The Wolf and the Highlander (Highland Wishes)

by Jessi Gage

  He continued to lap her wound gently. It wasn’t deep, wouldn’t need sewing. The bleeding had nearly stopped already. “Ten thousand apologies?” he murmured, his lips brushing her hand. “I can do that. I might get them all said by the time we reach Chroina.”

  She stiffened at his mention of their journey and slipped her hand out of his grasp.

  He let it go with a pang of loss. “It’s time I tell you why I’m bringing you there. And what’s at stake if I fail.”

  In the ensuing silence, it felt like the weight of the world settled on his shoulders. Maybe it had. His world would die without her. She needed to know it. He couldn’t be with her at all times. She needed to know how important she was, how vulnerable.

  She would probably hate him once he told her the truth. His proud lady would not like being told she must provide an heir for his king. Then again, maybe her hating him would be for the best. His scent already wafted off her from when he’d nuzzled her earlier tonight. He couldn’t seem to stop touching her, layering more of his scent on her. Instinct demanded he make her smell like his.

  But she wasn’t his. The instinct was wrong.

  He needed her to hate him so she wouldn’t let him touch her again, but not so much she’d refuse to do what his people needed.

  Shite. Women were complicated.

  He held out his hand to her. “Come. I have no idea how to cook your dinner. You show me what to do, and I’ll tell you all about King Magnus.”

  Anya eyed him suspiciously. Then she put her hand in his and let him lead her from the cave. “You’re right,” she said. “’Tis about bloody time.”

  Chapter 10

  Riggs crouched on the bank and skinned the buck’s hindquarters.

  Standing by the woodpile, Anya drew a flint box from her pocket. Smart lady to have kept it on her person. The one he used to make campfires for tea was still in the abandoned pack the trackers would have confiscated by now.

  When she knelt, she didn’t make a peep, but her pain was written in the pinching of the corners of her eye.

  He moved to help, but her glare warned him not to go near her. He resumed skinning the buck and pretended not to be entranced by her proud yet vulnerable beauty.

  She had the inner cone glowing with embers in no time. As the fire crackled to life, it made angry red slashes of her scars. He wanted to caress them with his hands, his lips. He wanted to show this woman no part of her was unlovely to him.

  But it wasn’t his place. If anyone showed her such things, it would be King Magnus.

  He stripped the last of the hide away, feeling lost. Where did he stick the knife to begin cutting meat to a human’s liking? How did he begin carving out the truth for her? Like the buck’s hindquarters, he couldn’t possibly give her the whole truth in one chunk. It would be too much.

  “Here, let me.” She got up from working on the fire, hiding her wince behind a mask of impatience. She came to stand over where he squatted. Her gaze raked him from crown to toe.

  He hadn’t put his shirt back on. Hadn’t even washed himself from the hunt. The buck’s blood streaked his shoulders. Dirt and dried blood made his arms gritty. When he lifted his chin to look her in the eye, the remnants of his meal cracked on his neck and flaked away.

  Her lips parted, looking like soft pillows. Then they pressed in a hard line. She held out her hand for his knife, and he gave it over. Without a word, she lowered herself beside him and began cutting the meat into cubes with swift movements, like she’d done this hundreds of times before.

  “The trackers are after you,” he blurted, “not me.” It was a terrible place to start, but at least he’d stuck the blade in somewhere.

  She looked up. “What? How do you ken?”

  Now to shape the truth into manageable chunks. “The wolves. They were prepared to kill me. That means it’s your scent they were following, not mine.”

  Her brows drew together. “So they wouldn’t have killed me?”

  “No. They’d have cornered you and held you until their masters arrived.”

  On her exhale, her chest stuttered. “Why me? I’m nothing to them. A trespasser, a foreigner.” She resumed her cutting and piled the cubes onto the hide to protect them from the sand. “Get me some sticks to slide these onto.”

  He helped her arrange the meat for cooking.

