by Paula Quinn
“Let us celebrate this night with the inn’s finest wine,” Cam suggested, leaving the bed.
Tristan had to laugh at that. “The only way ye’ll be findin’ fine wine here is if ye make it yerself.”
“Come.” Cam motioned them both toward the door. “Annie and Tamas await us. We will drink to our happy futures.”
Finding his plaid folded in one of the bags, Tristan draped it over his bare shoulder, tied it haphazardly around his waist, and left the room behind them.
Annie Kennedy was a bonnie lass with bright green eyes and a bow-shaped mouth designed for asking an endless array of questions. The more wine she drank, the more she spoke. Twice Tristan and Cam shared a smile at her tireless chatter.
Isobel seemed to be enjoying herself, despite shifting her weight constantly in her chair. She blushed three different shades of scarlet when Annie asked her if something pained her. Tristan merely smiled into his cup, then scowled into it when its sour contents touched his lips.
“Ye do not like spirits, Mister MacGregor?” Annie asked, catching his displeasure.
“No’ particularly. I’ve seen them make men do foolish things.”
“Oh, do tell!” Annie pressed eagerly. “What kinds of things?”
“Alas, I would no’ trouble yer delicate ears with such distasteful tales.”
She giggled without a trace of a blush. “Speaking of distasteful tales, what do ye think Andrew will say about yer betrothal to Isobel?”
“Mayhap he will challenge Tristan to a duel,” Tamas answered, a flash of enthusiasm brightening his eyes for the first time that evening.
“I never pledged my love to yer brother,” Isobel told Annie.
Tristan slipped his gaze to her. It occurred to him in that moment that she had never pledged it to him either. He scowled again and downed his wine.
“Well,” said Annie with a sly grin aimed in Tristan’s direction. “I can certainly see why not when ye had this one waiting in the wings.”
“Careful, darling,” Cameron warned playfully. “He is soon to be wed, and ye are soon to belong to me.”
Turning to face him, Annie went all weak in her seat. “And ye know how happy that makes me, my dearest. He is pretty, but my heart is yers.” She leaned into him for a kiss, whispering when she withdrew that she loved him.
Tristan called for more wine. Of course Isobel loved him. Why would she agree to marry him if she didn’t?
“I know Andrew will be pleased with our news,” Annie sang happily, holding up her cup for a refill when the server returned to their table. “He is quite fond of Cameron. Henry and Roger were delighted when I told them. Do ye have many siblings, Mister MacGregor? What will they think of ye wedding a Fergusson?”
Isobel stopped the server and let her pour more wine into her cup as well.
“They will come to love her as I do,” Tristan said, swigging his drink and refusing to think about Mairi and her hidden daggers.
“Do they look like ye?” Annie asked. When Cameron rolled his eyes heavenward, she hastened to explain that she only wanted to know for the benefit of her sister, Alice. “Remember, she is twenty and two and still unwed. It is difficult to find a husband these days.”
Tristan refused to look at Isobel to see her reaction. Of course that wasn’t why she had said aye to his proposal. She could have had a husband in Andrew Kennedy if that was all she wanted.
“Rob and Mairi resemble my faither.”
“And ye? D’ye take after yer mother, then?”
“My uncle, actually. I could have been his son.” Tristan didn’t realize his tone had taken on a hollow sound until Isobel reached for his hand beneath the table. He turned to smile at her, but a stinging poke to his shoulder stopped him. He turned and looked up at a tall, bearded stranger clutching a tankard in his beefy fist.
“What have we here?” The stranger grinned, exposing a missing tooth in the front of his mouth—a sure sign of a man who liked to fight.
Damnation, Tristan was not in the right frame of mind for this. When he noted the four—or were there five—men of equal height and build snaking around the table, he mumbled an oath through his clenched jaw.
“A Highlander in the Golden Hillocks!” The ruffian eyed Tristan’s plaid and shook his head with pity. “Ye have a pair of bollocks sitting here drinking our wine.”
“I must warn ye,” Tristan said, trying to clear his head of the wine’s effect and failing, “if ye claim ownership to this piss, it only proves that Covenanters lack good taste as well as good judgment.”
