Harlequin Historical July 2020 - Box Set 1 of 2

by Virginia Heath

  A shiver went through Penny’s body and something that felt a lot like pride. For he was the biggest, strongest man in a whole group of them, and his bearing was that of a leader. His words, his vows were true.

  And in that moment…she trusted him. Trusted he was everything he’d said. It mattered to her. It was silly, maybe, that it mattered, that there was some measure of honour in what he’d done to her, even if she were a pawn.

  He was driven by the need to protect his clan. To avenge the indignity visited on his family.

  She might not have asked to be caught up in it but, looking at him now, she could see the full measure of the man he was and she found him…beautiful.

  The line of men remained impassive, then one man stepped forward. ‘Laird,’ he said, inclining his head.

  Penny didn’t understand the protocol here, but she knew enough to understand the weight in that word. That at least one man was ready to acknowledge Lachlan’s place.

  ‘My father has ill used these lands and these people,’ Lachlan continued. ‘And you have my word that I will make right what he has done wrong.’

  ‘With due respect,’ the man who’d stepped forward said. He was tall, older than Lachlan, but it was impossible to tell by how many years for his face was brutally scarred. ‘How do we know you will keep your word?’

  ‘Execute me if I don’t,’ Lachlan said. ‘You might remember me from when I was a boy. I went away to try to make my fortune and I have done so. My time in England was not what I planned for it to be. But I made more than I could have imagined. And I’m still learning. I have merchant ships and have left men in charge of my business in London. I am an asset to the clan.’

  ‘Aye,’ the man said. ‘I swear that I will be the one to kill you if you don’t keep your word. Laird.’

  ‘I would expect nothing less. But I am not on trial. I am Laird here. And my word will be obeyed.’ He tilted his head upwards and she could easily imagine the look on his face. Iron. Uncompromising. ‘There can be no question. A house without a head will not know which way to turn. It will not stand. I will have no dissension in the ranks.’

  She could see two men, on the end of the line, exchange a look, and her stomach went tight. Lachlan was hard and he was terrifying, but she could see loyalty would not be easily won, not even for him.

  ‘It has been years, Cousin.’ The man on the end moved forward and, as he spoke, Penny could see the resemblance between the two men, though this man was not as tall or broad or fearsome as Lachlan. ‘I have been taking care in your stead.’

  ‘And for that I am grateful, Callum,’ Lachlan said. ‘Your work here will never be forgotten. For I honour blood. I honour that which is mine. My family. My clan.’

  He dismounted his horse and went back to the carriage, opening the door. Green eyes met hers and he extended his hand. She took it, trembling slightly as she exited the carriage. The dress she wore today was much finer than the one she had adorned herself in for the other days of travel. But she had known that they would arrive today. Had known she would stand before his people and it had seemed important that she looked the part of wife to the Highland chief.

  Not that she had any idea what the appropriate dress was for that role. But her yellow dress with its gauzy white fichu would have to do.

  She accepted Lachlan’s hand, and allowed him to lift her down from the carriage. ‘My wife,’ he said. ‘Lady Penelope Bain. She is to be treated with respect.’

  Something swelled in her breast, joining the pride that was growing there. That he was presenting her in this way. That they were…together. United. The satisfaction she felt went deep beneath the surface of her skin.

  She felt part of him. Bonded to him.

  ‘You bring us a Sassenach wife and demand respect?’ The tall man spoke.

  ‘I demand the respect owed me by my birthright,’ Lachlan said.

  ‘Are you not just an Englishman?’ the man spat. ‘You have been away these many years. You fought for their army.’

  ‘I’m not like my father. I’ve no love of the English aristocracy, nor do I feel the need to make merry with them. This woman is my payment. When I went to England I took work with her father, who promised me a ship. He lied. He sent me off with no wages, nowhere to go. And that delayed my return home. I became a war hero. A captain in the British Army.’ His laugh was hollow. ‘And with that I purchased my freedom. Our freedom. And when I had the money, when I had the power, I returned and took what was dearest to him. She is not evidence that England has conquered me, but that I have conquered England.’

  Penelope felt stricken, as if her husband had reached out and slapped her. Presenting her as a token of war. She had no idea he’d intended to do so. She kept her head high, though her heart was hammering heavily.

  ‘You’ll find the castle ready for you,’ said the first man who’d spoken. ‘We began to discuss this when your coin first arrived, and made our final decision when your men arrived ahead of you.’

  ‘An honour,’ Lachlan said, inclining his head.

  There was no emotion on his face. He betrayed nothing of what he felt.

  Penny wondered if he felt anything.

  It was the strangest thing she’d ever borne witness to. One moment they were standing opposite those men guarding the front of the castle like rabid dogs, the next they were moving to do Lachlan’s bidding.

  Lachlan barked orders, as if his position weren’t new, as if there was nothing tenuous about it, as if there had been no doubt a few moments ago if the people would accept or kill him. Orders to have things arranged, to have rooms prepared. To have the horses put away. He took Penelope by the arm and led her towards the door of the castle.

