by Laurel Adams
She gave a delicate snort. “Don’t be a clot-headed fool. A woman of your station has to be wiser in the ways of men. My son doesn’t bother to disapprove of anyone he doesn’t love.” With that, she pushed both bowls in front of me again. “Now eat.”
The very same lady who had refused to let me help her sew for the war effort lest she be seen in the same room with me now sat beside me, imperiously supervising my every last bite. I ate, silently. Numbly. Trying to make sense of my situation. Trying to understand what I should say or do.
Understanding only one thing…
If there truly was a babe inside me, I had to worry about more than just my own broken heart. It changed everything somehow. A child would have to be provided for, whether it was the laird’s get or not. Because the child was mine.
Unfortunately, Lady Fiona was right about one thing. The laird would not see me, even when I managed to slip up the stairs to his chambers. Young Rodric, posted outside his door, stopped me there. “No one passes. Least of all you.”
“My laird!” I shouted. “Please speak to me.”
But there was no answer from beyond the heavy wooden door.
“I’m not leaving,” I told Rodric. “I will camp here, in the hall, all night if need be. Surely the laird must come out of his chambers.”
Rodric turned a bit red at the tips of his ears. “You’ll make it harder for me to do my duty, woman.”
Woman? To take such a tone with me when Rodric looked scarcely past the age of eighteen! I quite nearly boxed his ears, but I supposed he could have called me worse things. “I want to see the laird.”
“He’s given me orders to escort you away if you should come,” young Rodric said. “I’ll do it if I must, but that will leave his door unguarded.”
And I remembered what happened to him the last time his door was unguarded. He was nearly murdered. Yes, I remembered. Though my hands and knees had healed of their scrapes, the wound was as fresh as ever in my mind. So, it was with despair and defeat that I returned to Ian’s chambers, my belly filled with such anger at my laird that I could almost imagine doing what he’d asked of me, in revenge.
That’s what I need from you. To bed down with him. To make him love you as you made me love you. To find love with him, if you can.
It had been worked out between Ian and I a sort of schedule. He kept to the bed during the days so that he could man the walls at night. And I slept at night whilst he was gone. In the few hours of overlap, we sometimes read together, talking of the books we both loved so much.
But this time, when Ian returned from his rounds, I demanded, “Do you love me?”
Ian froze where he was, his shirt half-on, half-off. “What?”
“I asked you if you loved me, and I will have an answer.”
Ian’s mouth gaped open a bit, then he snapped it back shut. “You’ve no place to be asking such a thing.”
“Your mother says that you harbor some depth of feeling for me. The laird insisted upon the same. I’ve never seen any evidence of even a fondness for me, but perhaps I am a clot-headed fool. I refuse to continue on in ignorance.”
Ian threw his sword down. Threw it, with a clatter. His eyes narrowed in something akin to fury and he pointed to the still-red scar of the wound on his ribs. “No evidence of fondness, she says! Won’t this do for evidence?”
The wound he’d taken defending me from the enemy. And the memory of it washed over me. Donald clan warriors been trying to grab me and make off with me as they’d done with Arabella. One of them had their hands on me.
Ian Macrae landed a staggering blow to drive him off. Ian had defended me with his body and taken a chop of the sword for his reward. I remembered the spray of blood—the hot, sticky feel of it as I tried to staunch his blood with my pretty gown…
And as I remembered it, Ian continued to rant. “I s’pose you will say that I took it for duty, and that much is true. But what of the wounds I’ve taken for you that you can’t see? Like the one you’ve given me just now. To have been inside you with the laird—to have made love with you in his bed—and not only watch you turn back into his arms, but then tell me you’ve no evidence of my feelings!”
I swallowed audibly. “But you never said—”
“What was I to say? You don’t want me. You don’t belong to me. I’ve too much pride to say such a thing and see the pity in your eyes after it. We might have gone forever together, you and I, without this added humiliation of speaking about it, but you’re like him, aren’t you? You enjoy tormenting me.”