Annie giggled behind her hand and then gasped when the stranger hauled Tristan to his feet.
“Ye’re a brave, if not foolish, bastard to insult me in my own town, Catholic.”
The inn spun in a circle from his brisk ascent upward, but Tristan hooked his mouth into a grin that warned the others to back off. “I’m pleased ye think so. Ye’ll be doubly impressed when I set ye on yer back in the rushes if ye dinna’ release me.”
The stranger swung. Tristan ducked, swayed on his feet for a moment, and then drove the heel of his palm into the man’s chin in an upward, bone-crunching motion. The ruffian went down as Tristan had promised he would, crushing a chair beneath him. The inn came alive with shouts and chairs being pushed aside. Tristan turned to see one of the brute’s friends rushing for his table. He shoved Isobel and Annie out of the way and shouted to Cameron, “Behind ye!”
Cameron blocked a punch to his jaw with his left arm and sent the man reeling into the table behind them with his right fist. Tristan took a moment to smile. The lad had learned his lessons well. His satisfaction was halted by a blow to his chin.
“Ye knocked Willy out cold, ye son of a pig!” Unconscious Willy’s third companion readied himself for another strike while Tristan regained his balance.
“I dinna’ have to do the same to ye,” Tristan offered, wiping a trickle of blood from his mouth. “There is still time fer ye to withdraw.”
The man’s eyes went red. His furious fist whipped past Tristan’s nose, missing by inches when Tristan took a step back. He came forward just as quickly and delivered a tight, crisp punch into his opponent’s belly, followed by a hard cuff to the jaw.
That wasn’t so bad, Tristan thought, straightening his plaid and watching Willy’s friend crumple to the floor beside him. Cameron had finished off his opponent neatly and efficiently, and Tamas… What the hell was the lad doing standing on the table with the leg of a chair clutched in his fists?
Someone tapped him on the shoulder. Tristan turned and looked up—and further up still. Och, hell, he thought, as a fist, big enough to block out everything behind it, flew toward his face—there were five.
The last he saw before he slumped to the ground was Tamas swinging the chair leg around like a sword. He remembered nothing else as splinters of wood flew, and the brute who’d struck fell like a tree on top of him.
Chapter Thirty-three
Tristan opened his eyes and smiled at Isobel’s face hovering over his. “Good morn, my sunshine.”
She smiled back and dabbed a cloth to his lip. He flinched. “It is evening,” she told him softly. “Ye have been out fer a quarter of an hour. Cam carried ye to the bed. He is returning Annie to her room and will come back shortly. He is worried sick over ye.”
Ah, the brawl below stairs. It came back to Tristan slowly. Why the hell had he drunk wine? It slowed his reflexes and his wits. “Are ye worried fer me, as well?”
She shook her head and brought her cloth to his brow. “Ye have been hit before—many times, if those tales ye told were true.”
“They were,” Tristan assured her, growing a bit agitated over the fact that she wasn’t even worried about him. “But that doesna’ mean I canna’ be seriously injured by a giant’s hammerin’ fist.”
“Tristan, ye are sulking.” She leaned back to dip her rag into a bowl of water and cast him an infuriatingly mocking pout. “Did that terrible man injure ye more than ye wish
to say?”
Tristan grinned at her, but it wasn’t a happy look. “Even if he took a blade to my throat, it wouldna’ slice as sharply as yer tongue.”
He was certain he heard the tinkle of her laughter, but Cam’s voice from the door distracted him.
“Ye are awake!” He cut a hasty path to the bed with Tamas hot on his heels. “I was growing alarmed when ye did not come to straightaway.”
“Did ye no’ see the size of the oaf who struck me, then?” Tristan answered incredulously.
“He was not so hard to put down.” They all looked at Tamas with a mixture of fresh admiration and worry.
“Come.” Isobel left her place beside him and shooed her brothers toward the door. “Let him rest. He will need his wits about him tomorrow when we meet with the merchants.” She bent to kiss him good night, and then hovered over him a moment longer. “I would have beaten the brute over the head with Tamas’s chair if he had dared aim anything at ye but his fist.”
