Bride of Lochbarr

by Margaret Moore

  Marianne studied the floor. “I didn’t ask.”

  She didn’t have to. It didn’t take the Sight to guess what she was thinking. People often assumed he must have many lovers. He knew it was because of his looks, but it galled him to have them imply he was no more than a faithless, lust-driven fellow with no other thought in his head.

  It galled him even more to realize Marianne thought the same thing, in spite of what he’d said last night. “I’m telling you anyway.”

  Her gaze flicked to the bed, then back to him.

  He’d forgotten about the sheets. “It was Dearshul’s idea to strip the bed this morning, not mine or anybody else’s,” he said, anxious to set her straight about that. “I was telling you the truth when I said I didn’t care if you were a virgin or not. Neither would my father, or anyone else in Lochbarr.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do.”

  She fastened her steadfast gaze on his face. “Then it’s also true that Nicholas will make no reprisals?”

  He nodded. “Aye. Your brother’s not going to do anything.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “He’s not going to accuse you of abduction or any other crime?”

  “He’s making no charges. He’s going to leave us alone.”

  “Even though he must break the betrothal agreement with Hamish Mac Glogan? He’s going to simply do that and not go to your king?”

  “My father said he never spoke of Hamish. He accepted the bride price and he’s content to leave us in peace.”

  “I can’t believe Nicholas has accepted our marriage with as good a grace as you’re implying. Please tell me the truth—all of it,” she said, looking like someone expecting to hear the worst, and who feared that the worst would be very bad indeed.

  He couldn’t bring himself to tell her about her brother’s harsh decree. “Isn’t it enough to know that we’re going to be able to live in peace?”

  She faced him squarely, her eyes as bold and challenging as Cellach’s had ever been. “I’m not a child, Adair, and I know better than you the sort of ambitious man my brother is. He took the bride price and he’s not going to make any charges against you—why not? What did your father have to do to ensure that? What promises did he have to make? What sort of treaty?”

  Why couldn’t she just accept what he’d told her and leave it at that? “Nicholas asked for nothing more, and he didn’t speak of what would happen with Hamish Mac Glogan.”

  “There’s more to it than that,” she insisted. “I can see it in your face.”

  Adair ran his hand through his hair and realized he couldn’t keep the worst from her. “He took the bride price, then told my father that as far as he’s concerned, you died when you fled with me. He didn’t even want to read your letter.”

  She stiffened ever so slightly. “I see. He would hear no explanations.”

  “No.”

  “Yet he took the bride price.”

  “Yes.”

  “A trade, then. Me for the money, and he’ll probably use some of that to recompense Hamish Mac Glogan, like a merchant buying his way out of a bad bargain.”

  He thought she’d be upset. That she’d cry. Instead, she sounded hard, cold—so different from the woman who’d loved him last night.

  “I can’t believe Nicholas is going to let this simply pass without reprisal,” she said, clasping her forearms. “This could be a trick. Nicholas could already be sending messages to your king protesting the marriage or trying to get it annulled. He’ll probably say you raped me, so I had no choice but to marry you and he had no choice but to agree. He’ll likely say the same thing to Hamish Mac Glogan.”

  So practical. So very Norman.

  “I agree he’s not a man to be trusted,” Adair replied, trying to sound just as composed. “Unfortunately, my father is convinced your brother meant what he said. He’s a good judge of men, so you should believe that, too. To your brother, you’re dead, and so not worth any effort at all. The money is his compensation.”

  “And so you all get what you want. Your father has the peace he desires. Just as you wished, you’ve destroyed the alliance between my brother and Hamish Mac Glogan, and even got a beautiful wife to take to your bed.”

  Was she never going to believe he’d helped her because he thought she needed to be saved from her brother and Hamish Mac Glogan? “I told you—”

  “Yes, you did,” she tartly interrupted as she yanked her gown over her head and threw it aside, so that she was clad only in her shift.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded warily, yet also intrigued, and aroused.

