MAD, BAD & DANGEROUS TO MARRY (The Highland Brides Book 4)

by Elizabeth Essex

  In expectation of your word, E

  Lord Ewan Cameron

  Castle Crieff

  Perthshire

  22 May, 1790

  Dearest Ewan,

  My heart is crushed with disappointment. I am fit to stomp my feet in agitation. We are obliged by the death of Mama’s mother ~ my dear grandmama the Countess of Kirdsay ~ to travel to the Northern Isles for her funeral. While I am excited about the prospect of fresh travel ~ first north to Inverness and Caithness before sailing for Wide Firth on the north side of Orkney Island ~ I fear I will not be able to meet you at Glas Maol, for unfortunately, we must leave this very morning.

  But I do delight in the honor and pleasure of naming your dog. After much thought, and careful consultation of various texts available to me here, I have decided not to take anyone else’s advice, and to consult only my own fancy. And I fancy he shall be named Gent in honor of his most gentlemanly and thoughtful master. Let me know if you approve of such, for I am sure, if pressed, I may come up with another name, though I should not like it nearly as much as I like Gent. And you must rub Gent’s head, and tell him what a good lad he is, and assure him I, too, look forward to the day that we three, along with my older lasses, Milk who is creamy buff-colored cocker, and Honey who is copper gold, will take a gambol up the hills at Crieff. We will all be the best of friends. I smile so to think how cozy we shall be.

  I wish you all the enjoyment of your stay at Crieff, and all the best for your end of terms exams. Pray save those kisses for me—I am sure I have just as many waiting for you.

  Yours, Greer

  Chapter 20

  Ewan watched from a distance as Dewar crept toward the bothy in the thin illumination of moonlight. “Lad,” the moorkeeper called into the velvet darkness. “It’s me.”

  “I’m here.” Ewan had been awake and on alert since his return from the village, and in expectation of Dewar since the moment the dog Gent first heard the auld keeper’s approach across the moor.

  Dewar swiveled toward the sound of Ewan’s voice where he had hidden behind the stonewall. “Good lad. Clever. Though it be as dark as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat, we’ve tae shift ye out of here.”

  “Aye,” Ewan answered. “I saw you, and the men you were with, riding through the forest last afternoon, and heard their talk. I’ve packed up my gear.” He passed the bundle of goods over the wall to the moorkeeper. And saw that Dewar held a gun—a heavy fowling piece, primed and loaded. “Has it come to that?”

  “Mayhap.” The auld man shook his wizened head. “If ye saw ’em and heard ’em, ye know they’re as nervous as a tinder box. Some biddy in the village swore she saw the old laird—an’ what in the devil possessed ye tae go down there in the first place?—an’ some other bloody busy-body, who don’t know how tae keep his filthy trap shut well an’ tight, sent word tae the castle. An’ that Gow—that was yer cousin’s man I rode with—come tae fetch me out tae track ye down.”

  “Do they know it’s me?”

  Dewar stopped on the path to peer at him. “An’ who the devil are ye?”

  “Ewan Cameron, Duke of Crieff.” He was sure of it now, even if he wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.

  “Devil douse the fire.” Dewar exhaled his relief. “Yer back. That changes things—”

  “Not entirely.” Ewan gave voice to his own misgivings. “I’m remembering more and more—Cat Sìth, and my friends Alasdair and Archie—but I haven’t remembered everything. I can’t remember how I got clouted over the head, or who the devil did this to me.” He had spent the better part of the night trying in vain to sort out the spate of new images that had taken up residence in his head and reckon whom he might trust.

  Dewar made a sound of disappointment between his teeth. “Ah, weel, more is more, and the rest will come. We’ll get tae someplace safe tae do the remembering.

  Relief was like a cold blanket on his heated skin. “Greer said I would be safe at Dalshee.”

  “Did she now? Clever enough lass, then.” Dewar began to lead the way up the burn toward Glas Maol. “Come on wi’ ye. I ken a spot. That Gow be a canny, suspicious man, and like as not, he’ll be up here, putting his nose where it’s no’ wanted on the morrow,” the wee auld fellow groused.

