Wild Wicked Scot

by Julia London

But Margot hadn’t left him. She was in the kitchen, her back to him, dressed in the old skirt he’d found. It was far too big for her and dragged the floor. She had tied the lawn shirt in a knot at her waist and had tied her hair into a knot at her nape. She was working at something on the counter that he couldn’t see.

  He walked deeper into the kitchen. She looked up with surprise, and her face lit with pleasure. “Look!” she said excitedly. “I found a potato!” She held it up to him. “There were turnips, too. And leeks, I think.”

  Arran was, he realized, bowled over on a wave of relief. He’d had that awful thought that she’d left him again. Improbable, impossible, and yet that was the fear that had crept in around his heart when she wasn’t in bed this morning.

  As she bubbled on about the garden she’d found, and how she did once accompany her grandmother to pick brambles from the bramble bush and could certainly do that again, Arran knew he would have lost his mind if she’d gone.

  Her words filled the space around them, swelling up and surrounding him while a river of love for the woman burned through him.

  It burned bright.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  IT HAD ALL seemed like a dream to Margot. From the moment Knox had ridden away from her, and every moment that passed as they moved farther north, she had grown more and more uncertain about her choice. The thought that she would never see England again, or Norwood Park, or Knox and Lynetta, began to weigh heavily in her heart.

  And then to arrive at this deserted lodge at the end of a deeply remote loch to fend for her life? It was all too much to bear. She was unprepared for this. She didn’t have the slightest idea what to do in a kitchen, had scarcely been in them at all, save those few times she went in search of an apple or orange. And that was only the beginning of her ineptitude.

  As a result, she and Arran stumbled through the first few days at the lodge. Of course he was more adept at making do than she was, but he was no more accustomed to keeping a house than she was, really. They had quite a row when he proudly presented her with a duck to pluck.

  “Pluck?” she echoed, looking at the bird in horror.

  “Aye, the feathers.” He held it out to her.

  “But...how?”

  Arran looked at her strangely. “You remove them. Pluck.” He jerked a feather free of the bird.

  Margot recoiled.

  He frowned. “Do it, Margot. I canna do everything.”

  “I am aware!” she snapped. She took the bird and, wincing, began to pluck. It was a horrible, wretched mess. She fought tears for the damn bird—such indignity in his death! Or was she fighting tears for the loss of her dignity? But she plucked it clean, and when she presented the battered carcass to Arran, he was not impressed by her effort. “Aye, I see. And now you must clean it.”

  “I will not!” she cried, and fled the kitchen when Arran seemed determined to force her.

  Later, after Arran had cleaned it and cooked it, Margot had to admit the duck made for an excellent meal.

  When Arran gave her a duck a few days later, Margot could pluck it well enough and without complaint.

  But she felt entirely useless to Arran and began to forage for food, picking brambles and gooseberries and holding them in the tail of her shirt. She dug around the old garden for leeks and potatoes, not giving up until she found a few. Granted, the potatoes were rock-hard and the leeks spindly. But she found them. She took their clothes down to the river to wash as she’d seen women doing on the way to the village at Norwood Park. But she was too earnest in her attempts and rubbed a hole in her gown. Neither did she hang the clothes properly to dry, so they were misshapen.

  Arran, bless him, said not a word.

  They did not talk about the past or future in those days. They were too engaged with the business of surviving to address old wounds. They talked about silly things when they came together for meals. Margot liked to tease him, to see the change of color beneath his beard. She told him he was shy in the presence of Lynetta Beauly, to which he took great exception.

  “That is no’ so. Miss Beauly canna stop talking long enough to draw a breath.”

  “That is true. But she is quite comely.”

  Arran snorted and turned away. And he did not deny it.

  He laughed so hard when she cut up potatoes to boil them that tears of laughter rolled down his cheeks. “There is no’ a thing any simpler than this, aye? You put the bloody potato in the pot, leannan.”

