A Promise of Love

by Karen Ranney

  "Shall we call a truce?" he asked her, a small smile playing around his lips. "Rest assured, Judith, you have nothing to fear from me. I prefer a celibate bed to one occupied by a frosty English statue."

  “I'm well aware that men have needs, does your truce include those?"

  He laughed, the mocking sound of it echoed through the room, prickling her skin. "What did your poor husbands do, to earn your enmity? Did they not give you enough of an allowance? Pay you no heed? Question your expenditures? If so, then you have not improved your lot. We are farmers here, without access to funds that are not reserved for grain or seed."

  Judith looked at him as if he had sprouted two heads. Would that had been all Anthony had demanded.

  She clenched her teeth. "Let us say that I am not a marital prize. To put it into words a farmer could understand, label me as stupid as a sheep, as stubborn as a goat, as hysterical as a chicken."

  "You do not, perhaps, have the loyalty of a favored horse, the placid disposition of a cow, or the intelligence of a pig?" He was grinning, his fatigue forgotten, his grief muted by this sudden, fascinating side of his silent wife. Judith wished she had the courage to wipe that idiotic smirk from his face.

  "No."

  "Then it does not bode well for the next few weeks, then, does it?"

  They stood for long moments staring at each other, and his sense of irony surfaced from the burden of day-to-day living, from the grief he felt for Janet and her babe, for Anne. Indeed, for the ruin of his life.

  "Shall we call it peace, then," he asked, "if for no other reason than for Granmere's sake?"

  “And your conditions, MacLeod?”

  “A smile, from time to time, perhaps? A word spoken without rancor, the cessation of your eternal silence. If I should enter a room, you will not disappear from it. Your chastity, my companionship?”

  After a long moment, she nodded.

  "I would have your word, woman."

  "My word?" she questioned shortly. "Would you take the word of your horse? Perhaps you could make your pig swear. Or your cow.” Her eyes widened at her own words, two fingers pressed against her lips as if to test their ownership. His grin grew broader in scope. So, his English wife had a temper, too, when nudged from her silence.

  "If you do not value your own word, woman,” he said softly, “then it truly lacks worth."

  "Is a Scotswoman's promise more valuable?" Her tone left little doubt of her thoughts.

  "You are woefully ignorant of our world, woman. You have evidently not been in a Scotswoman's presence, or else you would not speak so stupidly of what you do not know. She is the helpmate of her husband, works beside him, shares his life. Has been known to take up weapons beside him, and yes, to die with him, if need be."

  "I would not mind dying with you, MacLeod," she said bluntly, her scowl a study in irritation. "It's living with you I balk at."

  His bark of surprised laughter followed her from the room.

  CHAPTER 10

  Bennett Henderson stepped carefully around the puddle of vomit. Young Hartley was not up to drinking all night. The youngest of his group, the boy naturally gravitated to Bennett, had even taken to emulating his own taste in liquor and its quantity. The fact that Hartley was not quite up to the challenge was amusing, as was the puppy-like adoration.

  What Bennett really wanted was a companion of the soul, someone who would understand his deepest desires and most forbidden aspirations. Someone who would encourage his most terrible of wants.

  Anthony had done that.

  Sweet Anthony, two years his junior; Anthony would have done anything for him. The times they’d had, the debaucheries they’d practiced, it was almost too much, the memories. They summoned up a longing he could not dismiss.

  The last two years hadn’t been the same without him. Not only had he lost his brother, but his best friend, his gambling companion, and more. How many times had they shared a woman between them? How many times had they shared a look of such utter understanding across the body of a spent and sweat dampened female body.

  Anthony’s complicity in the forbidden equaled his. Anthony was his other half, his brother, his friend.

  Hartley staggered from the corner, where he’d pissed again, too drunk or uncaring to find a chamber pot. The stench in the common room was growing, but none of the inhabitants seemed to mind it. It was just another of those subtleties of his life which differentiated him from the rank and file of his fellow soldiers.

