Aidan grinned, and for the first time in a long time, he felt something in himself open, melt like ice into water. He delayed long enough to give her one last kiss, but then he had to turn and return to his people.
She was home, and she was his.
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chapter 38
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Margaret watched Aidan go, and it felt as if everything in her life had changed again. There had been a few times in her past where everything had tilted, and suddenly, the path in front of her looked nothing like what she had thought would be there. One of those times had been when she had opened the door to her mother's cottage and saw Aidan sitting there. Another time had, of course, been when his father had appeared, and another when her own father had appeared.
Is everyone's life like this? Do we all find ourselves full of hope and wonder at what we may be allowed, finally forgiven and finally true?
She hugged herself, as if she could barely keep her feelings of hope and sweetness from bursting through her. If someone happened by to see her right now, they would have found her glowing like the moon itself.
Margaret took a deep breath, shaking her head. She was being a fool. If anyone came upon her right now, they would probably think she was some sort of crazed witch. Her clothes were rumpled to rags, and her hair hung down around her shoulders.
With a sigh, she pulled her hair down, combing it out with her fingers in preparation for braiding it up again, and then she heard a low laugh.
“Why don't you leave it down for me, darling? I've always thought it was one of your best features.”
And just like that, the world shifted again, and she thought she would be sick.
He was a shape in the darkness, descending from higher up the ridge as if he was born to these slopes. She couldn't make out his features, but her mind filled them in anyway, even if she would rather have left him a dark blank.
It was Harry Stratham, and the moment he came within striking distance, she lunged for him, cursing the fact that she had no weapon, nothing to hurt him as much as she wanted to hurt him.
She might have bested him in the closed quarters of Maras Castle, but on level ground when he saw her coming, her chances were far smaller. Margaret had a moment to relish getting a solid blow in to his chin, and then Harry had her by both wrists, twisting one arm behind her back even as he brought her hard against his body.
“Hair down and your barbarian going so happily down toward his flock? I can guess what you've been up to, pretty Margaret.”
“Don't touch me,” Margaret snarled, faintly pleased that her voice didn't shake. She wasn't some quivering English girl to simply bear his ham-fisted attempts at flirting. She had remembered who she was, and she refused to go quietly.
“Oh, don't worry. Unlike your Highlander, I'm not one for rutting in the dark. No. When I have you, we will be in a proper bed, a place with a locked door and very... thick... walls.”
His lips were right in her ear when he said that, and Margaret wanted to spit at him, to bite and claw, but then he twisted her arm harder behind her back.
“You have led me quite a chase, Margaret. I would almost think that you were a witch who cast a spell over me, but I know better. You are simply a beautiful woman who will be mine, who should be mine. I will bring you home, set you up, and...”
She shook her head. No matter how hard she strained, no matter how she pulled away from him, she could not break free. Instead, she went still, and she listened, her breath harsh in her ears.
“Why in the world do you want me so much?” she gasped.
He laughed.
“Because you are beautiful, and because you would have chosen the damn Highlander over me. It was cruel of you to run with him, you know. I might have borne it better if you had run off with an Englishman, but not a Scot. You might as well have run off with a badger in a hole or a fish in the sea.”
Margaret's belly turned over. Harry was like a little boy who could never bear it if someone had something he thought his by right, even if he didn't want it. The terrifying part was that there were plenty in England who thought like that, and she wanted to scream.
“He's had me,” Margaret said suddenly. “We've... we've made love. Many times...”
Quick as a kicking horse, Harry spun her around and slapped her heavily on the face, once and twice.
“There now. That should shut up your harlot's mouth. As I said, there will be much to pay for when you return to England with me. But first we need to settle here. Look up the ridge, Margaret.”
Her face still stinging from his blows, she did, and she stared. There were glints of metal along the ridge, moonlight bouncing off of mail, swords, and arrowheads.
“How many?” she whispered in horror.
“Enough. Certainly, enough to butcher the people down there.”
“But the peace!”
Another unpleasant laugh, but this time, he did not answer her.
“I don't fancy having your Highlander come after you again, so let us make a deal, shall we? You make it very clear that you do not want to be followed. Make him angry. Make him leave. And we will not kill his loved ones down there. These Highlanders are very attached to their peasants, though Heaven only knows why. Surely, one little lie is worth his happiness?”
Margaret wanted to shout at him that it wasn't like that. The clan was a family, and though Aidan's rule might be absolute in wartime, during the peace, he was more like a protector. He cared about his clan, and if anything happened that hurt a single one of them, he would never forgive himself.
“And you swear you won't harm anyone? We'll just go?”
Harry smiled, handsome and sated now that he had gotten his way.
“We will. I have chased you for too long to put off the moment I bed you. If it wasn't for that letter in that smoking ruin of a house, I might never have thought to come so far north.”