Tristan grinned at her as she stepped away, ignoring the pain of his split lip.
“I will be along in a moment,” Cam told her. “I wish to have a word with Tristan.”
Isobel nodded and took Tamas by the hand to leave.
“Tamas”—Tristan stopped them—“I am grateful ye fought on my side tonight.”
Miracle of miracles, Tamas smiled at him and then looked up at his sister. “I am thirsty,” he complained as she closed the door.
When they were alone, Cameron remained quiet and pensive while Tristan sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “Hell, I hate drinkin’.”
“Tristan? Will ye keep yer word and wed her?”
“Of course. I always keep my word.”
When Cameron began to pace in front of him, Tristan looked away to stop the room from moving. “If ’tis my kin ye worry over, rest assured I will deal with them,” he said. “My father is no’ so merciless as ye all believe. Ye would be astonished to learn who my brother Rob brought home to Camlochlin recently and made his wife. Dinna’ fret over things, I shall work them all oot.”
Tristan was thankful when Cam stopped moving—and taking the room with him. Now, he stood as still as a rod and looked at Tristan with something akin to dread in his eyes.
“There is something I need to tell ye. Before ye marry my sister, ye should know the truth.”
Tristan rose to his feet and moved toward him. “What is it?”
“I cannot keep it in me any longer. Whenever ye speak of him, the weight becomes heavier fer me to bear, and now it is not just fer my father, but for him as well.”
“Fer who?”
“The earl. Yer uncle. It was I who killed him. My father took the sword fer what I did.”
Tristan stopped moving. He stopped breathing. In an instant, images of his uncle’s limp body in the rushes of Campbell Keep flooded his thoughts, his mother and his aunt wailing in anguish, his father promising to kill every last Fergusson. He shook his head. Nae, Cam could not have been responsible for that. “The life I knew ended that day.”
Cameron closed his eyes, unable to face him. “As did mine.”
Tristan’s blood went cold. He didn’t want to hear this terrible confession from a lad whom he had come to love as a brother. He didn’t want to think of the guilt Cameron had carried for a decade over the death of his father. He only felt his own pain bubbling to the surface from the place he’d kept it since that fateful night. He’d lost so much, and the man who had taken it from him stood before him now.
He snatched Cameron’s collar in both hands and dragged him closer. “I…” Isobel’s brother did not try to escape the rage he saw in Tristan’s eyes. He looked away from them instead, ready to take his punishment.
It did not come. Already Tristan was calculating Cam’s tender age at the time of the shooting. He had been a babe! Too young to even know…“Och, hell, Cam.” Tristan released his shirt and hauled him in for a tight embrace instead. “Fergive me.”
“No, brother, it is I who needs forgiveness. It is I who robbed ye… yer family of such a good man.”
Releasing him, Tristan slumped back onto the bed. Dear God, if his father ever learned of this…“How did it happen?”
“It was dark.” Cameron’s voice quaked with torment as he spat the awful truth from his lips and finally from his heart as well. “My father was shouting. I was afraid that the men who came out of the keep were going to kill him. I fired my arrow hoping to frighten them away. I—I did not mean to kill him. I did not want to kill anyone.”
Tristan knew in that moment that the noble ideals his uncle had taught him were the right ones. He’d been correct about the feud, correct in his opinions against revenge. “Ye were a babe,” he said quietly. “ ’Twas no’ yer fault.”
“I will understand if ye must tell yer father. But Isobel… she is afraid.”
Tristan looked toward the door. She was afraid of his finding out and rushing back to tell his father. Her caution with him, her mistrust… they made sense now. She had thought this truth was what he was after. She was right to keep it from him. He would have tried harder to keep himself from loving her if he’d known his father’s wrath against her kin could be rekindled by this secret. Callum MacGregor had killed seven of the Fergusson men he’d seen at Campbell Keep that night. He had killed them just for being there. What would he do if he discovered the one whose arrow had pierced his brother-in-law’s heart and his wife’s along with it was still alive? Did Tristan’s mother have the right to know who had killed her brother?