  It was so large, stone and imposing and mighty in its magnitude. A manifestation of her husband in many ways. Because there were castles in England and it was not demonstrably different from those that stood there, but there was a wildness to it all that made it feel like something separate altogether.

  There were men in England. Warriors. Strong, brave men with height and breadth and strength. But they were still not Lachlan.

  They entered the grand doors and she was struck by how different it was inside to what she had expected. For there was wallpaper, like in the great manor homes of England, and large, plush carpets. And it was nothing quite so cold or medieval as it had looked from the outside.

  ‘I think you will feel at home. My father had a fascination with the English.’ He said it with his lip curled, obvious disgust filling his being.

  ‘I gathered as much,’ she said.

  The great hall was massive, most of the original stone intact, with grand dining tables and other pieces of magnificence about the room. Grand portraiture hanging there, pictures of Lachlan’s ancestors. Grand tributes to the clan. And at the head of a massive table hung a coat of arms.

  As if she could forget that these were a different people. Their own nation in essence. The pride and fierceness seemed to reach from within the rocks. And she could feel injustice here.

  Injustice that these people had been taken by England.

  A proud people with a history that stretched back further than modern memory. They had been diminished by greed. The greed of Lachlan’s father, yes. But more than that, the greed of England.

  Penny couldn’t blame them for being distrustful of her, not for one moment.

  For they had been conquered and enslaved, their kilts outlawed for a time. Pieces of their national pride that made them what they were.

  And it was only in fighting for a nation that had betrayed them and stolen from them that they had been given some of their national identity back.

  She felt ashamed then, standing there, an Englishwoman in the centre of a Scottish hall.

  Still, she didn’t relish her husband presenting her as a prize.

  There was unfairness in
the world, but she didn’t have enough power to cause it and her humiliation certainly wasn’t going to diminish it.

  Just a pawn…

  All that hope that had been preparing to take flight in her chest had its wings ripped clean away. They were not one. She was little better than a prisoner. Him feeling loyalty to a clan, a castle, his family, had nothing to do with how he felt about her. She’d been an idiot to think it did.

  She waited for him to make introductions of her to the household staff, but he didn’t. Rather, he ushered her up the stairs and down a long corridor. It was true that much of the castle had been modernised, but there were great portions that remained part of the Middle Ages. Cold and grey and stone.

  ‘Our rooms,’ he said. There were two doors, side by side. He pushed one open. ‘I imagine you’re tired from the journey. I will send a maid up to help you bathe.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, her voice sounding detached and not quite like her own. ‘I… I could certainly use one.’

  ‘The door there leads to my chamber. If you need anything. But it is likely that anyone on the staff can meet your needs should need arise.’

  She nodded. ‘All right.’

  ‘I’m going down to the village.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, as if she understood and agreed, but mostly she said it because she didn’t think there was another option available to her.

  Then he turned and left her there, standing in the chamber, quite alone.

  She moved into the room cautiously. It was, as he promised, outfitted with every convenience she might have expected. Just as grand as the room she might have had in the Duke’s country home. An intricately carved bed with swathes of fabric draped around the top of the wooden frame. The bedclothes were rich and velvet, plush and glorious looking.

  The room possessed a grand fireplace that would ensure she was never cold. There was a chaise, a small table with chairs. Bookcases.

  A large armoire and, when she opened it to look inside, she found dresses. More even than had been in the trunk for the journey. More than she ever owned in her life. He’d said he had things sent ahead. And he had not lied. But none of them were her things. Everything in the room was beautiful, rich and lovely, but none of it was familiar and it only added to that sense of being outside herself.

  If she were to dissolve, there would be no one to see it.

  She had no purpose or reasoning to push her fear or sadness or loneliness down into that place inside her, because there was no one to put a brave face on for.

  She walked over to a vanity at the far end of the room, looked at the lovely, velvet-covered bench, then at the beautiful, marble-topped vanity to see something very familiar. That simple wooden jewellery box. The one left to her by her mother. The one that contained nothing more than pebbles collected at the estate, feathers. Things that mattered only to her. Things her father had not been able to sell. Things that were dear to her heart and only hers.

  He had retrieved it. He’d said he wouldn’t.

  Lachlan had made sure she had her jewellery box.

  If she were nothing more than a conquest, nothing more than a prisoner of war he had been fighting in his own heart for all these years, would he have done such a thing?

  She didn’t know.

  She sat down at the vanity and wished she could cry. Her eyes hurt, pressure building behind them and growing in her chest. But she couldn’t because she’d spent so long training herself to stay in one piece and, even when she was desperate to shatter, she didn’t know how.

  She hated this. In the moment, she hated him.

  No. It wasn’t his touch she feared, but the desperation it left behind. The need for something she could not put a name to. The desperate desire for something she had never expected her life would contain.

  She sat in silence, her eyes filled with grit. And then she made a decision. She was not simply going to sit here and wait for a maid to come and bathe her. She was not simply going to be installed in a room.

