Sue-Ellen Welfonder

by Master of the Highlands

  Nella of the Marsh burst out of the pend just then, disheveled and breathing hard, her face red from exertion. Nigh collapsing against the side of one of the lean-to buildings, she appeared to inhale great gulping breaths of air.

  Catching Iain’s eye, she lifted her hands and began shaking her head, but Iain paid her scant heed. Furious at the danger Madeline had put herself in, he tore across the blood-slick cobbles, reaching her in the selfsame instant she hurled herself at the miscreant carrying her father.

  “Mercy of God, woman, what are you about here?” he roared, plucking her off the bastard. “Did I not tell you to stay put at the forge?!”

  Wriggling free, she ignored him, launching herself anew at the blackguard holding her father. “Would you have sat fast? Helpless and not knowing what was happening?” she shot back, pulling her father from the other man’s arms.

  “Well?” she snapped, her tone so like his own when riled, he almost forgot his ire. Cradling the old man’s thin body against her own, she glared at him, her eyes blazing defiance. “I told you Drummond women are known for their tempers.”

  Her chin lifting a notch, she added, “We also descend from a long line of warrior women.”

  And looking at her, Iain didn’t doubt it for a minute. But then the anger seemed to drain out of her and she clutched her father tight, more loving daughter than aught else. She made some kind of cooing sounds, wee little mewlings, and just stood there, rocking the man, tears spilling unchecked down her cheeks.

  As discreetly as he could, Iain dashed his own from sight and thrust the killing end of his blade beneath Silver Leg’s chin. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Gavin MacFie making short work of the other dastard. His gullet sliced clean through, the man went down without a single cry.

  Silver Leg deserved a slower death.

  His two greyhounds snarled in bristling agitation, but stopped short of snapping at Iain’s sword, their white-eyed trembling speaking more of terror than menace.

  “So-o-o!!” Iain lowered his blade, but kept its tip aimed at Logie’s sizable girth. “I’d say you’ve been well fed during your sojourn at Abercairn. ’Tis your doom that I cannot say the same of the laird.”

  Casting a sidelong glance at Madeline’s father, Iain noted the man’s skeletal frame and sunken eyes, the waxy pallor of his skin.

  Sir John Drummond’s sad state made Iain’s blood run cold and ripped off all the veneer he’d struggled so hard for so long to paint o’er his fuming MacLean temper.

  “This was ill done, Logie,” he said, his voice quivering with rage. “I am nigh wont to tear you limb from limb for your villainy.”

  Silver Leg spat on the cobbles. “God’s everlasting curse on you and yours!” he hissed, his glance sliding to a shadow-hung byre hard by the curtain wall.

  Following his gaze, Iain spied two sumpter horses, each one heavily burdened with bulging canvas or leather sacks. Logie had been heading in that direction. No doubt to flee with whate’er of Abercairn’s spoils he could carry away with him.

  “Where were you going, Logie?” Iain pricked the man’s quivering belly with his steel. “Do those sacks contain what I think they do? Or simply… food. Since that, too, you seem to crave.”

  “I’ll rot in hell before I answer a single of your questions,” Logie seethed, his face dark with fury.

  “And I would assure you a swift passage there!” Iain vowed, nodding to Beardie and Douglas. “Seize him and hold him fast until I’ve seen what those sacks contain.”

  His blood pounding in his ears, Iain unsheathed his dirk and slit the burlap canvas of one of the sacks. Silver plate and assorted Church goods, not unlike the treasures Iain was delivering to Dunkeld Cathedral, spilled onto the bailey’s rain-damp cobbles.

  Snatching a handful of silver coins, Iain strode back to Silver Leg. “Your life is forfeit, Logie,” he said, letting the coins tumble from one hand to the other. “Had those sacks held your own collection of fine-embroidered tunics and knitted braies, I might have given you some degree of lenity.”

  Handing the coins to Madeline, Iain grabbed a handful of Logie’s hair and yanked back the bastard’s head so far, his mouth gaped open. “I ought melt down every last of those coins and pour the molten silver down your throat!”

  Silver Leg’s face ran chalk white.

  “Tell me what you were about with Laird Drummond, and I will think on a more acceptable solution,” Iain said, and folded his arms.