“No, no!” I cried, swiftly, reaching for his hand. “Of course I don’t.”
“Then what is it that you’re about?” he asked, his chest heaving.
“I—I don’t know. I don’t understand how it is between us. Your mother thinks I am your mistress.”
“Och! My bloody mother,” Ian cried, pulling his hand from mine to tear at his hair. “That woman is a meddler of the first order.”
“Am I your mistress now?” I asked, because I felt as if I must know.
“Well, you’re not my wife, are you?”
That made me shrink down a bit into myself in shame.
I went silent, and so did he. And in that silence, he yanked off the rest of his shirt and threw it to the floor. Then he climbed into his side of the bed with a crisp military precision, and brooded in silence.
I broke the silence with a whisper. “I never thanked you for saving me.”
“It was my duty,” he said, gruffly. “It is evidence of my feelings for you, but it is not a debt that must be repaid if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“No, but it was the first and only thing you ever did for me without sourness or complaint, as if it were easier to take the cut of a blade than to teach me my letters…”
“T’was a thousand times easier than teaching you to read, and not because you’re a slow student. To the contrary, the plainer it became to me that you’ve a fine mind beneath all that glorious hair, the more irritating it became to teach you. And not touch you…”
“You’ve wanted to touch me all along?” I asked, curious.
Without looking at me, he murmured, “I’ve been in a sweat of desire for you ever since you came to this castle and I saw you put the laird into a fever-lust. I stand shamed for it.”
“Because of what I am?”
“Because of what I let him make you,” Ian replied.
I bit my lower lip, wondering how differently my life would have been if the laird had never made me his harlot. Then I realized that it was not the laird who made me that. “I wanted him, Ian. The laird would’ve never put a hand on me if I had not wanted him. You saw for yourself how much I wanted him.”
“But he hurt you,” Ian said. “I watched him beat you with a belt.”
“You also watched me beg him for it.”
“If you were my woman, I would never do that to you.”
That, too, was a tragedy. Because I believed him. And it meant that I would never feel the way with Ian Macrae that I felt with the laird. “I was happy to have him do it. It gave me pleasure. I am suffering for its lack. I can’t explain it, but I wanted to make him take pride in me. Wanted to do anything for him—and I can never explain to you how miserable it feels not to be able to serve him.”
“I think I know exactly how it feels,” Ian said, and at first I thought he interrupted me because he didn’t want to hear of it. But then he added, “I know how it is with him. To feel as if he will let you inside, only to be shut out at the end. Feels like being put outside the castle walls, alone and in the cold.”
That Ian could know my feelings so precisely shook me. “You were once that close to him?”
“We were the best of friends when we were lads. I was an only son, but John had older brothers before him. He was never meant to be the laird and neither was I. Neither of us ever thought we might be put in contention or competition. And so we were thick as thieves.”
“But then?”
Ian cleared his throat. “But then the old laird died, and his oldest sons, too. John’s mother was a second wife; the clan had never approved of her. The men of Clan Macrae thought perhaps young John had too much Donald blood in his line. My mother got it into her head that I should be chieftain. I s’pose there are still those who think so.”
“But not you?” I asked, because I couldn’t imagine that he had no ambition.
He clenched his jaw. “I’ve sworn fealty to John Macrae. Not that he ever took me at my word. He has looked askance at me ever since. He takes my advice on matters of the clan, and keeps me close in war. But he cast my friendship away and froze me out just as he’s done to you.”
Not the same, I thought. Not the same at all. If only because Ian could at least still speak to our chieftain if he wanted. But the pain I heard in Ian’s voice was such an echo of my own that it touched me somehow.
Ian held me a breath away, my hand upon his chest as I steadied myself. And that’s when my fingers felt the scar of the wound he’d once taken defending me. He was right, that it was evidence. He’d put his body—his very life—between me and the enemy. He would always bear a scar for it. For my sake. And for the laird. That knowledge made me suddenly and strangely glad that if the laird needed to be rid of me, that he had given me to Ian in reward for his loyalty.