  She seemed intent on the task and didn’t rush his answer, which was good since he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want her thinking he would take her choice from her, even though that’s exactly what he would have to do unless she chose for herself to help his people. Could he tell her the truth in a way that would encourage her to choose what he wanted?

  His insides squirmed. He didn’t want to manipulate her. He wanted her happy, and that was the core of the truth. But he also wanted his people to survive.

  “Why me?” she asked again, once they’d laid the sticks around the base of the fire.

  Her attention was a weight on his skin. He suddenly felt the need to wash himself. While the savory scent of cooking meat billowed around them, he stripped off his trousers and stepped into the river, going far enough for the water to cover the evidence of his desire before he half-turned to keep her in sight. Maybe he was a coward. Or maybe he just needed a moment to gather his thoughts.

  He rubbed his palms up and down his arms and over his chest. Water trickled over his neck and back, carrying away the scents of game and forest. She’d seen him do this before, although she pretended she hadn’t. She pretended not to watch him now, but out of the corner of his eye he saw the truth. When he cocked his head to look directly at her, she glanced away and busied herself with turning the sticks of meat.

  “You should soak your legs while it cooks,” he said.

  She shook her head. “The venison will be done sooner than I could get out of my trews. Besides, I’m in fair shape. I’ve hardly walked at all today.”

  Fair shape, his ass. She was in agony. He saw it in her stiff movements, in her taut face. Maybe after she ate, he could coax her into the water for a few minutes like he’d done at Aine’s Falls.

  Aine.

  Of course!

  He suddenly knew where to begin.

  He finished washing and returned to the bank.

  Anya didn’t look his way as he put his trousers back on, but her cheeks darkened with a rosy hue. Her reaction to his naked form made him proud. Even if he couldn’t have her, he liked knowing he affected her. By the moon, she affected him.

  How would he return to his cabin without her after bringing her to Chroina? How would he stay sane knowing she was in another man’s bed? Shite. He no longer wanted to buy lottery tickets. If he couldn’t have Anya, he wanted no woman.

  His limbs felt like lead as he finished dressing and sat beside her near the fire.

  “Well,” she said. “Are you going to answer me or no’?”

  “I’ll answer. But first, I have a story to tell.”

  “I thought you didna like to tell stories.”

  The savory scent of cooking meat turned sharp and sooty. It was starting to burn. Was it still edible after being charred like that?

  “I never said I didn’t like telling them. I said my sire was the storyteller. This is one he told many times. Rescue your meat and I’ll try to do it justice.”

  * * * *

  Anya blew on a stick to cool the venison. She loved meat like this, charred on the outside, hopefully still tender on the inside. She took a bite. Och. Heaven. Tangy and gamy with a slight crust that would probably leave unsightly black flecks on her lips. She licked them between bites, just in case.

  Riggs’s gaze fixed on her mouth. There was hunger in his eyes, but not the sort sated with meat. That look made her squirm in her trews. She shouldn’t want him at all. He was of another race. He ate his meat raw. He yelled at her when she didn’t do as he commanded.

  He’d told her he didn’t want her.

  Why did he look at her that way when he’d made it cl
ear she was unsuitable for him? Men could be so bloody confusing. They weren’t always. Sometimes they were as straightforward as an arrow shot from a bow. Other times...och, she’d never understand them.

  She forced her attention to the venison, determined to eat as much as she could hold. Who kent when she might get meat again.

  Meanwhile, Riggs leaned back on an elbow and watched her. The dying fire made the gold flecks in his eyes dance. He absently twirled her discarded stick between his fingers as he began, “There once lived a man named Gregor.”

  A change came over him, a sort of contemplative soberness in place of his usual self-assured gruffness. The lines around his eyes seemed deeper. He looked older to her in the firelight. For the first time, she wondered about his age.

  “He was governor of Figcroft,” Riggs continued. “Which was at that time a thriving town. He and three other men shared a woman named Aine. The falls we stopped at are named after her.”