  “How was I to know?” she demanded. “Potatoes are generally served to me in pieces.”

  After a fortnight, the most impossible thing happened—Margot was at ease with the many things she had to do each day. She swept floors and boiled the single cloth they shared for washing. Arran chopped wood and she helped him pile it high near the door, laughing about the siege he was apparently expecting.

  Their existence was quite companionable, and when the day was done, and their muscles ached and they could scarcely keep their eyes open, they fell into each other’s arms.

  Their nights were filled with lovemaking, sometimes so tender that Margot wanted to weep, and sometimes so lusty that they rolled onto their backs laughing when it was done.

  They filled each other’s bodies and thoughts and senses in every way, as if they were the last two people on earth.

  When she was alone, Margot would often pull his letter from her pocket and read it again. “The beginning of my world and the end of it...” She wondered, was this the end of their world? Would this be their world? Margot slowly began to comprehend that she wouldn’t mind in the least if it was their world. How curious that she had feared this sort of life, loathed it from afar...yet this life had made her feel strong and capable in a way she’d never felt in her life.

  Unfortunately, the rest of the world began to creep into theirs.

  They were dining on leek soup one evening and were sitting together at the kitchen table, drinking from earthen bowls.

  “I saw riders today,” Arran said.

  Margot gasped and looked up. “Where?”

  “Going north. They didna see me.”

  “Are you sure? What if—”

  “No, leannan, they didna see me.”

  She was struck with the cold fear of what would happen if they were discovered here.

  “What would you do?” Arran asked.

  “If I saw riders?”

  He put down his spoon and held her gaze. “If I were captured. What would you do then?”

  The thought made her feel sick. She suddenly stood up from the table with her bowl and carried it to the pot. She didn’t want to speak of it. “Don’t even speak of it.”

  “Would you return to England?”

  “England! I’d likely die right here!”

  She heard the scrape of his chair, heard him come up behind her. He slipped his arm around her waist and pulled her into his chest. He took the bowl from her hand and set it aside. “If there comes a time that we might return to Balhaire, what then? Will you stay? Or will you return to England?”

  She hadn’t thought of England in days, maybe even weeks. She’d concentrated on existing and had not allowed her mind to be cluttered with all the scenarios of what-if. “I don’t... I don’t know,” she stammered.

  Arran suddenly let go of her. Margot whirled about as he stalked to the door. “Wait. Where are you going?”

  “The hell if I know.”

  “Why are you asking me these questions?” she snapped. “I’ve not thought of it. I’ve only thought of us here, and now—”

  He grabbed the handle of the back door. “That’s the difference between you and me, aye? I think of little else.” He barged out, the door banging behind him.

  She thought of the two of them, too—she thought of them all the time. But Margot
was a different woman now. She was her own woman. But she hadn’t figured everything out just yet.

  Arran did not come back in until it was pitch-dark. Margot was in bed, lying on her side, her back to the door, when he loudly entered the room. She’d built the fire tonight, and he wordlessly shed his clothes before it, then climbed in beside her. He pulled her to his body, kissing her neck, his hands roaming her flesh, sliding in between her legs.

  “Once,” she whispered into the hair at the top of his head as he kissed her breast, “I was a silly girl. I thought only of arranged marriages and fortunes, of what I would wear and who esteemed me and what things I might have around me. But I’m different now, Arran. I don’t even know myself any longer.”

  He grunted his response, moved down her body, spread her legs apart and sank between them, as if to say he knew her. And that she was part of him.

  * * *

  THE DAYS BEGAN to grow shorter and the nights colder. Two hares and a grouse hung in the barn. Late-blooming flowers were growing around the lodge. Margot was in the garden one afternoon, taking cuttings of the flowers, when she heard a sound that didn’t quite register. She paused, listening...and slowly understood that what she was hearing were riders.

  She felt a swoon of apprehension as she slowly lifted her head and looked over her shoulder. There, down the narrow glen, cantering alongside the loch, were four riders. They were coming to the lodge.