  “Aye. I didn’t like the look of him—” Something else about Dewar’s news made his awakened brain pound like a blacksmith’s anvil, beating out an alarm. “What do you mean, my cousin’s man?” The hot question burned like an ember on his tongue.

  “Aye, the devil’s in the details, isn’t he?” Dewar stepped close so he could look Ewan in the eye. “Aye, lad. The other man who rode with Gow and me—did ye recognize ’im? He’s yer cousin.”

  A cousin was family, someone to whom he was related and upon whom he might rely. But he hadn’t liked the looks of that fellow—he looked reliable in the wrong way. “The military looking man you went up the glen with?”

  “Nay, that’s Gow, yer cousin’s man. Yer cousin Malcolm’s the pretty one. Must have gone off wi’ her ladyship of Dalshee by then.”

  Another clang of alarm nearly deafened him. “Lady Greer? My Lady Greer?” Even he could hear the acid leech of jealousy in his voice.

  “No other. Though I may say, she’s got gumption, that lass—led him off pretty as ye please, though she looked none too happy. Did so to keep him away frae ye, I’m reckon. Mayhap I’ve been wrong about ’er. Mayhap she’s a good’un—she did gie ye yer dog back.”

  A different kind of relief warmed Ewan through. He had been right to trust her—she was trying to help him, though he had acted like a dunderhead in handling the revelations from the ostler. But he couldn’t seem to think fast enough to keep up with what was happening. “So Greer went with my cousin? And we’re to go to him? To Crieff?” It was all beginning to slowly come together in his less and less befuddled brain—Crieff was home, and he was Crieff.

  But Dewar was shaking his stubborn auld head. “I can’t like it, lad. There’s something crafty about the man. Something dangerous. Best tae hide fae a bit longer, until yer braw enough, and ken exactly who did this to ye.”

  It had already been a long, wearying night, and his patience was growing thinner with every hour. “I’m sick and tired of hiding—I can’t find the answers I’m looking for by hiding in a bothy like a wounded stag in the forest.”

  “Lad—”

  “I’m not a lad, so why should I hide like one?”

  “Hell mend ye.” The auld man seized Ewan up by his shirtfront in a surprisingly strong grip. “What good has going out there, into the world, done ye? Ye’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest ’o trouble, or did ye not understand that those men today meant ye no good? Are ye ready tae act? To protect yerself? Are ye? Yer no good tae us—to Crieff, nor Dalshee, nor that lass ye fancy—if yer no’ yerself. Ye need mor’n just yer understanding of the past, lad. Ye need yer full wits so’s ye can see in tae the future. Ye need tae be able tae lead the way, not just follow yer scanty remembrances, and ye can’t even remember yer own cousin, nor yer own damn dog.” Dewar let go of his shirtfront and poked a hard finger into his chest. “Look around ye—these are wild, unforgiving hills, lad. The mountains have ears as well as eyes. No’ for the faint o’ heart, nor the feeble o’ mind.”

  There it was, said out loud—his greatest fear laid bare.

  He was feeble-minded.

  Not just forgetful or injured or temporarily crack-brained. Feeble.

  And likely to stay that way forevermore.

  He felt gutted by the possibility.

  “Ye’d do well tae think on what I’ve told ye, lad,” Dewar intoned like an oracle. “Until ye ken—until ye understand tae the back of yer bones—what it means tae be Crieff, ye’ll do well tae stay put and do as I say.”

  “Aye,” was all Ewan could manage. “Come, Gent.” He patted his leg, and the dog came without question, loyal to him no matter the diminished state of his mind—loyal even if he seemed to have forgotten the wee creature’s plac
e in his prior life.

  They made their slow, careful, silent way across the dark moor to fetch up at a high mountain bothy in the wee small hours of the morning.

  “We’ll rest now,” Dewar ordered. “And in the morn, I’ll see what’s what.”

  “Aye.” Ewan dutifully laid himself down on the pallet, but he got little sleep and less rest. His mind would not stop whirring like a broken clockwork, aswirl with shifting images and words. And behind the turmoil was the looming fear that he was never going to be able to recover himself fully enough to meet Dewar’s requirements to resume his responsibilities. That this half-life, this shadow existence on the moor, was all he could expect.

