would have suffered far more to win you, Finnan MacAllister. Just promise me one more thing: there will be no more lies or deception between us.”

  He raised her hand to
his lips. “I do so promise.”

  “Then finish telling me of Culloden.”

  “Ah.” He froze with her fingers caught in his. “Does it matter, Jeannie? Could you not find it in your heart to love a turncoat?”

  “Were you a turncoat?”

  “In truth I was—twice.” He lifted his head and stared away into the rising stars. “At the time of the battle, Geordie and I were in the pay of a chief called Colin Campbell of Ballinore. He had been busy gathering men, you see. We neither knew nor cared why—we seldom did. ’Twas all about the pay, for me. I needed the silver to win my way back here and claim my birthright.

  “’Twas not until we mustered and moved out Geordie and I tumbled to the truth—in this battle we stood on the opposite side from men of our own blood and kind. Their fight should have been our own. But Jeannie, you ha’ to understand we had gone where sent and killed as bidden for so long. One more battle, I told myself. No different from all the rest. Yet, once the fighting started, it was different.”

  He narrowed his eyes on the gathering darkness, as if watching over again what had been. “Geordie and I found ourselves stationed on the left flank, facing Kilmarnock’s Footguards—Scotsmen all, Scotsmen like us—many of them lads no older than Danny.

  “When the battle turned—nay, even before—the Prince, that symbol of right and wrong, of honor and bravery, was persuaded to withdraw and save himself while braver men fought on and died.”

  Bitterness stole into Finnan’s voice. “The connection between myself and Geordie, then, was wide and deep. We had been fighting together a long while, had each other’s backs so long we rarely needed to use words to speak. We knew at the same moment we had taken our fill of that battle. When Kilmarnock’s began to fall back, we turned and fought with them—defended as many of our fellow countrymen as we could.”

  He stopped speaking as if what he saw in his mind proved too terrible to relate.

  “We survived,” he concluded then, in wonder, “even as so many did not. We fought hard, and eventually fell back through a river of Scottish blood. But, Jeannie, I have come to see that Geordie did no’ survive, not truly. He was broken that day, struck to his heart. The wound festered and took many years to kill him.”

  Jeannie said nothing, though she knew it for truth. She had witnessed Geordie’s final death throes in Dumfries, whence he had fled in an effort to outdistance a past not even whisky could eradicate.

  “He used to talk about it, before we parted.” Finnan merely whispered the words. “They dogged him—the men we might have saved during that battle, had we fought shoulder to shoulder with them from the start.”

  “I never really knew him,” Jeannie realized aloud. “I did not meet the man you knew—your brother-at-arms—only the man suffering that mortal wound.”

  “I should have been there for him.” Finnan closed his eyes in pain. “I should have stood with him, had his back as I had done countless times before. Instead I was chasing my hate here, and he fought—and lost—that final battle alone.”

  It was time, Jeannie thought, for this man she loved so well to give up his fighting, to stop battling conflicts of the past.

  “We can change none of that now,” she told him. “We can only take what we are given and carry on. Look at me, Finnan.”

  He opened his eyes and gazed into hers. She felt the strength of him then, firm and steady despite every wound, felt the depth of his love. Joy lifted her heart.

  Softly, she said, “Aggie and Danny mean to marry. It seems a fine idea, does it not?”

  Light ignited in his eyes. “It needs no priest, Jeannie, to make me yours. I need only swear it on all these things I love—the stones of this place, the water and sky, the fire in my heart.”

  Jeannie clasped both his hands in hers. “I give myself to you, Finnan MacAllister, all the love I can hold, every day for the rest of my life. And I take you in kind.”

  One corner of his mouth quirked upwards. “Scars and all?”

  “Scars and all,” she assured him.

  His gaze turned suddenly serious. “Aye, and I give myself to you, Jeannie, with all I possess. And I promise for your sake to lay down my sword at last. As the trout bade me, I will become a new man—one who chooses peace.”

  Hands still in his, Jeannie leaned closer in the twilight, near enough to catch the flame of devotion in Finnan’s eyes. “Not too much changed, I hope,” she told him. “For I confess I still desire the man I saw arise from the pool that first afternoon. Will you keep at least some of your wicked highland ways?”

  “Only let me show you,” Finnan said. And he did.

  A word about the author…

  Born and raised in Western New York, Laura Strickland has pursued lifelong interests in lore, legend, magic, and music, all reflected in her writing. Though her imagination frequently takes her to far-off places, she is usually happiest at home not far from Lake Ontario with her husband and her “fur” child, a rescue dog.

  Author of Scottish romance Devil Black as well as The Guardians of Sherwood Trilogy consisting of Daughter of Sherwood, Champion of Sherwood and Lord of Sherwood, she also enjoys writing Victorian-era Steampunk. Her latest release, Dead Handsome, is a Steampunk romance set in 1880 Buffalo, with a sequel following. In addition, she has penned two Christmas novellas: The Tenth Suitor and Mrs. Claus and the Viking Ship, all published by The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

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