It seemed somehow just and right.
That, in turn, made me want Ian again when I hadn’t thought it possible. I had, until that moment, considered desire in too narrow a definition. It could be found in gratitude and kinship, too, perhaps. I felt gratitude and kinship now. I felt it strongly. So strongly that I dared to lean forward and kiss the scar.
My lips upon it gave Ian a jolt. His hand tightened in my hair, and when he looked at me, his eyes were filled with confusion. “What are you doing, lass?”
That’s what I need from you. To bed down with him. To make him love you as you made me love you. To find love with him, if you can. That is my command.
“I—I want…to make love to you.”
“No you don’t,” Ian said, taking my fingers in his.
“I do,” I insisted, even over the protest of my own heart. Perhaps we could turn to one another to soothe the pain of the wounds the laird had dealt us both.
As if he read my heart, though, Ian said, “If you do want to make love to me, it is only because the laird is still somehow here in this room between us.”
That was true. The laird’s voice was still in my head. Perhaps some of my desire for Ian was to reach through him, back to that night, when the three of us had been together. “If he’s in this room with us, I don’t think you mind nearly so much…”
“No,” Ian admitted, still unable to meet my eyes.
“Then touch me, and let me touch you. Let me, because…” a little sob escaped me. “Because this is the last thing he asked of me, and it’s the only thing I can do to serve him now!”
I hadn’t meant to say it. But once the words escaped, Ian stiffened, caught me by the chin, and tilted my head up. “What the devil do you mean, the last thing he asked of you?”
Chapter Ten
THE LAIRD
“You bloody bastard,” Ian said, slamming the door behind him.
John had been in the tower—watching for reinforcements that were never going to come. Davy hadn’t made it or he’d have returned by now. Davy was assuredly dead, a thing John would have to tell the girl he’d left behind.
John had some treasure and holdings that he would sign over to Arabella for her upkeep, if his wishes could be honored after he died. That’s what he’d been working out in his head when Ian burst in.
“I wish you wouldn’t shout,” he told Ian. “I have a splitting ache in the head.”
Ian stomped the few paces it took to bring them face to face. “No doubt your head aches with all the scheming that goes on in that skull! Do you think your people are little pawns to be moved about on the squares of your chessboard? Is that what you think? Perhaps I’ve always known that of you, John Macrae, but I thought you’d know better than to treat me the same.”
“I don’t know what you’re on about,” the laird replied, wanting wine. Unwatered. But he couldn’t waste it on himself, no matter how badly he needed a drink. He was thirsty, but so was everyone else in the castle.
Yet Ian’s rage had nothing to do with that.
“You sent her to seduce me!” he roared.
John winced. Both because Ian’s shout exploded more pain behind his eyelids and also because it he’d been sure Heather would’ve been wise enough not to tell Ian the command she’d been given.
It had destroyed John every night since he parted with her. He thought it might actually kill him when he heard her call to him outside his door, only to be turned away. A necessity, he knew. But an agony of the spirit unlike any he’d ever known. “I sent her to you for safekeeping and as a gift for you, Ian. Don’t tell me she’s not to your liking. I sent her to find happiness with you. And you with her. You ought to thank me.”
“Aye, right,” Ian said with a snort. “She’s the least happy woman I have ever seen since you sent her away. She’s in love with you, you shallow-hearted lout. Or didn’t you know it?”
John hadn’t known it. Hadn’t been sure. She’d said that she loved him, but then he had broken her heart. She couldn’t still love him, could she? Not after more than a month in another man’s bed…
“I am not shallow-hearted,” the laird said, not liking the quaver in his voice.
“Entirely empty-hearted then, is it?”
