Highlander in Love

by Julia London

  “I think ye are right,” Payton said with a thin smile and gestured for Mr. Bowles to walk on. He turned the conversation to his distillery, looking back only once at his milk cows with their purple cloths, at the ends of which were tied the bells.

  That night, after dressing for supper and dining alone, Payton retired to his study and picked up pen and paper.

  Miss Lockhart,

  I am compelled to admonish you for the performance, or lack thereof, with regard to the laundering. I am particularly distressed about the purple neckcloths that currently grace my dog and the livestock. I shall not inquire as to whose neckcloths they are, for I fear that I shall take great umbrage with the answer. In addition, I rather inadvertently discovered a nightshirt, belonging to me, shoved carelessly under the bed in my chambers. You must have a care with the laundering at Eilean Ros, Miss Lockhart, or I shall be forced to add more days to your employ. Enclosed please find a list of chores that you should complete.

  Douglas

  Payton heard nothing from Beckwith about his letter. But he did receive a reply the following day.

  To the Highly Offendable and Endlessly Aggrieved Laird Douglas:

  How kind of you to take time from the importance of being laird and pay such excruciatingly careful attention to my duties. It is sad that you did not find the new collars agreeable, but I assure you, the cows and the dog liked them very much. Nevertheless, I shall remove them at once. And I fully regret that you found the nightshirt as you did, for had I known that you would be on your hands and knees, I certainly would have swept the carpet.

  Your Indentured Slave,

  ML

  Miss Lockhart:

  Please do endeavor to sweep the carpets. I have included a list of additional chores.

  Douglas

  Mared crumpled that response and fed it to the fire as she did all his letters. She hadn’t actually seen the tyrant for several days…but he never failed to send a list of tasks and admonishments.

  She did what was required of her. She’d made a halfhearted attempt to repair the small burns in the intricately embroidered fire screens. And she had cleaned part of the wainscot in the dining room and would have completed it all had she not determined she would be much happier if she indulged herself in a walkabout.

  On the day Rodina and Una took the drapes down in the sitting room to shake them clean, Mared was caught up in one of Payton’s travel books and had really just lost track of the time. And the afternoon the two lassies spent dusting the millions of tiny little bric-a-brac that cluttered the main salon, Mared had felt unwell and been compelled to lie on the divan, regaling Rodina and Una with tales of the dead Douglases that lined the walls. She was very careful to tell them of the mad Douglas, whose ghost purportedly still roamed the house.

  Each time she received a note from his highness, she wondered why he did not deliver his curt little speeches of duty and responsibility in person. And the next time she saw him she only caught a glimpse of him.

  She was late to supper one night, having napped too long in the small sitting room of the north wing, and was hurrying down the corridor when she passed the open door of the dining room and saw Payton within, having his supper. Completely and utterly alone.

  He sat at the head of a table that could easily seat twenty. It was covered in a damask tablecloth, and candles flamed from silver candelabras all around him. To one side were the discarded silver domes of the meal’s courses before him. He ate in silence, the only sound the occasional scrape of his fork against china.

  Jamie, next to the sideboard, glared at Mared—he’d not forgiven her the episode of the paddle—but he did not move or otherwise interrupt the lonely meal of his laird.

  Slowly, Mared walked on, but the image of his broad back, of him sitting so regally and alone at a massive dining table, stayed with her. It was a dismal picture. She’d never really considered that Payton had no one, and it occurred to her, for the first time, what it must be like for him living alone at Eilean Ros, day in and day out, rambling about such a large house all by himself.

  At Talla Dileas, the plaster fell around their ears, but there were Lockharts all around, and they enjoyed one another’s company.

  It seemed awfully sad to be so alone, she thought, but it served him right. No one could bear to live with such an overbearing, demanding, and disagreeable man.

  But that night, when she closed her eyes, she couldn’t erase that striking image of him dining alone. And she did not smile, she did not gloat.