  That he would never again be himself—the man he was supposed to be. The man who could woo Lady Greer Douglas for his own.

  He took what little comfort he could in kind familiarity of the soft sleeping dog curled up against his side, and stared at the low ceiling until dawn, which came blistering pink over the mountains to the east.

  Dewar woke soon thereafter, and as if sensing Ewan’s bitter frustration, took a more hopeful tone. “You sit tight, lad. We’ll see this through, see if we don’t. Sit tight and take the day as it comes.”

  Ewan intended to do as he was told. But as daylight came, the forced idleness was more than either he, or the wee dog, could bear.

  “Come, Gent.” Ewan took a tall walking stick with a horned handle, as well as a collapsible stalking spyglass from the peg next to the door and headed up the nearest peak to exercise his frustration and keep his broken mind occupied with something other than its failures.

  He was already so high up on Dalshee’s mountains that the way quickly grew progressively rockier, until there was nothing underfoot but the granite tor. With only the stick for purchase, he was obliged to crawl, taking to the steep rock face on hands and knees as low and stealthy as if he were stalking a stag. Just as he had done countless times before—the corridors at Crieff were lined with antlers mounted on plaques that told the story of where each stag was taken and when.

  He closed his eyes to see them high on the walls—the inscriptions written in ink in his grandfather’s hand. The trophy at the end of the corridor with his own name, and the date he had taken his first stag at the age of fourteen. The same year he had gotten betrothed.

  But to whom remained a devastating blank. All he could see, when he thought of a woman, was his lass, his Greer.

  He could see no other.

  Ewan gave into the press of gravity and lay flat against the solid foundation of the rock, letting the wind roughened granite bite into his skin, trying to force his mind to go where it clearly did not want to venture. He sprawled there so long that Gent was impelled to scratch his way up to burrow beneath him and lick his face into some semblance of liveliness.

  And there it was—the memory was like a raindrop sluicing under his collar, making him squirm with the knowledge. This was his dog—gifted by his friend Alasdair as a puppy when he had been lonely for home, for the open moorland of Crieff, in St. Andrews.

  He had forgotten his own dog—devil take him if he had forgotten a wife.

  Ewan clutched the wee dog to him and fought against the unsettling vertigo of another piece of the puzzle that was his life falling into place without revealing the picture it painted. He took a deep breath and ruffled the dog’s ears and took stock of how far he had come from the medieval halls of St. Andrews to the mountaintop in but a few weeks of accumulated experience to make sense of the memories.

  Dewar was right—for all his protests that he was a man grown, he was as helpless as a newborn babe.

  But a babe could learn—for Crieff’s sake if nothing else.

  Ewan put the spyglass to his eye. In the misty cool of the early morning, the Dalshee bothy looked wee and unsubstantial—as diminished as he felt. In the foggy distance to the east he found the low, regular chimney tops of a Palladian estate, all balanced symmetry and peaceful refinement—Dalshee, he guessed, where his lass lived and where she had asked him to go.

  But how could he? Of all the unanswered questions and problems with his past the one that loomed larger than all others was that he had told the ostler he was about to be married. An event, and a person, of whom he had no recollection.

  All he could remember of the day the ostler had told him about was the penny in his palm—and he still had no idea what that meant either.

  Ewan turned the glass to the south, toward the long cool slice of the upland loch and the silvered curve of the glen under Glas Maol, and spotted a rider picking his way toward the bothy he and Dewar had abandoned only last night.

  A rider with a pistol drawn.

  Ewan’s hands went suddenly slick, and he had to steady the glass on his knee.

  It was not just any rider. And not just any horse—the big black stallion with the star on his chest the ostler had mentioned so particularly. Cat Sìth.

  Recognition was like a punch to his chest—a furious mixture of rage and pride and longing. That was his horse. Being ridden by the man who had ridden with Dewar yesterday—Gow, his cousin’s man. Doing exactly as Dewar had predicted—putting his nose where it wasn’t wanted.

  Riding his horse.

  Possessiveness kindled a low, smoldering rage—that was his horse. And hell mend him if he was going to sit obediently and wait and watch another man take anything more of his.