  She marched up to him, grabbed his face and kissed him fiercely. “Getting what I want.”

  Kissing him passionately, she tugged at his shirt, pulling it from his belt, and ran her hands up his chest, as if she wanted him to love her standing there.

  Whatever he’d been going to say, he forgot it. Whatever proud words had come to mind, they fled. He could no more ignore her fiery desire than he could will himself to fly.

  Returning her kiss, he stroked and caressed her body, his hands eagerly roving, skimming over her shift. Her nipples tightened beneath his palms, and she pressed against him, thrusting her hips forward in silent, brazen invitation, until she let go of him to tear at the rest of his clothes. His broach fell to the floor unheeded and his shirt was stripped off in a moment. As she fumbled with his belt buckle, he pushed her shift lower, exposing her breasts to his lips and touch.

  Her eyes full of shameless craving, she wiggled out of the shift and kicked it away.

  She was naked and perfect and she wanted him. To hell with taking off his feileadh.

  He picked her up and threw her on the bed, then covered her body with his. His mouth captured hers, rough and hungry, demanding a response she fervently gave. Her body arched and bucked even before he hiked up his feileadh, positioned himself and pushed inside her. She gripped his shoulders and shoved her hips forward to meet him.

  She was so warm, so tight, so incredibly exciting. He’d never known a woman more thrilling, more impassioned, as eager as he.

  He thrust with lustful urgency and wanton abandon. She moaned and commanded, telling him she wanted more, and harder. Deeper.

  He thought he’d die, and gladly, to satisfy her.

  She tightened around him and cried out, sending him to the climax, where his throaty exclamations joined with hers in a frenzy of desire.

  As the throbbing ebbed, he realized she was weeping.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked as he withdrew and brushed wisps of hair from her flushed face. “Did I hurt you?”

  “No,” she murmured, moving away.

  “Then why are you crying?”

  “I’m not,” she answered, wiping her face and turning her back to him.

  “You are.” He raised himself on his elbow. “Was I too fast? Too rough?”

  “Can’t you just leave me alone? You’ve had your sport.”

  Adair stared at her, appalled by her words and what they implied. “Look at me, Marianne.”

  When she didn’t move, he grabbed her shoulder and made her roll over. “What did you mean, ‘I’ve had my sport’? You started this.”

  Her hair disheveled, she pulled up her wrinkled shift and rose without answering.

  He climbed off the bed. “You make it sound like I forced you. I’ve never forced you, Marianne.”

  “Oh yes, you did!” she charged as she tugged on her gown. “You forced me to stay in Beauxville when you stopped me that night. You forced me to run away with you when you came back.”

  “Running away by yourself would have been dangerous,” he replied, trying to control his temper, and failing. “If you have to blame somebody for running away with me, it should be your bastard of a brother.”

  “Yes, insult Nicholas again,” she retorted, adjusting her loose gown with quick, aggressive tugs. “Except that he’s not a bastard. He’s the son of Sir Lucien de Confriere.”

  “Yo
u can’t possibly want to defend the man,” Adair scoffed, pulling on his shirt.

  “How would you feel if your family disowned you because you’d married against their will?”

  “They wouldn’t,” he answered as he reached for the broach to hold the plaid to his shirt.

  She went to the table and grabbed the comb. “Not even if you’d courted me in secret, and then gone to live in Beauxville?”

  “Dunkeathe.”

  “Whatever you want to call it,” she said as she dragged the comb through her messy hair, her back to him. “Would you be delighted? Would you say, ‘Oh, never mind. It’s not important?’ Whatever you think of Nicholas, he’s my brother. My family. And because he’s my family, I can’t simply pretend I don’t care what he thinks. You Scots claim to set such store by your clan and family. You should be able to understand.”

  Adair walked up to her so that he could see her face. “You seem to forget he was selling you off to Hamish Mac Glogan.”

  “No, I’m not,” she retorted, putting down the comb. “But I could have stopped the marriage on my own.”

