the highlander’s lost bride
the highlands warring
scottish romance
a medieval historical romance book
* * *
anne
morrison
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by
Anne Morrison
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Table of Contents
Copyright
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chapter 1
chapter 2
chapter 3
chapter 4
chapter 5
chapter 6
chapter 7
chapter 8
chapter 9
chapter 10
chapter 11
chapter 12
chapter 13
chapter 14
chapter 15
chapter 16
chapter 17
chapter 18
chapter 19
chapter 20
chapter 21
chapter 22
chapter 23
chapter 24
chapter 25
chapter 26
chapter 27
chapter 28
chapter 29
chapter 30
chapter 31
chapter 32
chapter 33
chapter 34
chapter 35
chapter 36
chapter 37
chapter 38
chapter 39
chapter 40
chapter 41
chapter 42
chapter 43
chapter 44
chapter 45
epilogue
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Publisher Notes
chapter 1
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November 1302
Maras Castle, England
“You must know, Margaret, that you have no choice in the matter.”
Margaret Barton was silent. The tall and willowy young woman sat as straight as a marble saint in her chair, her back ramrod straight, her chin up. Her dark hair was braided but not covered, and her pale bare hands held her embroidery hoop and her needle lay quietly in her lap.
Show him no fear. He expects fear, or worse, gratitude, and he will have nothing from me.
When she made no response, a dark cloud crossed the newly-made Earl of Norwich's face. Harry Stratham was handsome, blond-haired and broad-shouldered, tanned from his time in the saddle and with a ready boyish grin that had charmed more than his share of serving girls and traders' daughters. Most of them never saw the darkness that Margaret knew lived at the heart of the young nobleman; she guessed that the ones who had glimpsed it were too afraid to speak of it. If they could speak at all afterward.
“I know that you are not so cold as you pretend,” he said, his tone cajoling. “With that hot Scots blood of yours, you'll find some joy in it, better than a girl of pure British blood might.”
Margaret couldn't stop from showing her surprise from crossing her face, which made Harry grin. In the flickering light of the hearth, his face seemed to twist into something dark and devilish, something that resembled more the carved gargoyles on the abbey walls than the face of an English knight.
“Did you think your father was rich and powerful enough to quell all of the rumors? Even he wasn't so powerful. I know, and I will not shame you for it, darling. It can be our little secret, something that perhaps we'll talk about of a long winter's evening. You can tell me about everything you've always wanted to do, everything you've been too ashamed to reveal. There's no shame with me, Margaret. I hope you know that.”
This was the first time he had been so very blunt, Margaret realized with some unease. He had hinted before. He had insinuated, in his nasty way. He had implied, even when they lit the candles for her own father's funeral some six weeks ago.
This was far more direct, and she was beginning to have the sneaking sensation that he would not be put off by her silence or her pretending ignorance.
Margaret stood to her full height. She was almost as tall as he was, though far slenderer, and she lifted her chin up proudly, as her father had always taught her to do. There was no trace of a Scottish accent in her voice, and she did not falter when she spoke.
“I'm afraid, my lord, that I do not know what you are talking about. You have caught me as I was just finishing my needlework. I will bid you good night, as I am going to my bed.”
Her tone was like the ice that gathered on the steep roof of the main hall on a cold winter's night. Her dark eyes were the howl of the wind. She bowed her head with the barest courtesy that a young woman should show to a lord, and she stepped around him.
For a moment, Margaret thought that she had put him off for another night. She would have another day, maybe another handful of days to figure out what in the world she was going to do about this, to plot how she was going to stay out of his hands and his bed.
She was reaching for the door when, with a deep sound that was more like a growl than anything human, he seized her hard by the shoulder and spun her around. She was caught unprepared, and he was able to pin one flailing arm and slam her back against the door. For a moment, Margaret was breathless, but before she could open her mouth to scream, Harry was kissing her, his foul mouth sealed over hers, his scent in her nostrils, his body pinning her to the wooden door.
“Here,” he whispered into her mouth. “You like it, don't you? Of course, you do. You were made for this, little half-blood. You'd let me do it in the yard if you didn't think your noble father would turn in his grave.”
His words filled her with a kind of fury she had never felt, too hot and too raging to allow fear into her frame. She struggled against him, trying to lift her knee to drive it into his groin, but he had pressed his thigh between her legs, pinning her to where her feet were almost off the ground. When she realized that she could feel his manhood grow hard against her thigh, Margaret felt almost lightheaded with disgust.