  He refocused the glass to follow the man’s slow, uneven progress up the glen. Gow had to work like mad to keep Cat Sìth in check—the normally biddable horse was everything fractious and ill-behaved, sidling and jibing under Gow’s heavy hand and heavier spurs.

  Ewan felt the unfamiliar hand of anger take hold of him—his breath grew tight and sulfurous with rage. He wanted to throttle the bastard for such abuse.

  So when Gow turned westward into the heart of Crieff land, Ewan rose and followed, drawn down the mountainside as if he were strung upon a pulley, and Cat Sìth were the counter weight. Where they went, Ewan was compelled to follow. Compelled to find what else was his.

  He took the descent at a run—pausing at the bothy only to bid the obedient dog to stay, before he headed west across the moorland. Even at a low run his legs burned and his lungs were straining for air—repairing the wall had recovered some of his strength, but the devil would have taken him straight down to hell if he had had to run up the moor instead of down.

  He stalked Gow as if he were the deer, following him at a distance, until at last, Gow manhandled the stallion over a rise. And there, at the foot of the hill was a grey, crenellated stone castle that rose like a cliff out of the granite hillside. Crieff.

  Exactly as Ewan had seen it in his mind’s eye. If he closed his eyes now, he could see the view from the battlements and feel the wind blowing up the glen on his cheeks. His grandfather would take him up there to show him the lay of the land—how the burn that flowed past the castle nourished the farmland that spread out like a patchwork blanket in the strath below, and how all this—the burn and the brae, the moor and the glens and the widening strath—was Crieff.

  His home. His—he was Crieff.

  Loss and longing fought with his fear. Fear of what he would find there. Fear of what—and whom—he had forgotten.

  Caution kept him hidden amongst the tall fir trees until Gow marched away from the stable, and the place descended into a calm quiet. But still, Ewan took care to make haste slowly, approaching the stable yard by stealth, pausing to listen for any unfamiliar sound.

  In the wide doorway, the sweet scent of horse and leather and hay rushed at him like a friend, bringing the memories with it—there on the right was his first pony’s stall. And above, in the loft, was where he had sneaked his first cheroot, not thinking of the danger of the flammable hay, only to be tanned to within an inch of his life by the stable master as his grandfather looked on.

  And there, at the end of the stalls, with his tall, proud neck arching over the door, was Cat Sìth. His horse. His.

>   Ewan walked toward the stallion as if he were in a fever dream, the images and sounds and experience coalescing into memory, into the very fabric of who he was. The station tossed his head and stamped his great hooves when Ewan drew near, but in another moment the animal lowered his head to take a deep suspicious snort of air. And then the great wee beastie let out a low, plaintive nicker, as if to chide Ewan for ever having left him.

  “I know, lad. I know.” He buried his face in his animal’s broad neck, leaning into the comforting breadth of his chest, soaking up the stallion’s power and strength and remembrance as if it were a balm that might heal him through.

  “Fuck me blind.” A groom—Angus, Ewan recalled with sudden clarity—appeared in the aisle and crossed himself. “Is it really you then, Laird?”

  Caution warred with pride and longing—longing to be remembered. Longing to be at home. But there was nothing he could give but the truth. “It is.” Of this he was sure.

  “Then yer no’ dead.”

  “No,” he answered quietly. “I never was.” But he was not comfortable either—home or no, the place felt dangerous. He needed to comfort and protection of the open air. “I’ll walk him cool,” he said, referring to his horse, whose sides were still marked with sweat and the chafing of Gow’s heavy spurs.

  But he had still not discovered what he had come so far to find out. “Who—” He struggled with the words. “Who is living here, now?”

  “Hisself, Malcolm Cameron, Laird Ewan.”

  “And my wife?”

  Angus’s wide face was blank. “Ye died afore ye could be married to the heiress of Dalshee, Laird.”

  Ewan felt a blistering bolt of hope. “Dalshee? Lady Greer of Dalshee.”

  “Aye, Laird.”

  The rush of relief was like whisky in his blood, so strong and so intoxicating he could barely feel his feet upon the ground. He took the lead rope from the groom’s hand, as well as a towel to rub the beastie dry, and led Cat Sìth out of the stable as if he were walking upon the mist.