He’d begun this quest to find honor, to end the pain both families had suffered. He had found much more. He would never again lose anyone he loved over this tragic accident. The journey was not yet over, but it had just become more difficult.
If true honor was easy to attain, Tristan, his uncle’s patient voice whispered in his thoughts, most men would have already attained it.
He turned back to Cameron just as the door to his room burst open. Tamas stood on the other side, his sling dangling from his fingers, his eyes wide with a mixture of fear and excitement.
“Ye better come quick. Yer father has just arrived.”
Chapter Thirty-four
I will ask ye again, Miss Fergusson. Where is my son?”
Isobel looked up, past a broad chest cloaked in Highland plaid, beyond a jaw chiseled from granite and just as unyielding, to hard, blue-gold eyes that scalded her soul. Eyes that had filled her childhood dreams with nightmares.
“Does he…” The mighty MacGregor Chief paused to tighten his jaw around words he clearly found difficult to utter. “Does he still live?”
Isobel nearly tripped over her feet trying to back away from him. The drink she still carried for Tamas spilled onto her kirtle. A large hand from somewhere to her right steadied her before she landed on her rump.
“Careful, lass.”
Her rescuer sounded like Tristan. He spoke the same first words Tristan had ever spoken to her, but this man was bigger, broader, and less delighted to see her than Tristan had been when he discovered her and not his sister in the king’s garden that first morning.
“We didna’ mean to come upon ye so suddenly.” Though his words were kind enough, his deep blue eyes, as hard as the Devil MacGregor’s, glinted at her from behind a raven forelock. “We didna’ expect to find ye here. Is my brother with ye?”
His brother. This had to be Rob MacGregor, the eldest of the Devil’s sons. But who were the other two Highlanders rising from their chairs? Where were the other patrons? Likely, Isobel answered herself, they had all run for their lives at the sight of the murderous Chief.
“Miss Fergusson”—his thick burr dragged across her ears like rolling thunder—“I have never in my lifetime harmed a lass. I want an answer from ye.”
Isobel wasn’t going to give him one. She couldn’t. Clear, logical reasoning had abandoned her and left her with cold, raw panic. She tried to tug free of her captor’s hold, but his fingers did no
t budge.
“Faither,” Tristan called out from the stairs. “What the hell are ye doin’ here?” Without waiting for a response, he stepped around his father and glared at his brother. “Let her go.”
Only after Rob complied did Tristan turn to the Chief. “How did ye find me?”
“We stopped to quench our thirst on our way to the Fergusson holdin’.” His father raised a cup in his hand as if to prove his words true. “Rob’s wife told us where ye might be when yer mother began to fear that ye were dead.”
Tristan cut a sharp scowl to his brother—who merely shrugged, his expression unchanged.
“So ye hunted me doun like a babe?”
“Ye left fer our enemies’ holdin’ almost a month ago, Tristan,” his father argued. “Did ye think I would no’ try to discover what happened to my son?”
Tristan looked only mildly remorseful. “As ye can see, I am fine.”
“What the hell happened to yer lip?” One of the other Highlanders left his chair and narrowed his cool gray eyes at Tristan’s face.
“A fight,” Tristan told him.
His curiosity piqued, the Highlander raised a dark brow. “Any broken bones?”
“Nae, Will, just the lip.”
“Ye call that a fight?” Will sneered and walked away, no longer interested.
“Son,” his father said, regaining Tristan and Isobel’s attention, “why have ye come here?”
Tristan turned to her. “To see her. And ye should know—” His words were halted when Will suddenly sprang for the stairs. Isobel whirled around in time to see him snatch Tamas’s sling from his hand and haul him up by the back of his shift.
“One of yers?” he asked Isobel, while her brother dangled two inches off the ground.
“Damn it, Will”—Tristan came to Tamas’s defense—“put him doun.”
“He was aboot to fire this thing at yer faither!”
“Put him doun,” Tristan repeated more forcefully. When the tall brute released him, Tamas pulled back his foot and kicked him in the shin, then ran to his sister’s side.