My Scot, My Surrender

by Amalie Howard

  “Patrick, Callan,” their mother said, dabbing at her eyes as she rose to her feet. “Aisla.” She took them each into an embrace, as she had with Brandt. And, though they didn’t speak any words, Brandt knew what was being said. This was their new beginning—a life finally out of the shadow of Rodric’s tyranny.

  Brandt winced as Sorcha prodded at the rapidly swelling tissue of his lower leg. She tore a strip from the end of her plaid and bound it about his calf before tending to the inflamed gouge in his shoulder.

  “It wasn’t too deep,” she told him, pressing the heel of her palm to it over another strip of plaid that she deftly wrapped over his shoulder and under his arm. “But both will need my mother’s salve. You’ll live, my brave laird.”

  Sorcha helped Brandt stand, his calf and shoulder hot points of throbbing misery, but his wife’s fingers as she clung to him helped to dull it. He took her chin in his hand and angled her face, wiping it clean with a corner of his own plaid. New bruises and welts marred her forehead, including several others around her throat that had the unmistakable look of fingerprints. His incisors bit the inside of his cheek. “Where is Malvern?”

  The man had strangled his wife. If he wasn’t already a corpse, Brandt would see it done in short order. But Sorcha only shook her head.

  “He is no longer our concern,” she said.

  “What does that mean? Is he dead?”

  “The Maclarens have arrived,” Patrick put in, and Brandt’s eyes jumped from his bruised, yet beautiful, wife to his brother. “They’re helping us to drive out the last of Malvern’s army.”

  Brandt tested his leg and tried to stand on his own. If he was to meet the Maclarens, he wanted to do so without looking like he was ready to faint dead away.

  “And Malvern?” he asked again.

  “My father and brothers have him,” Sorcha answered.

  “They had him,” one of the Montgomery men said from behind Patrick. The dark-haired one named Fergus. The one who’d put his arm across Sorcha’s shoulders and flirted with her during training. Those weren’t the only reasons Brandt scowled at him now.

  “What the hell do you mean, they had him?” He limped to where his sword lay and stooped to pick it up. A newfound purpose gave him strength, and that was to see Malvern in irons or dead.

  Fergus frowned. “He’s a slippery snake, that one. One minute he was there at the edge of the woods, and the next he wasnae. He cannae have gone far on foot. We’ll find him.”

  “Stay with our mother and sister,” Brandt said to his brothers. “There are women here who were wounded by Rodric’s men. I’ll deal with the marquess.” He eyed the tall Scot who had spoken. “Fergus, you and your men, with me.” He glanced over his shoulder to his wife. “Stay with your family.”

  Brandt’s scowl deepened as he limped to the bailey as best as he was able. Wounded or not, he’d find the bounder himself and run him through. He pushed open the doors and came to a dead stop. Montgomerys and Maclarens alike thronged the courtyard. Several of Malvern’s soldiers were clad in irons at the center, including his very own target—the marquess was moaning on the ground beside his father-in-law. Though Brandt had never met the laird, he could see where Sorcha got her eyes and her fierce demeanor, and where Ronan, who stood at his side, got his brawn.

  “Wee bastard tried to flee,” the Duke of Dunrannoch boomed. “My boy, Ronan, caught up to him right quick.”

  “He broke my bloody leg,” Malvern whined.

  Ronan shrugged his big shoulders, mouth twitching. “He tripped.”

  “He’s lucky he broke his leg instead of his worthless neck,” Brandt snarled as he made his way down the stairs. Sorcha appeared behind him, and he hesitated. “What are you doing here? I told you to stay back with your family.”

  “Ye’re my family, ye oaf,” she hissed. Brandt only laughed. God, he loved her temper; even her insults felt like passionate promises whispered in his ear.

  “Just so,” he said, reaching back to grab hold of her fingers as they came to the bottom where her father and brother were standing. Ronan smiled but waited out of respect for his father to speak.

  “I led my men here expecting to find my daughter married to a Sassenach stableboy,” Sorcha’s father drawled, a pair of assessing blue eyes measuring him from head to toe.

  “Stable master, Your Grace,” Brandt corrected.