“Can you feel what you do to me? By Heaven, I swear you are the devil's witch to enchant me so.”
His mouth slobbered its way down to her ear, making a full-body shudder run through her. She knew too well how this night was going to end if she didn't do something, and she knew it would only be the start. She had to get away from him, and she had to do it now.
Think. It is the only advantage you have over
this lust-addled monster right now. Think, think!
She realized that while one hand was pinned above her head, somehow the other was still free. She had been beating at him ineffectually with her embroidery hoop but dangling from that hoop was still her steel needle. She went still, working the needle from the thread into her fingers.
Harry must have thought that she meant to given in, because his free hand came down to close on her breast, so hard that she cried out.
“You like that, I knew you would...”
She didn't pay any attention to his foul words. Instead, she put the needle, steel and as long as her little finger, in place. She knew getting to Harry's eye was unlikely, so she went for the hand that was holding her wrist instead, taking a hard grip on the needle's shaft and driving up as hard as she could without looking.
The response was sudden and gratifying. Harry let go of her immediately, and when he pulled away, he took the needle with him. She saw with some pleasure that she had driven it squarely under the nail of his thumb somehow, and dark beads of blood were welling up around it.
He was shouting her name, shouting all kinds of foul threats, but it didn't matter. She was out of his arms, away from him, and she lifted her skirts and ran out of the room.
Maras Castle had stopped feeling like home after her father died. Now the long halls and grave tapestries felt more like a trap than anything else, and she thought that if she didn't get out, get some honest wind on her face, she would go insane.
She didn't bother to go for her cloak or her heavy boots. Instead she ran from the main keep into the courtyard. The cold rain sleeting down was like a hard slap, but it meant she was no longer in Harry's arms, and that was all she could want, all she needed. For a moment, she let the water strike her bare head, but then she turned toward the humble chapel in the west yard.
The chapel was a beautiful little building, the work of her father's wife, whom she had never met. It had stood empty for almost two years now, since kindly Father Roland had died, and she and her father had taken their service in the village. The local abbey had not found a replacement that it and her father had agreed upon, and then, of course, it was too late.
Margaret was too distraught to question the fact that there was already a candle lit at the altar. Instead, she stumbled into the holy shelter with a murmur of bone-deep gratitude. Out of instinct and long habit, she made her way to the front of the chapel, where she and her father had sat every Sunday.
She sat on the hard wooden bench, her hands clasped in front of her. She didn't know what was going to happen next, but the only important thing was that she was no longer with Harry, no longer suffering his hands on her, listening to his terrible words.
“You make a pretty picture there, your hair all aglow in the candlelight, but perhaps you already know it.”
Her body jerked like a fish on the line at the low rough words, but before she understood them, she heard the sway of the vowels, the burr and the lilt together, and her heart cried out home.
Margaret's head snapped up, and the man who stepped out of the darkness was tall and broad. His clothes were still damp, showing that he had come out of rain just as she had, but he wasn't wearing a cloak, allowing her to see the breadth of his shoulders, the narrowness of his hips. She couldn't quite make out his features in the dim light of the chapel, but she knew that his hair would be as black as sin and there would be a scar under his eye.
“Aidan MacTaggart,” she whispered.
He's grown up, filled out, fulfilled the promise of what I always knew he would become.
He came to sit on the pew next to her as if he had done so every Sunday, but there was no hint of a smile on his face, nothing of the loving young man she had known almost a decade ago.
“Hello, Meggie. What in the name of hell did ye call me for?”
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chapter 2
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Aidan came to the woods by Maras Castle just a little after sunset. He was two weeks from home, two weeks that he could ill-afford as the laird of Clan MacTaggart, he was sick of the lowlands and of the English, and if he had half an excuse to turn his horse around and start north again, he would have done so.
Of course, he didn't.
If he could have done that, he would never have come south in the first place, traveling through the country that he and his people had so recently been at war with, keeping his mouth shut so his accent didn't give him away, and doing his best not to take offense at every slur he heard about the North.
Aidan had cursed himself for a fool when he opened that letter instead of burning it as it deserved, and he cursed himself again now as he considered the castle. It was smaller than Doone Castle, the ancestral seat of Clan MacTaggart, but while it would likely hold out well against a raid, it wasn't alert enough to keep out one determined man.