  In this year of Our Gracious King, George II, the most favored and least onerous duty was that of soldiering. For a small fortune, a captaincy could be purchased, with the result that most of the officers in King George's army were noble second or third sons, or like he and Anthony, the only sons of a minor peer. The ranks of English officers, therefore, were less concerned with changing the world for the better than simply staying alive. They led their men the way a hundred generations of gentlemen had before them, with haughty superiority and an inbred belief in the rightness of themselves and England, if not their cause.

  If the Scots suffered for their invasion, it was because the upstarts had the audacity to challenge the world's greatest power. If fields were burned and houses razed, and babies slaughtered and women raped, it was no less deserving of their insurrection and rebellion.

  Bennett no longer bothered to listen to his companion's conversation, his attention on the ashes of the fire, allowed to grow cold not because the air was less chilly than before, but because none of their group would stoop to refuel it.

  Bunch of trailing sycophants. But they too, had their place in the world, he thought with a smile. It was not a warm or a comforting smile, but one that held a hint of rapaciousness to it, a tinge of cruelty to the upper lip, a mocking derision in the ice blue eyes. It was, a casual observer might feel, a look to cause one to wish his doors locked firmly, his windows shut tight against the evil night air.

  “Where is dear Lawrence, that he has not refueled our fire?” In his voice was more than question, it was an invitation, a luring finger beckoning all who would be led toward the most immoral carnality.

  As obtuse as the group was, they caught his meaning well enough.

  The young subaltern was terrified.

  The pitiful mewling of his approach made Bennett Henderson smile. Two of them divested the poor fool of his uniform without haste, their tender strokes and intrusive touch softening the edge of his fear. His arousal was a pitiful thing, half masted, more pulled from him than generated by true lust. He was too frightened to feel anything but the spiking of his fear.

  But his buttocks were so beautifully round, their whiteness only newly marked. Dear Lawrence was an apt plaything for when the storms of this godforsaken place precluded their patrols, when the rain promised only floods and Scotland’s eternal chill.

  Bennett lounged in his chair, watching as his companions kissed and readied their victim. He flicked his fingers, and the instrument of his choice was placed upon his palm. Standing, he surveyed their prize, the trembling young he-goat, nearly hairless, frightened, so afraid that the air was colored red with it.

  He breathed it in deeply, the stench of this fear and smiled.

  Without subtlety, Bennett swung his arm and the whip sliced through the air, the keening sound seeming to strip the tint from the young man's face until it was whiter than parchment, paler than a winter's moon.

  He relished these moments, craved them the way some of his brother officers lusted after virgins. When he tasted blood, it was of his own making, and the anticipation of it was almost as heady as the deed itself.

  Almost.

  His smile was sharp, grinning, his feet wide spread, his stance poised and in control. Bennett opened the placard of his pantaloons, prepared himself. But for the state of his rampant arousal, he would have been mistaken for a victorious soldier, exhilarated from a battle hard won. This was a battle of sorts, he supposed, but there was never a question of victor.

  He moved
closer, near enough to see the tears coursing down the young man's face, close enough to smell the cloying sweet scent of terror that jerked his arousal even tighter, harder. He bent, tenderly placed the young man into position, and flicked the whip gently, almost lovingly across the spread buttocks. His companions merely laughed, ennui giving way to anticipation, buggery an apt sport for a wet night in the Highlands.

  At the bellow of pain, he nearly laughed, so great was his euphoria at this moment. But the scream was almost too guttural, too masculine, lacking the real tones of pure terror. He pretended though, closing his eyes as he thrust himself forward. His arm lifted and the high pitched whine of the whip's strokes were a complement to his own shout of release.

  "Judith!" he nearly screamed, and it was rage that brought him to his senses at last.

  It should have been her white body beneath him, her moans he heard, her blood he spilled.

  One day, he would find her. Until then, he had her memory. Long nights filled with ecstasy.