  Was she never going to be grateful that he’d helped her, and at no small cost to himself? “How?”

  “Somehow! But you had to play the great hero, the mighty savior, and ruin everything.”

  “If you’d fled by yourself, you would have been easy prey for any outlaw or mercenary—”

  “I’m not Cellach!”

  He backed away, aghast, as if she slapped him hard across the face. To have her bring Cellach into this, and in that tone…

  “No, you’re not,” he muttered as he turned and marched to the door. “She listened to reason.”

  “Or did whatever you told her!”

  He whirled around, glaring. “Don’t you ever speak of Cellach to me again! And don’t you ever forget that you were the one who proposed this marriage. I offered to see that you were taken anywhere you wanted to go, even though you treated me like an outlaw for coming to your aid.”

  He strode toward her, stopping when they were nose to nose. “And you’re not the only one who lost something when I helped you. I’ve lost my father’s trust and the clan’s respect because of you.”

  He gave her a disdainful smile. “But don’t worry, Marianne. A bargain is a bargain, after all. We’ll wait and see if your stallion brought to stud has fulfilled his purpose. If not, of course we’ll try again.”

  With that, he left her, slamming the door so hard, it splintered.

  Marianne stared at the broken wood, then sank down on the bed. God help her, what had she done?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A FORTNIGHT LATER, Adair sat on a boulder on a low rise overlooking the village, the fortress and the loch. Above him, the sky was dotted with high, white clouds and gulls circling, their cries loud in the silence. Below, he could see the villagers going about their business, and his father and Roban training some of the lads getting used to the weight and heft of claimh mors. He could remember the first time he’d held his own.

  The day Cellach had died.

  “Adair! What are ye doing up here, man? Watching the sky for portents?”

  He turned to see Barra, leaning heavily on a stout stick, making his way up the path towards him. He got to his feet. “No. Father and I have been thinking this would be a good site for a watchtower. One made of stone, like the Normans have.”

  “Oh, aye?” Barra replied. He reached the boulder and gratefully sank down on it. “To be sure, a man could see far from here.”

  “We could have started it already, if I hadn’t had to give all that money to Sir Nicholas.”

  “Your father could afford it without your contribution,” Barra replied. “But he’s cautious with his coin, and wisely so. Come next spring, Sir Nicholas won’t have need of so many men to work on his castle, and we can hire experienced masons at a better wage. A very wise man, your father.”

  Adair gave the older man a wry, knowing look. “That was your advice, I’m sure.”

  Barra grinned. “Well, so I’m wise, too.” He gazed out over Lochbarr. “I see your wife’s in the market again.”

  “Is she?” Adair asked, trying not to betray any special interest although he’d already spotted her, walking with her usual grace and serenity, as if she were merely a casual observer of life in Lochbarr.

  At first, that air of detachment annoyed him, for he was sure she saw herself as above them all. Yet as the days passed, he began to see a certain wisdom in her aloofness. Since she didn’t try to give orders, she didn’t add to the feelings of ill will her arrival and their marriage had created. Instead, servants and villagers seemed to be more at ease around her, or at least less inclined to stop and stare. It might be a long time before she would be more than tolerated by them, but at least she wasn’t doing anything to make things worse.

  “It can’t be easy for her here,” Barra noted.

  “It was her idea that we marry,” Adair reminded the seanachie.

  He did not add that the past fortnight hadn’t been easy for him, either. Although he seemed to be back in his father’s good graces, the villagers and half the clansmen still regarded him with suspicion. And sleeping in the stables didn’t do much to improve a man’s mood.

  “Your father likes her. So does Lachlann.”

  “Aye, I know,” Adair muttered. He’d seen them talking to her often in her native tongue, in the hall or around the fortress.

  “But you don’t. There’s a pity.”

  “I don’t want to talk about my wife, Barra.”

  “No? There’s another pity, then. Your father often came to me for advice when he was courting your mother.”