  She continued to seek him out, but to no avail. Every morning, Mared went to Payton’s chamber first, a little earlier than the previous morning—but he was never within. His bed always looked as if forty people had slept in it—the linens were pulled from the corners of the mattress, the beautiful silk coverlet shoved off and onto the floor. Pillows were strewn on the floor around the bed, as if they’d been restlessly kicked and pushed aside.

  And every morning, Mared picked up his pillows and held them to her face, breathing in his scent. It was a funny little obsession she had, one she could not explain or begin to understand. But she was exceedingly disquieted that she found such comfort in his scent.

  During the day, she went about her business as housekeeper, such that it was. She refused to sweep the foyer and told Beckwith he might take it up with the laird if he did not approve, which stuffy Beckwith assured her he would. She stuffed the silver tea service Payton had bid her to polish away in the china closet and put out a porcelain tea service instead. Any questions she might have for the lord and master of the house she merely dashed off in a letter and left for him in the silver tray. I should very much like to put up some new drapes in the salon. The red ones are so dreary and outdated.

  Inevitably, a reply would be delivered to her: No. And do please stop frightening the maids with blatantly false tales of ghosts. But nothing more than that.

  At night, she would go to his chamber to prepare it to meet his exacting standards for sleeping. But no matter how long she lingered there, turning the bed down, stoking the hearth, cleaning his razor strop, or arranging the closed drapes just so, he did not come.

  She finally began to understand that he sought to avoid her, and it infuriated her. Not because she wanted to see him, for she didn’t in the least. It was just the idea that a man could practically kidnap a woman from her home, put her into servitude, and then go about his business all jolly and carefree as if she had ceased to exist.

  Therefore, the more Payton sought to avoid her, the harder Mared tried to gain his attention.

  She unexpectedly got her wish late one afternoon when she induced Rodina and Una into walking to the far side of the loch for a swim. They had suffered through a few days of unusual, brutally hot weather that had Mared chafing at the bit to be out-doors. On the far side of the loch, Mared had discovered a small cove where the loch fed into a shallow pool. It was warmed by the sun and delightfully cool on a day such as this—she knew this, for she had dangled her feet in the water on those occasions she was able to escape the house for a walkabout.

  With the laird off to Callander and not expected back ’til the morrow, they’d waited until Beckwith had moved to the north end of the house, the footmen with him, and hurried out from the back terrace with a picnic basket between them and Cailean trotting alongside.

  Rodina and Una wore bonnets; Mared had donned her father’s old straw hat. They walked along the seldom used trail around the north side of the loch, laughing and talking about the latest antics of the footmen and occasionally throwing a stick for Cailean to fetch.

  When they reached the pool, Rodina asked for a bit of food first, but Mared was quite hot and wanted to swim. She quickly peeled off the black woolen housekeeper’s gown, and while Rodina and Una watched, she shed her boots and stockings. She paused to let her hair down. “Eat if ye must,” she said lightly, “but I prefer to swim!”

  While they watched—Rodina munching on bread, Una looking terribly worr
ied—Mared picked her way around a boulder and down a rocky path, Cailean at her side, until she reached the water’s edge. She waded in up to her ankles—it was the most wonderful sensation, cool water on her hot feet.

  All smiles, she looked back. Cailean sat on his haunches, watching her, as did Rodina, who sat on a rock above the dog, still eating bread. Una stood off to the side and nervously kept looking over her shoulder as if she expected someone to catch them.

  “Be easy, Una!” Mared said with a laugh. “No one will find us here! No one uses the path, save Douglas.” And to prove her point, Mared impulsively gathered up the edge of her chemise and pulled it up to her waist.

  “Miss Lockhart!” Una gasped. Even Rodina stopped chewing, her eyes wide, as if she’d never seen a woman before.

  Mared laughed and waded in up to her waist, then pulled her chemise over her head and tossed it onto the bank. “Stop gawking like a pair of old maids!” she called out to them. “Come on, then, and join me! The water feels divine!” And down she went, submerging herself completely in the cool loch water.