  And the sounds of her screams.

  CHAPTER 11

  "The best wool," Judith explained,” is behind the shoulders and down the front legs. Here and here." With a few practiced strokes, the hapless ewe was shorn of half its coat. "Always cut from the legs towards the back, and it doesn't matter if you do it in one pass or not. Most of the time, the wool will have to separated anyway. It saves a step if you grade it while you shear it." She flung one section of fleece towards the small pile to her right, and a growing pile to her left.

  So far, only the twins had spotted the MacLeod, not his surprising English wife.

  "It's best if you wash the sheep before you shear, but you'll still need to wash the wool, too."

  Alisdair had expected many things of Judith. He had anticipated that she would stir his clan to irritation, possibly anger. Perhaps she would bedevil them the way she did him. But, in all his thirty-two years, Alisdair could not have imagined a scene like the one he came upon after returning from Inverness, with the sun beginning its downward journey into night.

  She was, his English wife, astride a sheep.

  Her skirt was tucked into her waistband, her bare legs pressed against the woolly sides of a protesting ewe. The sleeves of her bodice were tied back to the elbows, her hair fixed in a haphazard knot, curls tumbling from it as though she were a well used doxy at the end of a prosperous night. Her hands were buried in the long fleece, her face brightened by a sheen of sweat, and a dark swipe of something whose origins he preferred not to guess marred her forehead.

  A rim of men stood leaning idly against the fence shouting instructions, a gaggle of women stood in a tight circle muttering. With one hand, Alisdair dismissed the men, a look was all it took to send the women scurrying for cover. The twins stood on either side of his wife, each grasping two legs of the hapless ewe while she lectured them upon the serious business of shearing.

  When Judith noticed that neither of her helpers was moving to control the heavy ewe, she prodded Daniel - or was it David? - in the side with her elbow, her only free appendage, then glanced up to see the source of his fascination.

  The MacLeod’s smile was not so much mocking as it was rooted in surprise. Judith forgot how to make a sound, and even now, when the most prudent person would have looked away from the amber gleam of those eyes, she found herself staring like a lackwit at him.

  His trousers were not new, but they encased legs too broad and brawny to need any English padding. His white shirt was old, but constructed of the finest linen and still carelessly elegant. His coat was blue superfine, his boots polished black. It was not sartorial elegance Alisdair MacLeod portrayed as he casually leaned back against a fence post, legs crossed at the ankles, hands resting on hips. He was too tall, too muscled, too tan to be truly a dandy. Judith had the oddest thought that while he may have only been the chief of a tired clan, his home a burnt out castle, Alisdair MacLeod greeted the world with as much pride as a duke, as much arrogance as a prince.

  "Dare I wonder exactly what you're doing, wife?" he asked, his tone one not of a half-civilized Highlander, but of a bored effeminate indolently lounging in a London drawing room. For a moment, she could imagine him the medical student in Brussels, or Edinburgh, half his time analyzing the human body, the rest engaged in intense and intimate scrutiny of only female limbs.

  "I am shearing your sheep," she said, finally, straightening from her task and placing one hand against her lower back. David and Daniel were still on either side of her, both hands in identical position on the back of the sheep's neck, both legs clamped on either side of the bleating prisoner.

  At least twenty naked sheep, their forms curiously fragile shorn of their coat, were bleating their displeasure loudly and furiously nearby.

  A nod was all it required to banish the twins. The trapped ewe was released and scrambling up the slope. Judith pulled at the hem of her skirt until it fell from her waistband, fluffing out the material in a vain attempt to ignore the MacLeod. It was no use, she could better ignore an oncoming storm than she could his tall and broad figure.

  Whatever she felt about the man, there was no mistaking the fact that it was intensified in his presence. He was a puzzle, this new, and unwanted, husband of hers. He treated her with civility, was polite without being overly cordial, deferential without one word of mockery. He greeted her when they met with a smile which seemed genuine, if a bit tinted by the sardonic twinkle in his eyes. He inquired as to her health, asked about her daily pursuits as if genuinely interested, wished her a restful sleep. Once, they’d even discussed Brussels, of his travels upon the continent, his studies. Not once had he broken their truce, not one time had she cause to fear him. A month had passed and she had been left at peace.

