Claimed By The Highlander (The Highlands Warring Clan Mactaggarts Book 1)

by Anne Morrison

  claimed by the highlander

  the highlands warring

  scottish romance

  a medieval historical romance book

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  anne

  morrison

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by

  Anne Morrison

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  Table of Contents

  Copyright

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  Claimed By The Highlander

  ORDER OF BOOK LIST

  claimed by the highlander

  prologue

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  April 1302

  Blaken Keep near Ayr, Scotland

  The nights in Ayr felt longer than they had ever felt in London. Elizabeth Kendall had not slept well since coming north, and close to dawn, she gave up sleeping at all. She rose from her bed, ignoring the cold flagstones under her feet, and walked the long halls of Blaken Keep, not sure what she was looking for, but knowing she would not find it in her own cold bed.

  Her mind was still a blank most days, a tangle of grief and sorrow and anger at the circumstances that had taken her family from her. She felt like a ghost, but then, just as she was coming to a corner, she overheard two women talking, and it changed everything.

  “Go on wit' you, Gwen. Surely not!”

  “As I live and breathe, it's the truth! He's already sent for a dispensation from the king himself in Londontown, hasn't he?”

  “Oh, but he can't, not with that little mouse.”

  Elizabeth froze. Instinctively, she stepped a little closer to the wall.

  Elizabeth knew how they spoke of her in Blaken Keep, and when she heard the word mouse, there was only one person that they could be speaking of.

  . She was the Southern girl, too delicate for the Northern winters, too pale for prettiness, and too quiet to be a favorite. In her mourning black, she was as washed out as a ghost, an unattractive one at that, with the tip of her nose always pink from the cold drafts that swept the castle from north to south and a cool damp to the air that left her hands and feet stiff.

  She didn't mind it, and there was even a part of her that liked it. There was a kind of justice to it, after all. Her mother and father and baby brother were all dead from the plague that had swept through London, and it seemed a frightful injustice that she should be left behind, still healthy though pale and thin as a stick of sugar.

  “True as I am alive! Sally had it from Tom that all his lordship was waiting on was the king's yes, and then he'll take Little Miss Mouse to wife,” continued the one named Gwen.

  “I don't believe it. There's no way the church would stand for it. She's his own niece, his sister's girl. It isn't right!”

  “Of course, it ain't right, that's why he sent a fat purse of gold with the letter, didn't he? And poor old Longshanks, fighting the barbarians in the North, he'll let a lord marry a goat if it puts some money in his war coffers, won't he?”

  “Augh, you've got a filthy turn of mind, girl, and no mistake!”

  The voices faded away, and Elizabeth pressed her hand over her heart, which was surely beating too fast.

  No, there's no way. He cannot think to marry me...

  As the idea sunk in, however, Elizabeth could feel the pieces that had heretofore been left cluttering her mind locking together like links in a chain. It made all too much sense.

  Why else would her uncle, Lord William Blaken, the coldly formidable Earl of Wessex, appear after her family's burial, preventing her from entering the convent as she had intended? Why else would he bring her to Blaken Keep, so close to the border and so far away from her father's family?

  Elizabeth had never met the Earl of Wessex before he arrived two days after the funeral. He appeared out of the January storm like some kind of fairy out of a legend, and the next morning, she found herself packed up like a load of luggage on a rather ill-tempered gelding, wrapped up in a wool cloak that barely kept out the chill, surrounded by grim-faced guards and following her uncle north.

  She hadn't had a great deal of time to question much of anything as they traveled through the freezing temperatures, and when she arrived at Blaken Keep, she had fallen into a fever so deep she'd thought she would die.

  Elizabeth didn't like to remember the dreams that she had during those times. She dreamed often that she was lying in an oven, the hot flames rising up around her. Outside the iron slats, she could see twisted and demonic faces laughing at her as gnarled hands pumped the bellows. That was when her fever had grown so great that they had thought she might die, and a priest had been brought in to administer her last rites. Those dreams were terrible, but worse were the dreams where she was still in the house in London, the one her mother kept so sweet and her father protected so well.

  In those dreams, she was still herself, Elizabeth Kendall, Mary and Paul's daughter, Peter's loving older sister. She sang and laughed and spun and danced, and she was more than a narrow girl in black who sometimes could not speak because her grief was so great it sat in a lump in her throat. In her dreams, she helped her mother manage the house, and she helped little Peter with his letters. In her dreams, she was properly living rather than being a shade who couldn't decide whether she should stay or follow the rest of her beloved family.