  Sorcha’s fingers tightened around his in chastisement, but he could still somehow sense the smile she held in check.

  “Though now I’ve kenned ye’re the Duke of Glenross, Laird Montgomery,” the old Scot went on, his eyes falling to their joined hands. Something hopeful flashed in them. “I cannae say ’tis not a vast improvement of circumstances, Yer Grace. Even if ye did steal my daughter from beneath my nose.”

  “She was worth stealing,” Brandt said, breathing easier now that her father’s fierce glare held a bit of levity. “As far as the former, I couldn’t agree more.” He made a clipped bow. “Duke of Dunrannoch, Laird Maclaren, I welcome you to Montgomery, and thank you for your timely assistance.”

  “Call me William,” the duke said, clasping Brandt by his uninjured shoulder. “And no thanks needed. We always love a bit o’ sport, dunnae we, lads?”

  A victorious cheer went up from the Maclarens that was immediately taken up by the Montgomerys. The relief Brandt felt was palpable. His family was safe from Rodric. And Sorcha was safe, at last, from the despicable man sniveling at her father’s feet. “Escort the marquess to the dungeons until we can decide what’s to be done with him.”

  The last of Malvern’s army was rounded up, and shortly after, the sound of hoofbeats reached them, the horn once again sounding. In the distance, a huge regiment of horses was cantering up the road through the training fields, followed by several carriages. Men around him reached for arms but paused when Brandt raised one hand. He felt his heart expand as he recognized the flag and the noble face of the man riding at the helm of the contingent.

  “Who is that?” Sorcha asked.

  “That, my love, is the Duke of Bradburne.” He laughed at the sight of the beautiful woman riding beside him. “Along with his wife, the duchess, if I’m not mistaken.”

  The men in the courtyard cleared to make room for the new arrivals as they rode up. Archer dismounted, his proud face scanning the men and falling to Malvern, who kept his head downcast, his shoulders quaking. He had every right to tremble—the Duke of Bradburne was a powerful peer and one who had the influence to strip Malvern of everything he held dear.

  Archer assisted his wife to the ground and they approached together. Quick introductions were made to the Maclaren laird and his son, who stepped back to give them some privacy.

  “I daresay Brynn and I missed all the fun,” Archer said, clasping Brandt by the arm. Brandt groaned as the embrace pulled his weight onto his injured leg. The duke gave him a cursory glance, quicksilver eyes pausing at his bloody shoulder and narrowing. “Glad to see you’re relatively in one piece, my brother.”

  “Honestly, Brandt,” the Duchess of Bradburne, Lady Briannon Croft, admonished with a smile as he kissed her knuckles. “Are you ever not injured?”

  “I like to keep things exciting.”

  Briannon smirked as her eyes jumped to Sorcha, still wildly mud-splattered from her fight in the tunnels. “I see that.”

  Brandt tightened his fingers on his wife’s, drawing her forward. “Allow me to present my wife, Lady Sorcha Montgomery, the Duchess of Glenross.” He turned to her, allowing the depth of his esteem for his unequaled, battle-weary wife to ooze out of every pore. Brandt didn’t care if he looked infatuated. He wanted the whole world to know she was his. “This is His Grace, the Duke of Bradburne, and Her Grace, the Duchess of Bradburne, my dearest friends.”

  Sorcha curtsied to the duke and duchess, looking every inch the warrior goddess she was, her face held high. “It’s an honor, Your Graces.”

  “A pleasure,” the duchess said, her smile growing warm. If she
’d taken notice of Sorcha’s scars, she gave no indication of it. “Please call me Briannon.”

  “And you must call me Sorcha.”

  The duchess linked arms with his wife, uncaring of the mud caking her clothing, and they walked back into the keep together. Sorcha shot him a perplexed look as they went, but Brandt could only smile. Archer shrugged, seeing the exchange. “You know Brynn,” he said with a resigned shake of his head.

  Brandt did. The duchess was stronghearted and stubborn. She and Sorcha would get along well…or pummel each other to pieces. He had a feeling that it was going to be the former. He hoped.

  “So did I hear you say your wife is Lady Glenross?” Archer asked, the question of the last name clear as they turned to follow their wives. “And a duchess? What have you gotten yourself mixed up in this time?”