  When she broke the surface again, the two chambermaids were still watching her with awe. Cailean, however, was no longer interested and had wandered back up the trail, barking at a hare or some such creature. Mared waved at Rodina and Una to join her, but it seemed they were speaking to one another, debating it.

  With a sigh, Mared shrugged. She could lead them to the pool but she couldn’t make them swim—and besides, the water felt too good to fret over a couple of overly modest chambermaids. So she turned away from the bank and swam farther into the pool, alternately diving under, then rising to the top and gliding along the surface. She swam to the far side of the pool, where she turned over on her back and floated for a time.

  Until she realized Una and Rodina had not yet joined her in the pool, nor could she hear them. Mared swam back into the middle of the pool to have a look.

  Now she couldn’t even see them—it looked as if they’d left her. “Pity they canna enjoy a summer day,” she muttered to herself and dipped beneath the surface, swimming underwater toward the bank where she’d left them. When she resurfaced, she spied Cailean at the edge of the water, his tail wagging excitedly. Mared laughed, pushed wet strands of hair from her eyes, and looked again at Cailean—

  And her heart stopped beating. It literally stopped beating, and for one long moment, she could neither draw a breath nor release one. Her shock was suffocating her, for there, standing just a few feet away from the dog, was Payton, and behind him, Murdoch, stripping foliage from a tree.

  It looked as if he had ridden all day—his hair was windblown beneath his hat, and his boots spattered with mud. He was wearing buckskins and a lawn shirt, open to the chest, and she could see the sheen of perspiration glistening on the soft down there. He’d rolled the sleeves up to his elbows and his hands were on his waist, his weight on one hip, his head down, and his expression dark enough to fill her with alarm.

  Diah, he’d come home early, then.

  But worse than that, far far worse than that—she was naked. Thanks to her audacious swaggering for the benefit of Rodina and Una, she had made an enormous mistake. And now she was treading water in the pool, utterly and completely naked, and Payton was glaring at her as if he’d have her head.

  Even at this distance, and in spite of being covered with water from the neck down, she covered herself as best she could with her hands while she continued to tread water.

  “Miss Lockhart,” he said calmly, his voice cold, “I can only assume that if ye have time for swimming after completing yer daily household chores, then I have no’ given ye enough work to occupy yer time, aye?”

  Oh, this was not the least bit good, was it? She pondered what to say, having been caught with her hand, as it were, in the plum pudding, and decided that honesty was the best and only course. “I beg yer pardon, sir, but I’ve no’ completed any chores as of yet. It seemed too hot for it.”

  He cocked his head to one side. “Too hot?”

  “Aye. Too hot. Very hot.”

  That caused him to shake his head and look at the ground for a moment. “And do ye think it fair, Miss Lockhart, that the chambermaids in yer charge must toil in the heat while ye enjoy a bit of a swim?”

  Well of course she didn’t, but she could hardly confess they’d been here, too, not in good conscience, really, since she’d practically forced them here against their will. “No,” she said at last.

  “Then ye willna mind doing the rest of their chores today so they might seek respite from the heat, too, aye?”

  How she hated to be cornered by logic! “No,” she muttered at last.

  “Very good, then. I told them as much when I sent them back to the house,” he said, and damn him if a tiny hint of a smile didn’t suddenly appear on his lips. “Come out of there at once.”

  “I, ah, I…I will. At once, I swear it. If ye’d just go on, I’ll be along momentarily.”

  “Oh?” he said, lifting two thick brows. “What is it, Miss Lockhart? Were ye missing this?” he asked, and held out her chemise, which heretofore she had not noticed he was holding. Her purple chemise, to be exact, that had once been very white.

  Her shame burned all the way to the roots of her hair. “All right then, ye’ve had a spot of fun,” she said. “Just leave it and please go now.”

  Payton chuckled low. “I think no’,” he said, and tossed the chemise to her. “Put it on.”

  “I canna put it on in the water!”