He had been afraid that he might have to try to scale the wall, but instead, under the cover of the driving rain, he was able to make his way in through the small bailey gate. During times of trouble, it would be blocked off with a load of rubble from above, preventing entry or exit, but now the gate's latch was rusted and snapped when he thrust a heavy branch into it and pushed. Aidan held back a dark laugh as the gate swung in.
Heaven help the English if the Bruce ever decides to go on the attack instead of simply wanting to hold what is ours.
He made his way like a shadow through the bailey, staying close to the wall and going as still a statue whenever the guards came by to make their rounds. They seemed unused to it, and he remembered that in the village they had been talking about the newly-made Earl of Norwich, who had brought his own men from the South.
That'd be Margaret's new protector. Aidan shrugged off how poorly that idea sat on him. If she hadn't called him down from the North, he'd never be any the wiser, and none of this would have been his problem.
The chapel was obviously overgrown and deserted, and when he tried the door, it wasn't even locked. The only window was high above the door, so he reckoned it safe enough to light one of the dusty beeswax candles he discovered in a box under the altar. The entire place was nothing but dust and ash, which suited Aidan's purposes well enough. He stripped off his cloak and made his way to the small cell at the back of the chapel, where the friar himself would have lived. It was a bare little room, but there was a peg to hang his cloak on and a cot to rest on, at least for a while.
It was risky to be here, right under the Englishmen's very noses, but it would serve, at least for what he needed. He would come, reassure himself that Margaret was fine, and return to his proper place in the North.
In the silence of the chapel, with the rain rattling on the slate tiles overhead, the ridiculousness of his situation caught up with him. He was the Laird of Clan MacTaggart, responsible for every member of his bloodline and the land that they had held for centuries. Last year, Robert the Bruce had declared a tentative peace with Edward of England, and by all rights, he should be in the North, working his holdings, protecting his people, and seeing to the responsibilities that were uniquely his. He was lucky that his younger brother Reade had been at home and ready step up to look over things in his place, and where Reade might be too flighty to keep an eye on things, his new bride Elizabeth would steady them.
Even with Reade and Elizabeth keeping an eye on things at Doone Castle, there was no reason for the Laird of Clan MacTaggart to be in England, no reason for him to be hiding in a castle, no reason at all.
Except for a beautiful young girl with dark red hair and eyes the color of good whiskey, who had bound her hand to his and held them in the smoke of a campfire and called it their wedding day. He had told himself that he had forgotten her and that none of it mattered anymore. It had been eight years since they had last seen each other, long enough for both of them to have married and to have had several children, long enough for the world to change around them until the line between the Highlands and En
gland had been drawn in blood instead of with stone walls.
Aidan pushed those old memories away, because they would not serve him now. They had already brought him south, and even now, he knew that they would be the death of him if he let them have their way.
His heart still beat faster at the idea of being so close to Meggie Barton, but he ignored it. He wasn't the same raw youth he had been at twenty-two, and he knew she wouldn't be the same sweet eighteen-year-old who had stolen his heart at the ford.
I should get some rest for a few hours. I can go looking for her when the keep is properly asleep.
Aidan knew that he shouldn't have come at all, but at the very least, he could make his sojourn fast.
But you still came, an irritating voice in the back of his head pointed out.
He had, and he could only hope that it wouldn't spell disaster for himself and everyone he cared about.
That was when he had heard the door to the chapel open and close again, and before he even saw her face, he knew. There was something about Margaret Barton that he knew as well as he knew the edge of his sword or the walls of Doone Castle, and that was her.
His first instinct was to rush out of the shadows and to take her in his arms again, as if no time had passed at all, but that instinct had brought him south out of the mountains, and he wasn't so very inclined to listen to it at the moment.
Instead, he studied her from his hidden spot, watching as she came closer to the altar to take a seat at the front pew.
She was and wasn't the girl he remembered. She was twenty-six now, with a woman's grace and bearing. She had filled out some, but there was still a legginess to her stride and a proud tilt to her head, even if she was shaking in her light slippers. She wore a heavy blood-red gown of English design, fitted to a nicety and with long and draping sleeves that she surely could not work in, but perhaps she didn't need to work any longer. There was a gold chain around her neck, delicate, but he had some idea of how many cattle it could buy, and the number was not a small one.
She looked as if she’d had bad fright, sitting with her head bowed at the pew, and without thinking, Aidan stepped out of the shadows.
The Highlander’s Lost Bride (The Highlands Warring Clan Mactaggarts Book 2) Page 1