At first, Margaret had no idea what he was talking about, and then she realized that Catherine must have left a message of some sort, telling her husband where his family had gone. Her heart sank even as she nodded with weary understanding.
“All right,” she said dully. “I understand.”
Harry beamed at her as if she had said she loved him and wanted to spend the rest of her days with him. For all she knew, she had. Harry, she was coming to realize, lacked some important part that made other people warm. He was cold, all the way through, and he ran on pride and acquisition.
“Good girl,” he said, giving her a kiss on the lips. When she struggled and finally fought her way free, spitting on the ground to get the taste of him out of her mouth, he only laughed again.
“I'll be waiting from beyond the rise,” he said, “And I will be listening. At the first sign that you are trying to tell him what has happened, I swear that I will put an arrow through his throat.”
All signs of merriment and joking slid away from Harry, and Margaret recoiled. For all that he was so handsome, there was something monstrous about him, and she had no idea how she had never seen it before.
“I will remember,” she managed to get out.
He smiled at her.
“Good.”
He disappeared back up the ridge, and this time, now that she was no longer so stunned over the pleasures she had shared with Aidan, she wondered at how she could miss him. He could be as clumsy as a mule when he wasn't on the battleground.
She tried to keep on thinking of that and things like it. She didn't dare let her thoughts settle for too long one way or another. If she did, she risked bursting into tears, and that would mean the end for Aidan and all the people he loved so fiercely.
Margaret sat down in the shelter of the stone, letting its cold seep into her. She knew that just beyond the rise were men who were poised to swoop down and take everything from her, and not just from her but from the people who were celebrating so very innocently below.
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chapter 39
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Aidan was pleased enough to be summoned down to the festival to taste the newly uncorked meads that the clan brewers had been aging for two years, but even as he sipped some of the passing fine honey alcohol, he wanted to be gone, back up the mountain and in the dark with Margaret.
If he thought too much of the time they had lost due to his father's short-sighted cruelty, he would go looking for a fight, so he didn't. Instead, he thought about what he would say to Margaret, how he would convince her that she was no duty and no burden. She was the woman he loved, and a part of him relaxed just from thinking it. His heart and his instincts had known long before his mind ever did, and when he acknowledged it, it let him breathe for the first time in what felt like years.
I loved her back then, too, but Heaven and saints, I love her so much more now. I love who she has become, I love how brave she is, and I love everything about her.
Aidan pulled himself together long enough to help judge the meads, and then there was a dance with an old woman wrapped in a shawl, whose eyes snapped bright fire, and who at the end, tapped his shoulder with a hard knuckle.
“Now, dancing isn't something you do with the old, my dear,” she said sternly. “You find some girl to dance with you. Why not the one you've been trying so hard to avoid, hmm?”
Aidan winced.
“So very obvious?”
“For those as have eyes, yes. And she's not the kind you can keep on a string forever, Laird MacTaggart. Sooner or later, she will leave you if you don't give her enough reason to stay.”
As irritated as Aidan might be about his clan deciding that they needed to know everything about his life, he had to say that she was probably right. He and Margaret had been fencing back and forth for too long about what they meant to each other, and it was past time for them to sweep away the nonsense and do what they should have done ages ago, to take what should have been theirs so long ago.
Aidan remembered her smile when she said that she would wait for him at the top of the hill. There was too much to do, but there always would be. There would always be a harvest or a blizzard or a battle. He remembered being told once that the only thing that was granted for certain sure was that very moment.
Aidan stayed long enough to keep his clan from gossiping, and then at the first moment he could, he went back up the slope. Along the way, he could hear giggles from the darkness, other men and women who had found the darkness and the mead too enticing to resist. There would likely be babies born nine months from now, right into the heat of summer. Aidan imagined what Margaret might look like with a baby at the breast and the feeling sent a sweetness through him that he had never thought himself capable of before.
I would have thought that part of me was killed off during the worst of the fighting.
When he returned to the spot he had left, Aidan at first thought she had gone on without him, returned to the castle or to the dancing and somehow, he had missed her. Then she stood up from the stone, so quickly that she might have been a wraith.
“Meggie, there you are!”
“Don't touch me.”
Aidan froze, hand still reaching for her. He felt as if he had run into a cold wall of frost, something that would flay the skin off of him if he was not careful.
“Margaret...”
“Please don't touch me.”
The iciness of her voice stopped him. It was nothing he had ever heard before, nothing that had anything to do with the passion they had shared just a short while ago. Even when they fought, she had never felt so very distant.
“This has been an enormous mistake on my part,” Margaret continued. “One that I refuse to continue making.”
“You don't mean that. Margaret, if this is about what my father said...”
“No!” Her voice was like the crack of a whip. “No. This is about what my father said.”
“Your father?”
