by Jessi Gage
All for the sake of Ackergill, his uncle claimed.
For the sake of mild insanity, more like.
But completely sane or no, Steafan was still laird, and the woman would have a hard enough time convincing him she was no threat nor burden to their clan with her odd speech and manner of dress, not to mention her unborn bairn. She didn’t need to be associated with a mysterious box on top of it all. Best for all involved if he kept it to himself for the time being.
* * * *
Melanie’s problems settled into the background as she followed Archie’s instructions in cleaning and binding wounds until he could get to them with his thread and needle. Broken bones were left for the physician at Ackergill, who she guessed was too valuable to be risked in skirmishes. The man with the lung injury was transferred to a pallet in the back of the wagon, where Archie informed her in a subdued voice he would likely die on the way back to the village.
If anything could keep her mind off her predicament, it was the weight of injury and death casting a pall over Archie’s rudimentary field hospital. But even with the heavy atmosphere, the men bantered good-naturedly with her and availed themselves of any and every opportunity to pinch her bottom. The first time, it had been the man with the profusely bleeding thigh. She’d changed his soaked bandage and tied another around the wound so tight he’d winced and asked her if she were trying to sever his leg in twain. When she’d turned to separate another length of linen from Archie’s stash, he’d grabbed a handful of her rear end through her skirt and given it a sharp jiggle. She’d spun around and slapped him. Then she’d hastily apologized when he reminded her with a wince how badly his leg hurt. The other men had caught on and, well, her butt was starting to throb–and her left eye was starting to twitch–from all the attention.
More men came into the clearing, both wounded and “hale,” as Archie referred to the able-bodied. Fortunately, the wounds sported by the newcomers were mostly minor. Not twenty-first century minor, but minor in the sense that nothing major had been cut off and the men were functionally ambulatory. Several men helped themselves to Archie’s stash of bandages and then pitched in with the more grievously wounded. From their boisterous banter, she gathered the skirmish was over and the Keiths had come out victorious.
Good. If the men she’d met were a representative sample, she wasn’t a fan of “the Gunn.”
She searched the milling two-dozen or so men for a tall head of honey-blond hair, but didn’t see Darcy. Worry tightened her chest. Had he been hurt too badly to make it back? Why did that thought disturb her so deeply? She’d just met the man. And he’d spent half the time she’d known him annoying her.
A tall man strode into the clearing, tall being relative to those in the clearing, and since Darcy wasn’t there, the man qualified as tall. He had short brown hair and a closely-trimmed beard and said in a booming voice, “Well fought, kinsmen. The Gunn will think twice about trespassing on Keith land again.” A round of victorious shouts rent the damp air. “Gloaming comes. ’Tis time to return to our ale and our women.” This elicited raucous cheers, punctuated by hoots and whistles. The man smiled briefly, then squinted around as if doing a mental headcount. “Where’s Big Darcy?”
“Here I am,” came a smooth, deep voice from the trees. When a honey-blond head poked through, followed by a blessedly hale, broad-shouldered body, her chest relaxed.
His eyes found hers, then darted away. He trudged through the men to the wagon where she lost sight of all but the top of his head in the small crowd. She jostled her way through the milling Keith to find him and ask whether he’d found the box, but the bearded man stopped her.
“And just who might you be?” he asked with a firm hand on her shoulder. His ice-blue eyes flashed with suspicion and promises of punishment if he didn’t like her answer. Her neck prickled with warning. This was a dangerous man.
They’re all dangerous men. Tread carefully, Mel.
Darcy appeared behind the man, and some of the tension left her shoulders. “I found her near the northern hill by Berringer’s marker,” he said in a light tone that thawed the coldest layer of frost from the bearded man’s eyes. He’d also made himself seem shorter by slouching. “Since she’d stuck a Gunn with his own dirk, I assumed she was on our side. Seems she’s lost and could use an audience with the laird. What say you, Aodhan, shall we escort the poor thing to Steafan and beg the laird’s hospitality?”
“She English?” Aodhan asked, as if she weren’t there.
“No,” Darcy said with surety.