  “Wait,” she interrupted. “Shared? What do ye mean?” Polishing off one stick, she reached for another.

  Riggs plucked one of the remaining sticks from the log where she’d laid them and sniffed the venison, wrinkling his nose. Setting down the stick again, he exchanged it for a long, smooth stone from the rocky sand. He began flipping it over and under his fingers in a trick she couldn’t look away from. How could such large fingers be so flexible, so quick? How did he not drop the stone when he wasn’t even looking at it?

  His eyes were on her when he answered. “In those days, it was common for several men to share a single woman.” He shrugged and stuck out his lower lip, as if this were the least astonishing bit of information to ever be spoken. “Back to Gregor—”

  “Why did several men share a single woman?”

  “If you keep asking questions, it’ll take all night to tell the story.” He winked, and her foolish body fluttered with pleasure.

  “Fine. Tell your bloody story. I won’t interrupt.” She took an enormous bite to finish the second stick.

  “Good.” He handed her the stick he’d sniffed. “Centuries before Gregor’s time, the birthrate tipped toward males. By the time Gregor became governor of Figcroft, the only chance most men had of breeding was if a female invited him to enter a breeding pact. Every female was obligated to enter into one with at least three men of her choosing within a year of reaching breeding age.”

  She took another big mouthful to keep herself from barraging him with questions. Like, how few women were there for such a practice to be common? How could young lasses be expected to choose three men to share a bed with so soon after becoming young women? Were these pacts like marriages? Could a lass get a divorce if one or more of the men treated her poorly, as any Highland wife could if her clan was led by a just laird?

  Riggs tossed the pebble into the fire and chose another to roll between his fingers. “Aine chose her three, but then she met Gregor. She chose him as well. Nothing wrong there. There was no law restricting a woman to only three men. In fact, there was no upper limit, as long as the female shared herself fairly between her pactmates.

  “But Aine did not share fairly. As governor, Gregor had his own home, a fine home. Aine spent more time there than in the house she’d shared with her other pactmates. They soon became jealous, but recognizing her great affection for Gregor, they held their tongues. They didn’t want to upset her. Until two whole seasons passed and she didn’t return to the communal house. The three went to the governor’s home to demand he send Aine to them. It was more than their turn to try and breed with her.

  “The whole town stood behind the three outside the governor’s gates, outraged at their leader’s selfishness. How was he to rule in breeding pact disputes when he himself didn’t respect the rights of his pactmates?”

  Anya felt herself nodding, angry with Gregor on behalf of the pactmates. “What happened?” She picked at the third stick with her fingers, too fascinated with Riggs’s tale to eat.

  He began carving into the sand with the stone, etching deep, straight lines. “Gregor came to the gate to meet the townspeople. He claimed Aine was ill and could not come out. The pactmates forced their way inside. They found Aine inside, smelling strongly of Gregor’s mating scent and something else, something more pungent and much, much more rare. Every man there understood what the scent meant, even though they’d never smelled anything like it before. Gregor had taken Aine as his lifemate.”

  Riggs had gouged into the earth the shape of a box.

  “Lifemate?” The stick dangled in her hand.

  The fire was burning low. Riggs’s face was half in shadow, half in wavering light. “Legend says that when Danu made us, she put a bit of the moon’s power in our souls. On rare occasion, a man would recognize within a woman a piece of moonsoul that perfectly matched his own. If he petitioned the goddess and received her blessing, he could mate with his chosen female under the full moon and the goddess would permanently and irrevocably unite their souls. They would become lifemates.

  “It was said of lifemates they were inseparable, even in death. Every time they mated, the male would mark his female with a special scent that would strengthen their bond and repel other males.”

  She snorted at that. “I doona ken of a single man who would let somat like the way a woman smells discourage him from tumbling her if he wanted to. There’s no’ bloody much that can come between a man’s cock-stand and his pleasure.”