  On the night before her fever broke, Elizabeth remembered her mother standing beside her bed. Mary Kendall looked not as Elizabeth had seen her last, pale and sunken, her face marred with pox, but smiling and plump as Christmas.

  “Now, darling,” her mother had said with a voice that sounded as if it came from far away. “You must not linger here. This is not your place yet. We will be together again, but not for a very long time. Right now, you have other work to see to, my girl, and I know you are no slug-a-bed.”

  “Mother... Mother, I miss you so. It's so hard, and I am so tired...”

  Her mother had leaned in to kiss her, and the press of her mother's lips against her forehead brought a refreshing cool to Elizabeth's entire body.

  “I know you are, my pet. And I'm sorry to say that you will be more tired and more ill-used still. But take heart. Go north and find the answers that you need. Go north.”

  “Mother, what's in the North? I don't understand.”

  “North. Remember it, my baby, my most precious girl. Go north.”

  The instructions had ech
oed in her head, whether she wanted them or not, for the next two months. In the end, that was why when Elizabeth Kendall fled her uncle's house in a maid's stolen dress. With nothing more than a bag of food, some pilfered money, and a few pieces of her mother's jewelry, she went north.

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  chapter 1

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  Glasgow

  Reade MacTaggart had thought he liked Glasgow for about two weeks. It was Scottish, after all, and after his travels through the South, it was a blessing to eat food the way he liked it best, to talk with people who didn't stare when he forgot to smooth down his accent, and where he could get a proper drink or three if he was so inclined. It was a wild town, full of people displaced by the war between Edward Longshanks and the lairds of Scotland, full to bursting with people out to make their fortune, save their lives, and see what might be left after Edward of England and Robert the Bruce began their unsteady peace.

  In two weeks’ time, however, he had also found it to be cramped, dirty, and full to the brim with men who had lost one fight or another and were looking to get their own back, whatever that meant.

  All right, Aidan, I've been in the damned Lowlands since before Christmas. If you want more, I'll send you south myself and stay snug at Glen Farren for summer.

  Reade knew that his older brother hadn't asked him to go south lightly, and as the heir to the clan head, doing so might have proved costlier than Clan MacTaggart could bear.

  “It's going to have to be you, Reade, and sorry I am for it,” his older brother had said.

  “Of course, it has to be me. You'd lose your temper inside of a day, and we'd hear of you hanging off the Tower walls, wouldn't we?”

  “Just be careful. We can't spare a one of us, and much as I would love to be free of your stupid jokes, Clan MacTaggart needs you, little brother.”

  Reade had left almost as soon as word had come north of Robert the Bruce's capitulation to Longshanks. There was too much going on in the South for Clan MacTaggart to stay ignorant, and so Reade had gone.

  He had learned a great deal, guessed at some more, and the rest Aidan could figure out, Reade decided with a grin. Let his older brother do some work after Reade had been masquerading as a gallowglass and seeing the South. Blank-shield soldiers didn't have the best reputation, but they went nearly everywhere, and since people seemed to think they were universally stupid, they talked in front of them.

  No, another night, maybe two after this damnable weather clears up, and then I'll be off to the North. North and home.

  Reade was thinking that another night at the Cock and Compass would be fine, if cramped, when he heard the sound of a scuffle down an alley. Mostly, it wasn't worth a broken head to find out what was going on down Glasgow's dark alleys, but something made him turn his steps to investigate. From the volume of the sound, he expected to see two men quarreling over some insult or another, but instead, two men were menacing someone in a recessed doorway, looking incredibly irritated and angry.

  “All right now, you come out of there and give us what we asked for. We ain't going to hurt you if you do that, word of honor.”

  To Reade's surprise, a large stick came out of the doorway and swung at the two men. One dodged, but it caught the other on the shoulder, giving him a hefty blow and making him bellow.

  “Come out here right now before I take that damned stick from you and shove it in that mouth of yours!”

  “I won't!”

  “You will, and you won't like what happens if we have to make you, you little trollop!”

  Reade might still have kept going, because if he had learned one thing on his travels, it was to mind his own damn business, but the voice that defied the two men so boldly belonged to a little girl, high and piercing, and he was a lot of things, but he wasn't going to let a child get koshed about by a pair of grown men.

  This wasn't a matter for the sword at his side. Instead, he simply reached for the man closest to him, grasping him by the shoulder and swinging him into the wall so hard he dropped to his knees. The second man turned just in time to catch Reade's fist in his face, and despite himself, Reade grinned. It wasn't civilized to like the call to battle as much as he did, and he had heard far too much about warmongering Scots since coming south, but there was a grain of truth to it, at least as far as he was concerned. He never felt as alive as when he was in a fight, and when the second man roared and lunged for him, Reade laughed out loud even as he stepped out of the way and kicked hard at the man's legs.