“Who does she belong to?” Those cold eyes snapped to Darcy with greater attention than the question seemed to warrant. She had the impulse to say she didn’t “belong” to anybody, but she held her tongue, remembering where, and when, she was.
“No Keith or Gunn. That much I’ve determined,” Darcy answered cautiously. “Beyond that, I dinna ken.”
Aodhan appraised her like he might a horse for sale. His shrewd eyes softened with appreciation, and his lips twitched with the kind of smile a turkey might see before ending up Thanksgiving dinner. He opened his mouth to say something, but Darcy blurted, “I’ll take responsibility for her.”
Aodhan gave him a measuring look that bordered on annoyance. Finally, he grunted and moved away to shout orders at the other men.
Darcy huffed a put-out sigh, then turned to her with his mouth pressed in a hard line. “I suppose ye’d better stick close to me.”
That was fine with her, though she could have done without the attitude. “Did you find it?” she asked as she followed him to the wagon, already forgetting about the strange little confrontation with Aodhan.
He shook his head and picked up the wagon’s jutting handles, lifting its front feet off the ground so the entire rickety thing groaned back on its two wheels.
“Did you find it?” she asked again, her voice sharp with desperation. She needed to hear him say it. She wouldn’t let her hope come crashing down around her for anything less than verbal confirmation that the box hadn’t come with her into the past.
He walked forward, pulling the wagon and falling in with the departing men. “No,” he said, the muscles in his jaw tense.
She stared after him, her legs locked in shock. Men wafting the pungent scents of blood, whisky, and body odor closed around her to follow Darcy out of the clearing. Another hand found her butt and gave two solid tweaks. It jolted her into a jog. She caught up to Darcy, ignoring the snickering behind her.
“What do you mean, ‘no’? You looked where you found me and you didn’t find it? Are you sure? Did you poke around in the mud?”
“I looked where I found ye,” he said tightly. “I looked as well as a man can, and yet I am empty handed. I regret that I have no box to give ye.” With a pained expression, he met her desperate gaze. “I am sorry.”
She closed her eyes against a crush of disappointment. If the box hadn’t come through with her, then she had nothing tangible with which to buoy her hope.
“I have to go back and look for it,” she said, turning to trek back to the field.
“’Tis no’ there,” he said firmly, putting down the cart to snatch her arm before she’d taken two strides. She met his eyes and the sympathy in them knocked the wind out of her. He was telling the truth. She knew from his sincere expression that no amount of searching back at the boulder would reveal the rosewood box. “Ye must come with me, Melanie. I need to bring ye to the laird as I would any stranger on Keith land, but then I’ll see you fed and rested. I vow I will do all in my power to return ye to your people on the morrow.”
In the wake of Kyle’s betrayal, her first instinct was to bristle at the promise, but with a stab to her heart, she remembered Kyle had never made her any promises. In fact, no man had ever made her a promise before.
She eyed him, unsure how to react. Whether it was the comforting sound of her name marching from his lips in that hearty burr or the earnest gleam in his eyes, somehow she knew that a promise made by Dar
cy Marek MacFirthen Keith was a promise a girl could trust. Something in her gut relaxed.
She might not have the box, but she at least had an ally.
She was reluctant to leave the spot where time had broken apart and abandoned her to the past, but when Darcy picked up the cart handles and walked on, she went with him.
* * * *
Darcy shook his head at himself as he pulled the cart back to Ackergill. Melanie–Malina he kept wanting to call her in the Scots way–plodded beside him, despondent but no less beautiful for the small crease between her slanted brows.
He’d put that crease there when he’d made her believe he hadn’t found her cherished box. He could wipe it away just as easily by reaching into Archie’s healer’s supplies, lifting out her hidden possession, and placing it in her tiny, graceful hands.
But her relief would be short-lived. If any of the men saw the thing and word got to Steafan, ’twould go badly for her. And he wasn’t sure how much of her suffering he’d be able to bear. He’d met her less than two hours ago, but he already felt protective of her. And it wasn’t just that he’d claimed responsibility for her before Aodhan.