  This was news to Adair.

  Barra grinned, looking like a mischievous sprite. “He had a terrible time of it, too. She hit him the first time he tried to kiss her.”

  Adair stared in wide-eyed disbelief. To hear his father tell it, his mother had fallen in love with him at first sight.

  “Not too many people know about that,” Barra continued, smiling with wistful remembrance. “He was that embarrassed, we tried to keep it a secret. She told him he was an insolent, arrogant fool, and she wanted nothing to do with him.”

  Barra eyed Adair as the younger man sat beside him on the rock. “He was insolent and arrogant, aye and as stubborn as you, when he was young.”

  Adair tried to picture his father slapped for a kiss, but he couldn’t quite manage it. “So what did you tell him to do?”

  “I counseled patience.”

  Adair frowned. “You always tell everybody to be patient about everything.”

  “And how often am I wrong?” the seanachie indignantly demanded. “If you’d been patient, your father would have put a stop to the marriage between Lady Marianne and Hamish Mac Glogan and you could have courted Lady Marianne properly.”

  “My father didn’t do anything to stop the marriage, and I never wanted to court Lady Marianne.”

  “You didn’t see the messenger he sent to the king, being too busy with other more weighty matters, like riding off in a lather to Dunkeathe.”

  “He sent a messenger to the king? Why didn’t he tell me what he was going to do?”

  Barra gave him a look. “As if he needs your permission?”

  “No, but—”

  “But he keeps his own counsel sometimes, until he makes a decision, especially if it’s best nobody knows what he intends to do.”

  Adair squirmed. He knew he wasn’t much good at keeping secrets, for deception didn’t come easily to him, but this was disconcerting to hear. “Even if he had sent a messenger in protest to the king, it would have been too late for the king to stop the marriage.”

  “It would have been too late for Sir Nicholas to get wind of it, either, and send a messenger of his own,” Barra replied. “Then your father would have gone to Dunkeathe before the wedding and told Hamish Mac Glogan he’d taken the matter to the king. Hamish Mac Glogan, greedy lout that he is, would think twice before
doing anything that might give the king cause to question his actions, so he would have agreed to a delay. And that would have given your father time to persuade the king that this marriage would be trouble for him, too, since it would ally two powerful men. Once you’d brought the lady here, you forced another decision.”

  Feeling even worse, Adair put his head in his hands. “Oh, God, Barra. Was there ever a greater fool in Scotland?”

  “Maybe,” the older man speculated, sounding as if he didn’t really think so. “But it’s done.”

  Leaning on his stick, Barra hoisted himself to his feet. “Losh, I’m parched. Are ye finished here, or do you want to admire the view some more?”

  “No, I’ll go back with you,” Adair said, getting up to help Barra down the path.

  They proceeded in silence until they came to the village. “I’m off to train with the men,” Adair said, bidding Barra farewell.

  The seanachie regarded him steadily. “Adair, what’s been done has been done. There’s no point dwelling on what can’t be changed.” He put his hand on Adair’s shoulder and gave him a fatherly smile. “It’s easy to build walls, Adair, my lad. But once they’re up, they’re hard to tear down. Don’t build walls between you and your wife.”

  Adair’s jaw clenched. He appreciated that Barra was trying to help, but the seanachie could never understand. “This is different, Barra.”

  “A woman is a woman, Adair, wherever she’s born,” the seanachie replied.

  “She acts as if I forced her into this marriage against her will, when I was the one who was forced.”

  “Were you now?” Barra said, regarding him quizzically. “Your father threatened you, did he?”

  “No, but—”

  “There was no talk of punishment if you did not, was there?”

  Adair felt as if he had tumbled off the side of the hill and rolled all the way to Lochbarr, for his father hadn’t threatened him—at all. “Then if I’d refused outright—?”

  Barra shrugged. “Even I don’t know what your father would have done then. Maybe he would have threatened you to make you marry her. Then again, maybe not. Good day, Adair.”