  Might as well get all of this out while I'm away from home, I suppose...

  The man who lunged for him was bigger than he was, but far slower, and Reade had always been known for his quickness on his feet. Another few passes, and the man simply fled, his face black and blue from his encounters with Reade's fists.

  He was just turning back to the doorway that had started all of this when there was a blur of motion in the corner of his eye. The man he had stunned had not stayed stunned, and he rose up with a cobblestone in his hand, ready to crack Reade's head open.

  Reade was probably fast enough to evade his attacker, but it would have been a near thing. He was braced for the man's wild blow to connect at least glancingly with his head, to reel back and then fling himself at the man, but with a wild cry, a skinny little thing came out of the doorway, a length of wood held high.

  That's a vicious one and no mistake about it. Read blinked in surprise, and then she was swinging her makeshift club down on the man's head with a strength that seemed to belie her slender frame.

  The man was so large that for a moment, Reade thought the blow was going to bounce right off of his skull, but then, after a moment when all three of them were frozen in place, he groaned and sank first to his knees and then thumped hard to the ground.

  "Didn't expect that," Reade muttered, and then he flashed a grin at the little girl with the club.

  Not really a little girl at all, he realized belatedly, for all that she was so slender. Despite her childish squeak earlier, she had to be at least nineteen or twenty, with blue eyes that flashed like a dangerous storm.

  "Well, we should leave while the leaving's good, lass."

  To his shock, she stared into his eyes, and he felt something close around his chest, around his heart. Somehow, she had reached out an invisible hand and squeezed him tight enough that he could barely get his breath, barely breathe at all. A chill shook his body, and Reade almost took a step back in fright. There was something uncanny happening in this moment, something that would change everything.

  Then the girl toppled forward, and with a curse, Reade lunged forward to catch her before she hit the ground. She felt as light as a feather in his arms, and he found himself wondering when in the world she had last eaten.

  Reade's head jerked up when he heard shouting coming from one of the houses nearby. They mostly likely weren't friends of the gentlemen he and the girl had dispatched so very efficiently, and they may not have cared even if they were, but he hadn't lived this long and done everything that he had by taking needless chances.

  "All right, lass, I suppose we're friends for a little longer."

  It did cross his mind to stack her in some out of the way corner and take his leave, but everything in his body roared against it. He decided to call it simple human decency, because he had been in Glasgow for a while now, and he had an idea that the local street toughs would have all sorts of unsavory ideas for a girl they found unconscious.

  It was more than that, however, and he fought down the strange and eldritch sensation that had occurred when they first laid eyes on each other. Something in him, something that spoke the same language as the Northern winds and defended what it owned with teeth rather than with the sword, refused. Somehow, this girl had become his, and there was nothing in the world that was going to persuade him to let her go.

  She doesn't weigh much more than wet cat. He lifted her in his arms, making his stea
dy way down the alley and away from their attackers. As he moved, several drops of cold rain struck him. The storm that had been brewing for the last few hours had arrived. The rain went from a few bare drops to a torrent in a few moments, and Reade walked faster.

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  chapter 2

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  Elizabeth wondered at first when her bed had become so uncomfortable. In London, she had shared a bed with little Benji, and the two of them nestled deep into the goose-down mattress, cuddling up tight so that neither of them would get cold at night.

  Even her bed in her uncle's castle was luxurious, if always a little cold and oddly clammy in the perpetual Scottish drizzle.

  The bed she slept in now felt like little more than a blanket thrown over a pile of straw. She could feel the ends of the stalks poking her through her shift, and when she turned, she could feel how hard the wood beneath the padding was, bruising her shoulder and her hip.

  Well, this won't do. Benji will wake up bruised all over if he has to sleep in this.

  She sat up, aware of a chill in the air and the low glow of the embers on the hearth. Something tugged at her, told her sleepy brain that all was not well, but her mouth ran ahead of her.

  "This bed is absolutely unacceptable. I would like it changed, please."

  Two things happened at once. The first thing was that the sound of her own voice awakened her the rest of the way. She wasn't in London; she wasn't at Blaken Keep. In fact, she had no idea where she was.

  The second was that there was a movement from the chair by the fire, and as she watched with fear growing larger in her mind, a tall form rose up from the chair, reaching for the bottle of spills that were kept by the fire. The dark figure reached for one of the stalks in the bottle, lighting one end in the fire and then using it to light a candle. As the candle flame flared up, he came close to the bed.