  Everything seemed to suddenly grow too bright. Margot dropped the flowers and ran around the corner of the lodge to the outbuildings, flinging open the door where Arran was working.

  “Christ in his heaven, what is it?” Arran asked when she burst through the door. He caught her with one arm and held her still. “What is it, Margot?”

  “Horsemen.”

  Arran pushed her aside, grabbed his gun from the wooden table and strode outside. Margot looked wildly about for something to defend herself with. She spotted the little knife he often carried in his boot, grabbed it and ran after him. She caught up to him just in front of the lodge. But his gun was pointed at the ground. “Aye, that’s Jock,” he said. “There is only one man who sits a horse like that.”

  He strode out to greet his cousin.

  But as the riders drew closer, Margot saw someone else that made tears spring to her eyes. Knox was with him. She raced to her brother, leaping up to hug him before he’d had time to come down from his horse.

  Knox laughed into her embrace. “You’ll break my fool neck, Margot. Come,” he said, wrapping his arm around her waist. “There is much to tell you and Mackenzie.”

  They gathered inside the lodge, and after the party from Balhaire was assured that Margot and Arran were indeed quite well, Jock told them what had happened.

  “It was quick-like,” he said. “Rory and Bruce Gordon were accused of throwing in with the Jacobites, and the crown come looking for them—English soldiers all, forty of them if there was a one. But do you know, they slipped out under a heavy mist, bound for France.”

  “This doesna surprise me. I’ve never put much store by Gordon,” Arran said.

  “But that wasna the whole of it, laird,” Jock said. “Gordon left behind a few things, and one of them was a letter from Tom Dunn, aye? In the letter, he insinuates that he and his partner will share the wealth of Balhaire when you are hanged for treason.”

  Arran swallowed. “As we suspected,” he muttered darkly.

  “But did you suspect his partner was my father?” Knox asked.

  “What?” Margot said. “That can’t possibly be.”

  “But it is, darling,” Knox said. “Thomas Dunn was steeped in duplicitous dealings. When the authorities came for Father, he finally confessed to me what he and Bryce had known all along—Thomas Dunn was in a great deal of debt. Moreover, he’d fallen out of favor with the queen as talk of uprisings and conspiracy to remove her from the throne kept coming from the very men he’d vowed would keep James Stuart from our shores. He was desperate, and he devised a scheme to cast the blame on someone else and profit from it at the same time. He landed on Mackenzie because of his self-made wealth and his marriage to you.”

  “Aye, this we’d surmised,” Arran said impatiently.

  “But how was Pappa involved?” Margot asked.

  “Dunn told him that Mackenzie was a traitor. Father panicked and sent you to discover if that was true before Dunn could act. But while you were gone, Margot, Dunn apparently realized that it could all go wrong and he’d be exposed. So he offered our father a deal of sorts—if Father would agree to corroborate his accusations against your husband, he would receive a substantial stake in the Mackenzie holdings once they were forfeited. Dunn assumed the holdings would come to him for exposing the treason.”

  This news was a knife to her heart. She knew her father was culpable in some way, but this was so despicable it knocked the breath from her. “No,” she whispered. “How could he?”

  “It was dirty business,” Knox said quietly.

  “Will he hang?” Arran asked flatly, and Margot’s heart squeezed. She was as disillusioned and hurt as she’d ever been in her life, but she did not want to see her father hang.

  “No,” Knox said with a shrug. “Although he may well wish he had. The queen has stripped his title and bestowed it on me, and has decreed his holdings to be divided between his only daughter and his bastard son.” He glanced at Arran. “Begging your pardon, laird, but the queen refused to bestow any of the English holdings on a Scottish laird, not with all the unrest.”

  Arran shrugged indifferently.

  Margot suddenly sat down, the weight of this news too much to hold. “What of Bryce?” she asked weakly.

  Knox smiled thinly. “I suggested he look into the vicarage.”