“Yes. He came riding up north like a hero ready to fight a dragon, and one of the first things he said to me was that I was too fine to spend the rest of my life in a cow byre with the barbarians.”
If Aidan were honest with himself, he had spent more time wondering what that first interaction was like than he wanted to think about. He had wondered what that English lord had said to Margaret that sent her south, whether the man had been coercive or bullying.
He had never thought that the English lord might have brought her away from her people with anything like flattery, not outside of his darkest moments. He could feel a cold rage rising up in himself, and even as he tried to push it away, it found its way into his lungs, his voice, even his heart.
“And what did you say to him?”
“I said he was wrong. I said that I loved my life. I loved my family. That is what I said. Even then, I knew in my heart that he was right. I was born for better than this, Aidan.”
She paused, and there was a difficulty there that somehow brought it all home. This wasn't some childish panic or some erroneous belief. This was something that she wanted to deny and couldn't. It sent a wave of rage through Aidan's body, and this time he did grab her by the shoulders, only at the last moment stopping from giving her a shake.
“You don't mean that...”
He wanted her to shout at him, to hit him, to do something that told him that there was still something there to convince, something he could argue with. Instead. Margaret was as still as a statue in his hands, and when she looked up at him, her face was perfectly still. There were no tears, no anger in her eyes. Instead, there was only a kind of sorrow and disdain, and that convinced him the way her passion never would. Even when they were fighting, Margaret had a deep fire inside her. Now that fire was gone as if it had never been, and Aidan dropped his hands from her shoulders in shock.
“And what happens now?” he asked, his voice hollow in his own ears.
Margaret shook her head.
“I just... I just want to be done with this. I want to see my mother. I can ask someone else to take me there. And then... And then I suppose I will go home.”
For some reason, the word home struck Aidan like a kick to the gut. All his life, he had known where home was, and in the last little while, he had thought it might mean the same place to Margaret. It told him, more than anything else could, that there was nothing to be said any longer.
He stepped back from her, wondering if the cold that settled into him now would ever dissipate, shaking his head. There were a thousand things he wanted to say to her, but right now, he couldn't imagine saying anything at all.
He turned from her and walked down the slope.
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chapter 40
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Margaret held her breath as Aidan walked away from her down the slope. Somewhere in the celebration, she could hear fiddle music and the beat of a hand drum. The world that could have been hers, should have been hers, seemed to call to her, and she squeezed her eyes tight against it.
She didn't dare cry. If she did, she might betray everything to Aidan, and then?
Then he would get himself killed.
There were a half-dozen plans in her head, ways that she could get herself away from Harry, come back to Aidan and to Clan MacTaggart, but then, a few moments after Aidan had disappeared down the path, Harry appeared again.
"That was terrible to watch," he said. "I am glad for both our sakes that it is over."
Margaret hadn't meant to say anything at all, but that was too much.
"It was cruel," she said angrily. "Are there not enough women in all of England to satisfy you?"
"Not when I want you," he said with a grin, and she felt her stomach sink at what a terrible man he was.
No, I would not wish him on the women of England any more than I would wish him on myself. I must be the one to bear him. I must be the one to survive him.
Mar
garet wanted to be defiant in the face of Harry's victory, but she knew that it would be empty. All he had to do was to threaten the peace that had been found by Clan MacTaggart, and she would cave to him.
It was better by far to be agreeable, until... until she could do something. Surely, there was something she could do, some way to save herself without risking the man she loved.
Harry, now that he had won, seemed inclined to be courtly. He offered her his arm as if they were at a country dance, and when she took it, he smiled at her.
All over again, she was struck by how handsome he was and how easily he could fool someone who only spent a short time with him. She felt as if she were the only one in all the world who understood his brutality, the cruelty he was capable of, and she swallowed hard.
"You have led me on a merry chase, Margaret," he whispered in her ear. "Do you know that is something you must not do to a hunger or to a real man? When he catches you, he needs to make sure that the chase was worth it, that the prize he takes will be something worthy of the effort he has put into pursuing it."
Abruptly, he pulled her to his side, careless of whether it made her trip. She stumbled against him, her hand going out to steady herself, and she knew it was only his support that prevented her from falling flat on her face onto the stony ground.
"Other men, lesser men, might be worried about whether you were worth all the trouble of coming to find you. Other men might have given up. No. I am not like them. I know that you will be worth the time and effort that I have put into coming so far north and into finding you."
"How could you know that?"
He smiled at her, and for the first time, she wondered if there was something more than a little mad about it.
"Because I will make you worthy. As long as it takes. As difficult as it is. I have broken the wildest horses to my hand, pretty Margaret, and I cannot imagine that you are going to be any different. Why, after your time with the barbarian Highlander, I imagine I shall have a much easier time of it."
The Highlander’s Lost Bride (The Highlands Warring Scottish Romance) (A Medieval Historical Romance Book) Page 18