  “He was taking me to the old smithy,” Laird Drummond himself spoke up, his voice little more than a rasp but surprisingly strong for a man who’d been through such hell.

  “The smithy?” That, from Iain’s lady. “But Da… are you sure? No one has gone there for years.”

  His bravura cracking at last, Silver Leg began to tremble.

  Laird Drummond eyed him, a look of raw disgust on his haggard face. “Logie has been using the old smithy to melt down Abercairn silver and gold,” he said, clutching his daughter’s arm, clearly grateful for her support. “But he hasn’t found the true treasure… our jewels from Bannockburn,” he saided, a note of pride in his thin voice.

  He looked at his daughter then, and the love Iain saw shining there flooded him with an intense wave of sheer yearning and clutched fast at his heart.

  Saints, but he’d love to have a daughter or son he could share that kind of love with someday.

  “I didn’t tell him where the Bruce jewels are hidden,” Sir John said, his gaze still on Madeline’s tear-streaked face. “That’s why he brought me up from the dungeon when the trouble began this morning. He meant to ride away, but keep me with him until he could pry the answer from me… or find you.”

  “No one is going to e’er harm a hair on your daughter’s fine head, Sir John. Nor on your own,” Iain declared, keeping an eye on Silver Leg. “You,” he said to that dastard, “shall receive a most pleasing penance, Logie.”

  Striding up to him, Iain drew himself to his full height, and smiled. “I shall allow you to return home… to your own home,” he said, and his smile widened a bit more. “Word has come to me that the accommodations there are most comfortable. I wish you all haste on your journey… both to your own home and to hell.”

  He turned to Beardie and Douglas. “Hie the bastard from my sight,” he said, eager to have done with the viper. “And see you he is cast into the deepest pit in his dungeon.”

  “Ho! That we will do,” the seamen chimed in chorus and dragged the spluttering Logie from the bailey.

  Iain watched them go, his mind on his own journey. The one he just ended, for of a sudden, he knew with all his heart that he not only wanted to make Madeline Drummond his bride in truth rather than just the Bane of his heart, he also wanted a family.

  One of his own.

  And mayhap one, too, in which a fragile old man could be nurtured back to good health. Too much love bonded his lady and her father for Iain e’er to consider taking her elsewhere.

  If she would have him.

  He turned back to her, determined to resolve that matter forthwith, but a surprisingly firm grip on his forearm stayed his tongue.

  “Iain MacLean!” Sir John Drummond’s reedy voice held a distinct challenge. “My daughter tells me you have reason to make an honest woman of her,” he said, peering at Iain from earnest gray eyes.

  Iain’s brows shot upward, but he caught Madeline’s tearful wink and played along.

  “Aye, sir, that may be true,” he admitted, struggling to keep a serious face.

  “I thought so,” the old man said, and Iain suspected he caught a wee twinkle in John Drummond’s eye. “Young man, am I going to have to challenge you to up-hold my daughter’s honor or will you do the noble thing and marry the lass?”

  Iain glanced away for a moment, stared at a single shaft of morning sunlight breaking through the clouds to shine on Abercairn’s massive curtain wall.

  Saints, but he needed to swallow… and to blink a few times, too.

 
; But when at last he turned back around, he was smiling.

  The most dazzling smile Madeline Drummond had ever seen.

  “Aye, I will marry her, good sir,” Iain said, lifting his voice so all within Abercairn’s bailey and mayhap out-with, too, could hear him.

  “I wish to have your daughter as my wife and at my side,” he vowed, placing a firm hand on each of their shoulders. “Aye, I want her badly, Laird Drummond. For all the days of my life.”

  Epilogue

  Dunkeld Cathedral, The Highlands Two Months Later…

  YOU AND YOUR NEW LADY wife have all our good wishes and felicitations.” The good Bishop of Dunkeld reached yet again to pump Iain’s hand. “’Tis rare to see a lovelier bride than the Lady Madeline.”

  Madeline nodded her thanks… again.

  Iain kept his dazzling smile in place and didn’t show a single sign of agitation.

  Even though the rotund Bishop had kept them standing on the cathedral steps for nearly an hour already.