  “The Mackenzie name is cleared, then,” Arran said.

  “I cannot speak for your side of the border, but your name has been exonerated in England,” Knox said proudly.

  Arran looked at Jock. “Ach, you know as I do that Highlanders are a distrustful lot, aye? There are those who still doubt you,” Jock said. “But more who donna doubt. It’s safe to return to Balhaire.”

  Arran shifted his gaze to Margot. She could see the same conflict in his eyes that she felt swirling in her. “Well, then,” he said. “This is quite a lot of news, is it no’, Lady Mackenzie?”

  “Quite,” she managed. She should have been happy to be freed from this exile, but she felt only an overwhelming sense of melancholy. She was grief-stricken at the loss of her father, devastated that he’d wrought this tragedy in their lives. She felt grief for the loss of the life she’d once had and uncertainty about what came next. But her agony went unnoticed—Jock had brought ale, and the men drank, exchanging tales of what had happened in the last few weeks.

  It was decided, given their mean surroundings, that they would leave on the morrow. Leave this place of peace, she thought morosely, where she and Arran had, for the first time, really, lived as a married couple ought. The sense of loss was now overwhelming, and Margot excused herself, retiring to the small room she shared with Arran.

  Arran joined her sometime later and wordlessly slipped into bed with her. Margot had not slept; her mind had been racing with the sudden change in their existence. She felt his hand seek hers, lacing his fingers with hers. They lay wordlessly on their backs beneath a woolen plaid, staring up into darkness, each of them, she supposed, trying to take in all the astounding news. After living on the edge of emotion and fear, to have it all suddenly released from them was not as freeing as she might have imagined.

  “You must be relieved,” Arran said at last.

  Was she relieved? She felt sick with sadness. “Do you know that I really rather liked it here.”

  Arran squeezed her hand. “Aye,” he said. But he suddenly let go of her hand and sat up, swinging his legs over
the side of the bed and bracing his hands on either side of his knees.

  Margot sat up. “What’s wrong?”

  “The same that’s been wrong for far too long—I donna trust you.”

  Margot blinked, surprised. “Surely now you know I had nothing to do with it.”

  He shook his head. “You donna understand me. We’ve existed, you and I, these long weeks, aye? You’ve done your best, God knows you have, but now, Margot, now you’re a rich woman in your own right, are you no’? And I’m a Highlander. You might do as you please and I... Diah, to this day, I donna know that it pleases you to live as a Highlander’s wife.”

  “But I—”

  He stood up and stalked to the window, as if he didn’t want to hear what she would say. He opened the window to the night breeze. “I’ve loved you since the moment I laid eyes on you. You’ve astonished me, you have. You’ve become a woman I never thought you’d be, aye? A Diah, it only makes me love you more. But you are free now, Margot, and I donna trust you to stay true to me.”

  Her heart squeezed with trepidation. “Are you... Are you sending me back to England?” she asked disbelievingly.

  “England?” He turned from the window and looked at her over his shoulder. “Do you no’ understand me yet?” He suddenly came back to the bed and went down on one knee before her, his hands clasped together on the bed almost as if he was praying. “I’m no’ sending you away, Margot, no—I’m on my knee, begging you no’ to leave me. Never leave me, do you hear me? No man will ever love you as I do. No man will ever honor you as I will all my days.” He groaned and closed his eyes, anguished. “I will always love you, but I’m begging you now to release me as I’ve released you. If you donna mean to remain in Scotland, then donna torment me. I canna live my life fearing that you will go.”

  Margot pressed her clasped hands to her mouth. Her heart was racing, and with a silent sob, she leaned over this man and stroked his face. She could see the terror in his eyes—she recognized it because she was feeling the same terror. It had struck her the moment she saw riders approaching—the terror of living a single day without this man. When she had seen them coming, she knew how much she loved him. “I understand,” she said, and Arran’s eyes welled with tears. “But, Arran, my love, you will never love me as much as I love you.”