  “Alas, no diverting fake identities, I’m afraid,” Brandt said after a moment. “Apparently, I’m laird here and rightful heir to a dukedom. As it so happens, Monty wasn’t my father, after all. It’s a long story. I’ll tell it to you over a pint, shall I?”

  Archer had never looked so utterly confounded. “Are you telling me you’re a bloody duke?”

  “Ah-ah, don’t forget ‘Your Grace,’” Brandt said, wagging a finger. “It’s only proper.”

  Archer vaulted an amused brow. “Don’t get cocky.”

  “I learned from the best.” He grinned at the man who’d been like a brother to him his entire life. “Not bad for a stableboy from Essex, eh?”

  “You were never just a stableboy, Brandt,” Archer said quietly, his teasing turning serious. “You were always a Croft to me, a true brother. When your messenger reached me in London telling of your troubles with Malvern, I dropped everything and mounted a company immediately. Brynn insisted on coming to your aid as well, despite her recent confinement and my foot being well and truly down.”

  Brandt’s voice was choked with emotion. “Thank you.”

  “You would have done the same for me. You have done the same for me. You saved my neck too many times to count, Brandt.” They both knew he was speaking of his risky exploits as the Masked Marauder before he married Briannon. Archer shrugged. “You led us a merry chase, but we managed to track you all over Scotland. Though as it turns out, you had everything well in hand.” His eyes flicked to Malvern, who was being led away in irons toward the dungeons. “The marquess is wanted for extorting hundreds of thousands of pounds from the Crown in false land and tenant fees. I’ve been tasked with seeing him back to London to be tried for his crimes, if that’s well and good by you. He’ll likely be hanged.”

  “I’ll be happy to see the last of him.” Brandt suspected Sorcha and her family would as well. He would do everything in his power to make sure that Tarben Castle and its holdings would be returned to the Maclaren.

  Archer paused at the top of the stairs, his gray eyes twinkling. “Despite your wounds, it pleases me to see you well and content.” The duke’s tone grew grave. “When I learned who you’d taken to wife, I’ll admit I had my doubts. She has somewhat of a…reputation across Scotland. It has a lot to do with how we tracked you so easily, in fact. The Beast of Maclaren is quite a moniker. But you are, aren’t you? Happy?”

  There was no malice in his friend’s tone, and the truth was, Sorcha wore the nickname proudly. Beast or not, he wouldn’t change one hair on her head, or even a single scar. Brandt heard his wife’s low laughter echo through the open doors of the keep, and he smiled. Happy seemed too mediocre a word to describe what he felt, but even he couldn’t find another that could do his feelings justice. There was no simple word to describe Sorcha and their relationship, or to encompass the enormity of what he felt for her.

  With a nod, he looked his best friend in the eye. “She’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The Montgomerys had been starved of boisterous celebration for so long that when they began to rejoice a few days after their victory, no one seemed able to stop. Even the death of the previous laird did not curtail the festivities; a murderer would not be mourned.

  One feast led into another, one song to dozens more; the great hall was overrun with dancing and singing and booming orations by men who, by the end of each spirited account, had been the very warrior to chase off the enemy and single-handedly save Montgomery keep, along with the women and bairns and all the unborn babies that would no doubt make their debut in nine months’ time.

  Sorcha had never smiled or laughed so much in all her life. The clanspeople here had been starved of merriment, just as she had been, and like her new family, she could not seem to satiate herself. She and Brandt had welcomed the Duke and Duchess of Bradburne, as well as their caravans of servants and soldiers, along with her own father and brothers, and every last Maclaren who had trekked to Montgomery lands. Ronan, she discovered, had won his fight with Coxley that day in the field, slicing the English brute across the back. Coxley had gone down, and Ronan, presuming the man dead, rejoined his men who were still fending off the attack. After Malvern’s men had withdrawn, he’d returned for the body, but he’d found naught but a patch of grass, spattered with blood.

  Ronan and what remained of his men had turned back toward Maclaren to seek reinforcements. And, though Sorcha had told him she and Brandt were heading north toward the Brodie, the fortified Maclaren army had the luck of passing by the monastery, where Abbot Lewis informed them of Sorcha and Brandt’s change in destination.