  Indeed, if the gregarious church man didn’t soon cease pressing his abbatial hospitality on them, dusk would soon settle and the great wedding feast awaiting them at Abercairn would begin without the bride and groom!

  Sliding an eloquent glance at her new husband, Madeline tried to catch his eye, but the Bishop looked her way instead, rewarding her with yet another of his warm and jolly smiles.

  Only Madeline’s father didn’t seem to mind the wait. Much improved in health in recent months, Sir John Drummond strolled about the tree-shaded grounds, enjoying the tail-wagging affections of the Bishop’s young hound. The black-and-tan whelp jumped and cavorted about the Drummond laird’s legs, and Madeline’s heart swelled as she caught her da’s laughter at the dog’s playful antics.

  Such was a joy she’d ne’er tire of, just as she enjoyed seeing Silver Leg’s two greyhounds trail her father’s every step through Abercairn, adoration in their great round eyes… and her da’s, too.

  John Drummond had always loved dogs, but ne’er been able to keep one, and now it seemed every canine in the realm found its way to Abercairn’s door.

  Much to the old laird’s delight.

  None of Abercairn’s leeches could explain why dogs no longer made the laird sneeze, but Madeline and Iain suspected it had something to do with Iain’s sacred relic having been secured in Sir John’s bedchamber for safe-keeping in the weeks before Iain was able to deliver the reliquary casket and his other gifts to the cathedral.

  “Ahhh… here comes Brother Jerome at last,” the rosy-cheeked Bishop intoned, his eyes twinkling. “So sorry to have kept you, but the gillie who delivered your gift a sennight ago claimed he’d been told it was of the greatest importance that you receive it on your wedding day.”

  Iain’s brows lifted when Brother Jerome joined them on the Cathedral steps and offered him a large sheepskin-wrapped package. “Here, my sweet,” he said, handing it to Madeline. “Today is your day, too.”

  But the Bishop placed a beringed hand on Iain’s arm. “Nay, sir,” he said, shaking his head. “We were instructed you are to open the gift.”

  Puzzled, but determined not to let even a puzzled frown mar his brow on his wedding day, Iain took back the package, opened it, and withdrew the most beautifully worked leather sword belt he’d e’er seen.

  Of finest leather and exquisitely worked, it was clear the belt was priceless in value. But it wasn’t the belt’s value in coin that made it so dear to him.

  Nay, the gift’s worth went far deeper.

  Hot pricklings jabbing at the backs of his eyes, Iain blinked several times in an attempt to clear his fool vision enough to admire the belt’s craftsmanship.

  But most of all to gaze in wonder and awe at the two large Highland quartz crystals set into the belt’s clasp. They shone with a magnificent inner light that rivaled the afternoon’s bright blue sky and brilliant sunshine.

  Indeed, the two stones shone with an almost other-worldly glow. A stunningly beautiful inner fire that seemed to have a life of its own.

  And Iain recognized the stones.

  They were old Devorgilla’s Fairy Fire Stones.

  The very ones the cailleach had tried to foist on him long months ago, claiming that they’d help him find his MacLean Bane.

  His one true love.

  Devorgilla had insisted the stones would catch fire and burn with an inner light that would ne’er extinguish… the instant Iain and his Bane found each other.

  And now that they had, Devorgilla’s glittering Highland quartz shone with a light brighter than a thousand suns.

  “Oh!” Madeline peered at the belt, its priceless stones. “How beautiful!” Seizing it, she fastened the belt low around Iain’s hips.

  Stepping back to admire the belt on him, she smiled. “Now you truly do look like the Master of the Highlands.”

  Iain blinked, glanced aside.

  He had to swallow again, too, damn his fool throat!

  But when he found his voice once more, he placed two silencing fingers over her lips. “I do not care much about being styled Master of the Highlands, sweet lass,” he said.

  “No?” Confusion clouded her lovely green-gold eyes. “I thought you liked the title?”

  “Och, but I do, never fear,” Iain admitted, and dropped a kiss on her brow. “It just matters more to me to be the Master of Your Heart.”

  Enjoy this exciting peek at

  TEMPTATION OF A HIGHLAND SCOUNDREL by Sue-Ellen Welfonder!