His need to protect her had gripped him from the moment he’d seen her, her emerald eyes wide and frightened, her hands shaking and covered in blood. His heart had cried, Mine, even though he kent better than to believe he could have a woman for his own. His foolish mouth had verified it soon after, when he’d thought Aodhan had been about to lay claim to her. And Aodhan, the cur, had accepted it without batting an eye. In fact, a twinkle in the war chieftain’s usually hard eyes suggested the man found Darcy’s claim amusing.
As if to confirm his suspicion, Aodhan hung back to walk alongside him, opposite from Malina. “She doesna look pleased to have been claimed,” the war chieftain said in the auld tongue.
Darcy glanced at Malina. She paid them no heed. “I dinna suspect she kens what it means.” She spoke English, but a strange version of it. And she seemed too upset about her box to care that he had declared his intention to wed her.
“Ye do realize Steafan will likely wed ye tonight when ye present her to him. She’ll be sure to understand then.”
He jerked his head to stare at Aodhan. “He wouldna.”
Aodhan’s smirk confirmed what his suddenly thumping heart already kent. Steafan would.
Of course, Aodhan had been there a fortnight past when Steafan had summoned him to his office and threatened to find a wife for him if he didn’t find one for himself by Harvest.
“Your brother shames ye, lad,” his uncle had said. “Wed and already with a bairn and he two years your younger. Ye’re far too auld to nay have a wife, and Ackergill willna suffer a laird with no prospects for children.”
“Make Edmund your heir, then,” he’d said. He didn’t mind yielding the honor to his brother. Edmund was a fine man, and Steafan made a good point; their family line would carry on with Edmund where it had no chance with him. But the whole argument was pointless. At a whole and hearty forty-five, Steafan wasn’t old enough to fash about who would be laird after him, and after losing his son and then his wife to grief soon after, he’d married a young lass. Ginneleah, Aodhan’s daughter. At a fresh seventeen years, she had many seasons of childbearing ahead of her. Just because she hadn’t conceived in the two years they’d been wed didn’t mean she never would. Steafan was bound to have an heir of his own blood. He wouldn’t have to settle for one of his brother’s blood. But Steafan wasn’t one to put hopeful stock in what might happen. Steafan was a pessimistic, paranoid bugger. And a bully.
“Dinna be so quick to throw away your birthright, lad,” he had said. “Remember Jacob and Esau?”
He and Edmund had little in common with Isaac’s sons, but arguing with Steafan was as useful an expenditure of time as trying to force a gelding to breed. There was one thing he hadn’t ever admitted to his uncle, though, one thing he hoped might sway the laird.
“I canna wed, uncle,” he admitted while Aodhan had looked on. “’Tis impossible for me to lie with a woman.”
To his dismay, his uncle burst out in laughter, and a grin broke the war chieftain’s icy demeanor. His face had burned hot. He’d long grown used to being a laughing stock because of his size, but to bear whisky-slurred laughter in the pub was one thing. To bear the sober mirth of his uncle and the laird’s second-in-command in a private meeting felt leagues worse.
“Ye dinna actually believe that, do you, lad?” his uncle had forced through his guffawing. Seeing the look on his face, Steafan’s smile died on his lips. “Christ, Darcy. ’Tis nothing to be shamed by to be large under one’s plaid.”
Tell that to Anya, he’d thought. Even years later, her horrified expression stuck in his memory like a fly in a spider’s web. He couldn’t shake the image free, and he was determined never to see such a look on a woman’s face again.
“I willna marry, Steafan,” he had insisted.
“Ye will. I willna release you as my heir and I willna settle for an heir with no wife.”
He’d trudged from his uncle’s office kenning full well he’d be wed within the year and pitying the poor lass Steafan would force into it. But now, with Aodhan whispering in his ear and Malina by his side, lovely as a lily in the gloaming and smelling of exotic fruit despite the mud and blood caking her clothing, he wondered if the saints had presented him a solution that would suit both him and Steafan.
What if Steafan did wed them tonight? What if he kept the lass rather than help her return home? She was already with child. They could be a family and he would never have to trouble her with his bed.