  She wanted to repay him for it.

  When she looked up, it was to see a strange assessing look on his face, as if he judged her with some secret knowledge.

  Judith could feel the flush rise from her toes to her cheeks.

  “Why?”

  “It is already summer, MacLeod and the sheep are fat with wool.”

  "I'd thought to hire some sheep men," he said, his voice soft, almost soothing.

  Neither one of them mentioned that if there was coin to be had for hiring men, she would not still be at Tynan.

  "I doubt you'd find many to come this far north," she said, partly to ease his pride, and partly to ease the silence between them. It was the first time she’d felt disturbed by the utter absence of sound. Even the incessant noise of the sheep seemed muffled, as if a great glass jar separated them from the rest of the world.

  “I know a great deal about sheep, MacLeod, more than I ever wished to know. My father saw to that.” Squire Cuthbertson had insisted all of his daughters earn their keep, despite the fact that raising sheep required hard physical labor. At nine, Judith had learned to shepherd the stupid things, walking from hilltop to hilltop on her father's vast acreage. She'd learned to wash the long virgin fibers and card the wool before she was twelve.

  “And so, you’d teach what you’ve learned.”

  “That, and the weaving, if you wish.” All of them, even Elizabeth, had worked the looms and if Judith had a favorite activity of all of them, it was that. She could sit on the hard bench behind the six foot wide loom, pressing the long narrow board with her feet, while her hands automatically placed the threads in position. She'd become so adept at it that she could spend hours weaving, mesmerized by the sounds of the click, clack of the boards shunting across the tight threads, lost in her own world of thoughts and dreams.

  Alisdair found himself curiously entranced.

  Her face was dirty, her hair a tousled mess of long dusty locks, a thousand small white curling strands of fleece clung to her clothing; she smelled of sheep and good, honest labor.

  Her eyes flickered like a candle flame, he thought, wondering what caused her more consternation, the fact that he emulated her way of mute defense, or that he could not help but be captivated by this
new, unanticipated side of her.

  She raised her eyes to examine his face and found herself oddly trapped by the look in his eyes. It was not censorious, or even angry, but filled with the strangest sort of curiosity, and if she didn't imagine it, a hint of vulnerability. As if he dearly wished to know who she was and what she was about and such inquisitiveness rendered him open and susceptible.

  "Why do you care, Judith?” he asked softly. Calling herself back to the present, she spoke in as soft a tone, as if the world had suddenly become still with listening and their conversation too intimate to be overheard.

  "If you cannot import shearers or weavers,” she said, answering his question in a roundabout way, “then you need to train your people, MacLeod. Women have more patience for the weaving, and men more strength for the shearing."

  She turned away, but her movement was not quick enough to escape the arm that easily grasped her around the waist.

  "Why, Judith?" he asked, when he tilted her chin up so that her eyes could meet his. They were too close, too near to each other, which was why she could barely breathe, and why her heart was beating so quickly. The wisp of his breath brushed across her cheek, the hand upon her waist spread until it nearly reached her underarm and the curve of one breast.

  Her lashes fluttered like the wings of a trapped bird, he thought. And her pulsed raced as rapidly. If he had not thought she would have fled his touch, Alisdair would have placed his finger there, to prove to his eyes how quickly her heart beat. Or breathe upon it, his lips only an inch from the softness of her skin, his warm breath a comfort. Instead, he plucked one curling wool fiber from her bodice, wondering if the pressure of his fingers singed her skin as ably as the touch of her softness made his fingers itch.

  “You’ve been fair in your truce, MacLeod. I’d thought to repay you, that is all.”She looked away, down at the ground, up at the darkening sky, anywhere but at him.