  Despite an official peace decreed by the king after a fierce battle between neighboring clans, old conflicts smolder in the Glen of Many Legends. Kendrew Mackintosh, chieftain of his clan, is famed as both a hot-blooded warrior and a sensual lover. He has no intention of settling down… until he kisses a forbidden beauty whose passion matches his own.

  Highborn and gently raised, Lady Isobel Cameron has long harbored a secret fascination for the fearless, charismatic Mackintosh leader—even though her brother is his sworn enemy. When destiny draws Isobel and Kendrew together for one night, she discovers a secret tenderness Kendrew can no longer hide. Unable to resist her deepening desire, she surrenders to his seductive touch. But what begins as a flirtation soon becomes a fight for survival. A deadly new threat has come to the Glen, and Kendrew and Isobel must learn to trust one another—or pay the ultimate price.

  “Few writers can bring history to life like Sue-Ellen Welfonder! For anyone who loves historical fiction, the books in the Highland Warriors trilogy are a true treasure.”

  —New York Times and USA Today best-selling author Heather Graham

  Chapter One

  CASTLE HAVEN

  THE GLEN OF MANY LEGENDS

  MIDSUMMER EVE 1397

  Do you believe Kendrew Mackintosh dances naked on the dreagan stones?”

  Lady Isobel Cameron glanced across the well-appointed bedchamber at her good-sister and, much as she tried, couldn’t keep the excitement from her voice. Her heart knocked wildly at her daring. Especially when Lady Catriona’s reaction was to sit up straighter in her massive, four-postered bed. She also pinned Isobel with a look that held more than a hint of disapproval. Worse, there was a flicker of sympathy in the depths of her dark blue eyes.

  Isobel lifted her chin, pretending not to see.

  Pity was the last thing she wanted.

  Her heart was set on the Mackintosh chieftain and had been for some while—as Catriona well knew.

  It’d been her plan, and not Isobel’s, that the two of them and Kendrew’s sister, Lady Marjory, should each seduce and wed a man from one of the other glen clans. Only so could true peace be held.

  Or so they’d agreed the previous autumn, in the bloody aftermath of the trial by combat. A battle to the death, ordered by the king to decide which of the three clans should be granted overlordship. When the fighting ended, the three warrior chieftains were still on their feet, their weapons held fast in their hands.

  In his well-meant benevolence, King Robert III declared a tr
uce.

  He’d presented each chieftain with a charter for land the clans already saw as their own. And he’d left them with a not-too-subtle warning that any further unrest would result in severest punishment.

  Banishment to a distant Hebridean isle was just one threat that—still—hung over the heads of every man, woman, and child of the glen.

  No living soul in the Glen of Many Legends would risk such a fate.

  Yet the men of the clans were quickly angered, their tempers easily roused.

  Keeping peace fell to the women.

  Catriona was now wed to Isobel’s brother, James, clan chief of the Camerons.

  It seemed a blessed union.

  Isobel was meant to be the next bride.

  And on the day the three women made their pact, she’d chosen Kendrew. What she hadn’t done was tell her friends how much she secretly desired him. His wildness excited her, his adherence to ancient Norse ways calling to her own Viking blood—a legacy she was proud of and that her own clan largely ignored, much to her sorrow.

  Only Isobel’s heart quickened at the thought of distant northern lands full of cold wind, ice, and endless winters. She alone held a soft spot for the fearless, seafaring people who, legend claimed, gave one of their most beautiful young noblewomen as a bride to a distant Cameron chieftain. A war prize and peace offering, she’d forever sealed the clan’s irrevocable bond with the pagan north.

  Isobel felt drawn to that legacy.

  So Kendrew, who often wore a bearskin thrown over his broad shoulders and favored a Viking war ax over a sword, fascinated her.

  He flaunted his Nordic ancestry.

  Isobel admired him.

  Unfortunately, the attraction wasn’t mutual.

  Isobel brushed at her sleeve, willing her annoyance to fade. Unfortunately, she failed. Her wilder side, the part of her no one suspected existed, swirled and raged inside her, demanding attention.

  “Kendrew Mackintosh is a howling madman.” Catriona found her tongue at last, her tone proving she knew the source of Isobel’s agitation.