Aodhan’s eyes scrunched with uncharacteristic warmth as the possibility unfurled in Darcy’s imagination, puffing his chest with pride and filling his belly with nervous flutters. But ’twas a dream and no more.
He shook his head. “I canna wed her, Aodhan. She is lost and wishes to return to her home, her people. I have vowed to help her do so and I willna go back on it.”
“So wed her and then send her home to her people. Ye can tell Steafan she glimpsed under your plaid and ran away.” Aodhan’s lips twitched, and Darcy felt his cheeks burn. “Steafan willna be able to null the marriage without your consent. Ye will be wed as he wishes. Ye will have fulfilled the letter of his law, so he willna be able to hound ye or force ye into another marriage.”
He stared in shock at the plotting war chieftain. He’d never before thought Aodhan less than utterly loyal to Steafan. Yet what he suggested was dishonest. He was ashamed to consider it.
Aodhan’s eyes sharpened to their characteristic ice. “Steafan is besotted with your size, lad,” he said, his voice low. “It keeps him from seeing Edmund would be the better leader if it comes to that. There are few Keith who can match you as a fighter, and ye’re a fine miller and businessman. Ackergill owes a grand share of her prosperity to ye. But ye dinna have the ruthless streak a man needs to keep a clan in line. I tell ye nothing ye dinna already ken.”
He nodded in agreement. He didn’t particularly want to lead, and he didn’t like the attention of being Steafan’s heir. Aodhan’s plan was tempting, but there was a flaw in it. “Steafan is no fool. He wants me wed, but only because he wants me to have bairns. If I wed the woman and she leaves, he’ll likely put me in the stocks if I dinna agree to a null.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Aodhan said. “I could even make excuses for ye. Wed the lass tonight and take her away. Escort her to her home. I’ll tell Steafan ye’ve gone searching for your run-away bride, and I’ll talk to him about Edmund. When ye return alone, Steafan will have to admit that ye’d make a terrible laird if you couldna even keep a wee wife in line. He’ll accept Edmund.” He scoffed, “It doesna matter anyway, since Ginnie is sure to have a bairn sooner or later. Steafan worries over naught.”
Aodhan made it all seem so easy. He could be wed tonight. To Malina. But then he’d have to help his wife leave him. ’Twas too terrible to consider. “I canna leave my mill,” he protested.
Darcy studied the war chieftain. He’d rarely conversed with the man outside of trading tawdry jests or discussing swordplay tactics on the practice field. “What are you up to, man?” he wondered out loud.
The ice melted from Aodhand’s eyes. “I dinna like to see ye suffer needlessly, lad,” he said and stalked away.
Chapter 4
Melanie’s feet were killing her. She was used to being on them since she often performed docent duties at the museum, but she wasn’t used to marching for upward of an hour over rock-strewn trails cut through darkened forests. On top of burning soles and aching muscles, it also felt like her stomach was trying to eat itself. According to her internal clock, dinner time had come and gone with nary a glimpse of anything edible. If she’d been back in Charleston, she’d have probably eaten two meals that would qualify as dinner by now.
Just when she thought about asking, “Are we there yet?” the forest gave way to an immense, wide open clearing that could have been anything from a swath of farmland to a peat field. Beyond the clearing was a gentle rise dotted with crofter cottages and capped by a utilitarian, three-story rectangle of a castle with glowing windows.
“Ackergill?” she asked, her spirit lifting with the prospect of food and rest. It was the first she’d spoken to Darcy since he’d promised to help her return home. Ever since the hushed talk in Gaelic he’d had with Aodhan, he’d seemed tense, and she hadn’t needed any more tension in her life just then, so she’d chosen to ignore him as they walked.
He nodded without meeting her eyes.
Scanning the village, her eyes were drawn far to the right of the castle where three tower-shaped silhouettes with four sails each stood against the night like pieces on a chessboard. “Ooh, are those windmills?” She’d had a thing for windmills ever since reading Don Quixote in her 4th-year Spanish class in high school.