  It was up to her whether or not she was seen as a conquest.

  It was her decision to make what her life became now.

  Too long, men had controlled all that she was and all that she could be.

  Yes, Lachlan was her husband. And, yes, there were decisions he had made for her life and her future that she could not control. But she was a woman and the household belonged to the wife. She would have been the Duchess at Bybee House and she would have made it her own. She would have had the responsibilities of running a household and she would have them here as well.

  He would not simply relegate her to a bedroom and leave her here.

  Something about that jewellery box, about its presence on the vanity, gave her the confidence that he would not wish that.

  That he perhaps cared a small amount more than he pretended.

  He could not possibly care to pretend less.

  It was true. The only time she felt connected to him was when he came to her at night.

  But this place was his. Part of him. And she had felt that the moment she had entered. The history in the stones. If she became part of this house, then she would be part of the history of Clan MacKenzie. Part of the history of Lachlan.

  She was determined to see it so.

  And one thing that was true of Penny was that once she made a determination towards something, then she would not be deterred.

  And this would be no different.

  * * *

  Lachlan had stopped at every farm. His people were proud and they did not necessarily trust the new Laird. When he had presented the gifts of coin, he had to be careful to make sure he called it what it was: restitution. Not charity. Not mites being given to beggars, but property being returned, for the rents his father had charged during his life. For the cost it had had for the people.

  By the time he was finished, his exhaustion was bone deep. They had travelled for hours today, then he’d had to make sure this bit of business was done and done right. He was a soldier and it was rare that anything took a physical toll on him. It was being back here. This place.

  It was so familiar, yet he could not stop staring at it as if he had never seen it before. And he realised, as he stood there by the loch, the shadow of the castle looming over him, that he had never truly believed he would come back here.

  He’d have thought it a dream misremembered by a desperate fourteen-year-old boy who wanted to believe there was a home that belonged to him somewhere in the world.

  He had many homes. Had the money to instal himself wherever he chose in London. But it was not the same. For his blood flowed from here. The clan was his blood. His breath. His life.

  For all the hatred he carried in his heart towards his father all these years since he’d been away, it was only intensified now. For how could he give allegiance to anything other than this place?

  How could anything matter but the sacred earth that was enriched by the bones of their ancestors, down beneath the surface? How could anything bear more weight than the land? Their pride. Their strength. Their people. For you could purchase the title and you could dine in Edinburgh with the esteemed, make a play for being part of the peerage, but it would not change blood. Money could not purchase a home. A place of belonging.

  It came from blood. The blood of his mother’s family. Clan MacKenzie. And even if his mother’s body was not in consecrated ground, she was here.

  She was part of this earth.

  He had brought his men with him—the men who had fought with him in the war—and a few of the men who had set themselves up as protectors of the clan, the gentry and chieftains who had been holding the clan steady since the death of his father and prior to his return.

  Though he did not have an easy camaraderie with the men, they’d all pledged their loyalty to him.

  It was all that mattered.


  They rode their horses down to the cottages that sat in the outlying areas. They were in disrepair here. The poverty pronounced. The fields around them fallow.

  The door to one of the homes opened and a man came out, staggering. ‘What is it ye’re after?’ he slurred.

  ‘This is the Laird, McLaren,’ a chieftain of the clan, Glenn, shouted at the drunk. ‘Mind yourself.’

  ‘Laird?’ he said, his lip curled. ‘Oh, we’ve all heard about you.’

  ‘Then you’ve heard I’ve come to restore the clan.’

  ‘Can’t restore what’s dead,’ the man said. ‘It’s too late for us.’ He swept his hand to the side, indicating the fields. ‘While you were making merry in England your father destroyed us. Bankrupted us.’ He spat on the ground. ‘I’ll have nothing from you. You and your Sassenach bitch.’

  Lachlan drew his sword and got off his horse. The man stumbled back, fell to the ground. A woman appeared in the doorway behind him and screamed, ‘Ye can’t kill him!’

  But Lachlan’s vision was a red haze. He would not have his wife questioned. Would have no words spoken against her. Her honour, her safety, would be protected.

  ‘I will have your allegiance,’ Lachlan said. ‘I am Laird here. My wife is the lady of the castle and you owe her respect.’

  ‘Cut my throat,’ the man said. ‘I owe you nothing.’

  ‘No!’ the woman shouted. ‘Ye cannae take him from me. We’ll all die.’

  He saw a child in the doorway then, staring up at him as if he were a devil.

  ‘You will pledge your fealty to me,’ Lachlan said. The man paled as Lachlan took a step closer. ‘I am your Laird.’

  ‘You have my allegiance.’ The man’s lip curled and it was clear in every line of his body he hadn’t wanted to pledge it, but it was of no matter to Lachlan. The inhabitants of every house within sight were watching now.

  He was a conqueror. This was what he knew. There was only one way to take respect and he would do it at the point of his sword if he had to.

  ‘Are there any others who wish to voice dissent?’ he asked, looking around at those who were gaping at the scene before them.