It was too much to bear that Ian could say such a thing to him. “It’ll never be enough for you, Ian, will it? You want my clan. You want my woman. Well, when I’m dead, you’ll have them both—”
“Don’t play the martyr with me. Just marry the bloody Donald girl! For the love of God, John. Agree to their terms, surrender the castle, and save your neck, damn you.”
John had made an oath to the Mackenzies. He’d made an oath to Heather, too. He couldn’t see the point in breaking either, just to save his neck. “Is that what you’ll do, when you’re chieftain, Ian? Break your oaths?”
“I’m not saying your choice is easy. But you have a choice. You can negotiate or you can fight, and we’ll be beside you either way. We’ll die with you to the last man. But not if you give up. Not if you sit up here in your tower, trying to control matters after your death, babbling about how I’m going to be chieftain.”
“You are,” John said. “Once you let the enemy into the castle.”
Ian went red, and his fists clenched at his side. “You—you think I’m the traitor?”
John let his eyes lock on his kinsman’s. “I think you’re a wise man and you know there’s a deal to be made. You aren’t the one with an oath of alliance to the Mackenzies, after all. I am. When it is all said and done, and my head is on a pike, you can deny letting them in the walls. You can let them take you prisoner for show, if you must, until the clan is appeased. I’m sure overtures of this sort have been made to you already…either through your mother or directly to you when I sent you out to speak with the enemy.”
Now Ian went from red to purple. “What if such overtures had been made? You actually think I’d entertain them. After all the years I called you not only my kinsman, but my friend. After all we’ve shared. You think I’ll betray you?”
“I know you will,” John said, feeling the tightness in his chest as he said it. “Because I’m commanding you to do it.”
Ian was a big, brawny warrior. A man who could stand at his post for hours without tiring. He had an endurance about him and a singleminded purpose that John had often envied. But at these words, his kinsman’s knees went a bit wobbly, and he seemed to lose all place of himself in the world. “What?”
“It’s the only way for me to both keep my honor and protect Clan Macrae,” John explained, as calmly as a man could explain his own demise. “Accept whatever offer has already been made to
you. And if one hasn’t been made, then I’ll send you out for another parley and you can offer to betray me. Barter for the lives of the villagers. For whichever holdings of mine they’ll let you keep. They might even make you constable of this castle, to hold it in allegiance to them, though that might be too much to ask. What I ask is that you watch after Heather. Do that, and my clan and my woman are both yours.”
The laird never saw the blow coming.
One moment, he was giving the painful order and the next Ian’s fist was connecting with his face. The crack was shattering—knuckles against jaw. The pain of it nearly blinded him. And he could taste the iron tang of blood in his mouth. A moment later they were grappling, grabbing one another by the collars of the shirt, shoving and straining.
“You dare to strike your laird?” John shouted, true rage coursing through his veins that he hadn’t let himself feel before now. The laird returned the punch, delivering a solid blow that snapped Ian’s head back, and spouted a fountain of blood from his nose. “I could have you killed for it!”
“Do it if you can,” Ian cried, tears in his eyes as he readied his fist for another swing. “Because you’re right. I want your clan. I want your woman too. But I would never have taken either from you. And I’ll be damned if I let you give them to me. You can find someone else to be your Judas.”
~~~
HEATHER
Not long after I watched Ian storm off in a rage to confront the laird, Brenna hovered in the doorway. “Will you need help dressing?” Brenna asked, her skin still pale from the poisoned well-water, and her lower lip a bit quivery, lending her speech a bit of a slur.
“You shouldn’t be up and about!” I cried, rushing to usher her into a chair.
“There’s no point in laying about feeling poorly if you can be useful while feeling poorly,” she said, adjusting her cap with exactly the sentiment I’d come to expect from her.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” I said, mournfully, for the shepherd’s boy didn’t make it and several others emerged with such weak thumps of the heart, it was as if they’d never recover. “In any case, you need not worry about dressing me anymore. I’m not the laird’s lady any longer, and as you can see, I’ve managed to dress myself.”