  Sorcha’s heart filled at the memory of her brother’s words in the hall after the battle…that every last Maclaren warrior has always been, and would always be, willing to die to defend and protect their own. The Maclaren soldiers who had given their lives hadn’t just been defending her—they’d been defending other Maclarens who would suffer the brutality of Malvern.

  “You were the one to set our freedom into motion,” Ronan had told her. “Because of you, sister, Maclaren is free, and none of the men who stood up died in vain.”

  The release from the guilt that had plagued her had been almost immediate.

  She had spent the last handful of days trying not to think on what might have happened had her clansmen not tracked them to Montgomery. If they had not been there at the marsh when Malvern had dragged her out of the tunnel. And Brandt, every time he saw her expression darkening, would take her hand and kiss the ridge of her knuckles, threatening to distract her if she didn’t stop worrying.

  “Is that a promise?” she’d whispered once.

  “I take my duties as laird quite seriously, Sorcha Montgomery,” Brandt replied, a flare of mischief sparking in his fey-bright eyes. “And it is my duty to make my duchess smile more than she frowns.”

  “I’ve been smiling for days,” she shot back, and feigning exhaustion, added, “I don’t know how much more pleasure I can endure.”

  Brandt had leaned closer to her ear, his breath hot on her skin. “Come up to our bedchamber with me and I’ll show you how much more.”

  And he had. Her husband’s lips and hands had proven time and again that she had a rapacious appetite for pleasure. For him. Even now, as Sorcha sat on a blanket spread under the courtyard yew, with Briannon and Catriona deep in conversation at her side, she watched Brandt with longing. He and Archer, along with some of the Maclaren and Montgomery men, were taking a reprieve from the festivities as they repaired the arch over the water well, damaged during the siege. Though the spring weather had returned to a more expected crispness, shirts had been discarded, and bare chests were shining with sweaty exertion.

  Brandt still wore a bandage over his left shoulder and one around his calf, but her mother’s salve was doing its job. Neither dressing, nor the fast-healing wounds he’d received along his shoulder and ribs during his first battle with Rodric, took away from his air of strength and masculinity. They seemed only to enhance it. Sorcha knew the contours of her husband’s chest and stomach and back by heart, and she imagined running her fingers over the dips a
nd swells of his muscles with mounting desire.

  Sorcha let her attention drift toward Lord Bradburne, who had clapped his arm around Brandt’s shoulders. “Your duke and Brandt get along so well,” she said to Briannon.

  Catriona entered the conversation then. “’Tis true. I cannae tell ye how glad I am my Brandall had a brother in yer husband, Lady Bradburne.”

  “And now he has more brothers than he knows what to do with!” Briannon said, the strong Scottish ale she’d been sipping making her voice loud and merry. Catriona and Sorcha laughed, causing Brandt and Archer to look over at them, but they only grinned before turning back to their task.

  Yes, her husband’s family had grown exponentially. In the corner of the courtyard, two of his new family members—Ronan and Patrick—were sparring with their hefty broadswords. The competition was friendly enough, but there was no mistaking the pride each man was bringing to the exhibition. She glanced to where her youngest brother Niall lounged against the stone wall of the keep, waiting for his turn to show off his sparring skills. Callan stood at his left, his mouth moving, and every now and again, Niall would break into laughter.

  Aisla had seated herself on a ledge jutting out from the keep’s wall to Niall’s right, and more often than not, Sorcha noticed her brother’s eyes traveling furtively over her legs, which she’d crossed at the ankles and swung playfully. The lass wasn’t oblivious to his glances, either, Sorcha noticed, especially when Aisla shifted her seat to slyly raise the hem of her skirt an inch.

  A breeze rustled the new leaves on the yew, bringing the scents of roasting meat and vegetables from the kitchens into the courtyard. Sorcha felt as if she’d glutted herself for days on a banquet of food, and that evening she would do so again. The carousing would continue in the form of a wedding celebration. Her mother, the Duchess of Dunrannoch, was due to arrive with yet more Maclarens by that evening, and Catriona had insisted on a proper reception. She had insisted the water well be repaired and in full use before then, too.