  “The alternative is to put it on here, so I suggest ye try,” he said, and with his legs braced apart, his arms folded implacably, he stood watching her.

  With a huff, Mared grabbed the undergarment before it sank. She turned her back to him and struggled to put it on. When she turned around again, he had not bothered to hide his pleasure at her embarrassment.

  With an icy glare, Mared continued to tread water, her chemise billowing around her. The exertion of donning clothing in the water on top of having swum for so long was taking a toll on her—she was beginning to tire and really needed to come out. “Now will ye go?” she asked him, panting. “I canna swim any longer.”

  “Then by all means, come out.”

  “I canna come out with ye standing there!” she protested.

  “Ye should have thought of that before ye went in.”

  “All right, all right, ye’ve made yer point, sir,” she protested with a groan. “I’ve behaved badly and now I’ve been humiliated for it. So will ye please turn round? I’m no’ decent.”

  “That,” he drawled, “is an understatement.” But he turned around, so that his back was to her.

  Warily and reluctantly, Mared swam to the edge of the pool. When she found footing, she tried to cover herself with her arms. It was no use—there was nothing she could do to keep the garment from clinging to her or revealing her flesh through the wet fabric. She was, for all intents and purposes, completely exposed to him.

  Yet still, she might have salvaged her pride if only he hadn’t turned round just then. He was smiling, enjoying her embarrassment…but his smile faded when he saw her, and his gaze turned so intent that a strange little shiver jolted her.

  Without modesty, he openly looked at her, his gaze leisurely taking her in, skimming down her chest, across which her arms were tightly folded, to her hips and the dark patch of hair between her legs that shone through the wet garment. Then down her legs, all the way down to the very tips of her toes and back.

  She could do nothing but stand there and endure his attention, for Payton stood between her and the rest of her clothing. The more he looked, the deeper the shivers ran inside of her.

  When at last Payton lifted his gaze to hers, she could see and feel the strength of his desire emanating from him, radiating toward her. And she could also feel her body’s response to the look of his desire, rising up in her, flooding her limbs. The sheer intensity of it made her panic—she didn’t know what to do with it, how to react.
“M-my clothes,” she stammered.

  “Tie yer chemise,” he said quietly. His voice had gone rough; Mared glanced down and realized that her chemise, heavy with water, was hanging so low on her frame that her bosom was all but exposed. She looked up at him; his eyes went to the outline of her breasts and hardened nipples beneath the wet chemise. Mared grabbed the ends of the strings that pulled the fabric together, but her hands were so cold she could not tie it.

  She struggled with it until Payton’s hand covered hers. “No!” she said frantically, knowing instinctively that if he touched her, something would happen. “I can do it.”

  Payton ignored her; he easily pushed her hands aside and took the strings in his hands. He took a step closer to her and made a lazy loop of one. Mared lost her will to fight and dropped her arms, watching him tie her chemise as if he’d done it a thousand times before. He moved closer again and languidly looped the other string around the first.

  When he tied the bow, she risked a look at him and inwardly flinched at the power of his smoldering gaze. It mesmerized her, intimidated her. Payton put his hands on her shoulders, casually pushed wet hair over her shoulder. And then he let his hands slide down her arms, over the thin straps of her chemise, to her hands, his touch light and reverent, his fingers leaving a trail of fire in their wake.

  She was feeling things inside her that astounded her, parts of her igniting that she had never felt before. She bit her lip as his hands moved to her waist, then deliberately slid his palms up to her breasts and over them, turning his hands so that his knuckles glided over her collarbone, then turning them again to caress her breasts and nipples. And then moving again, around her back, slowly down to her hips, and around, to the swell of flesh at the apex of her legs.

  His hands stopped there; he lifted his gaze and looked her in the eye as he cupped the swell with one hand. With his other hand, he gathered the material of her chemise, pulling it up, giving it slack, and slipping a finger between her legs, lightly touching her in a way that made Mared believe she might actually faint.