  Riggs went still, all except for his right hand. He began flipping the stone over and under his fingers again, slower than before. While he did it, he watched her with a strange intensity in his eyes.

  “Furthermore, the female would not be receptive to any other male,” he continued as if she hadn’t interrupted. “It was said none except her lifemate would be able to breed on her, that her womb would open for his seed alone.”

  She rolled her eyes. The story had captured her attention until he’d brought up this moonsoul nonsense. “I suppose you wish me to conclude Gregor acted selfishly by taking Aine as his lifemate.”

  This lifemate business sounded like the kind of story men told their wives to frighten them into being faithful. Those same men would visit a bawdyhouse without compunction. She hated men like that. If a husband was going to be unfaithful, he ought to have the decency to look the other way when his wife repaid him in kind.

  “Selfishly, yes. And illegally.” Riggs returned his attention to his drawing. He was adding vertical lines to the front of the box. “Exclusive pairings of any kind were outlawed when breeding pacts were established. Women of breeding age were too rare to be kept by one man alone. The law applied mainly to pledgemates, an old practice where a pair would pledge themselves to each other for life. It was understood this went for lifemates too, though lifemates were so rare no one had bothered to pen it into law at that time.

  “Gregor claimed he hadn’t petitioned Danu to make Aine his lifemate. He hadn’t even pledged himself to her. The bond simply happened. Aine vowed the same. They hadn’t done it intentionally. But no one could argue that for the first time in generations, it had been done.

  “Furious, the people of Figcroft deposed Gregor and brought him to Chroina for the king’s judgment. The king heard the case and ruled that Gregor could not have made Aine his lifemate unintentionally. A new law was penned, and Gregor was sentenced accordingly. Life in prison for violating Aine’s pact with the other three.” He tapped a finger on the sand. The box had become a cage.

  “But that wouldn’t help the pactmates,” she said. “If they couldn’t get her with child, what would be the point of continuing the pact?”

  Riggs inclined his head, agreeing with her point. “There would be no point, if that were the end of it. But some thought with separation, the lifemate scent might wear off. Apart from Gregor, Aine might eventually become receptive to her pactmates, even conceive for them.”

  “Some thought? Didna they ken for cert? If this is how things were, why did the people nay understand ho
w it worked?”

  “By Gregor’s time, there were no lifemates left to offer advice. Not even pledgemates. Exclusive pairs were a thing of the past. They only had a handful of historical records to guide them.”

  How strange. What must it have been like to live in such a world? “Well, doona keep me waiting. Did Gregor’s scent fade from Aine? Did she welcome her pactmates to her bed eventually?”

  “It took a single moon cycle for Gregor’s scent to fade, but that wasn’t all that faded.” Riggs began drawing another picture beside the first. “The very substance of life seemed to drain out of Aine. Her skin became dull. Her hair became limp. Sadness snuffed the glow in her eyes. She would not eat or drink and began wasting away.

  “Her pactmates were distraught. They did everything they could to please her. They made her gifts with their own hands, showered her with affection, sang her songs, and saw to her every comfort. Nothing worked. She simply stopped thriving. Eventually, she stopped speaking and just lay in her bed, staring at the wall.”

  With a pang of sympathy, Anya remembered lying in her cot in the ladies’ cart after her fall. She would stare at the wall for hours on end. She’d refused to speak, to eat. Parted from her beauty, strung tight with pain, and kenning how badly she was bound to be crippled, she’d wanted to die. She’d cursed Gravois every hour for rescuing her.

  How much of Aine’s state was due to this mystical lifemate connection, and how much was due to plain old self-pity?

  “Not knowing what else to do, they brought her to Chroina. They thought, if she could visit Gregor in prison, she might improve. But when they arrived, the jailor told them Gregor had hanged himself in his cell weeks before. He’d written on the wall with his own blood, My life, my Aine.”

  The fire went out. The only light came from the moon and a handful of embers. It was enough to make out the dark shape he’d drawn beside the cage. A noose.

  She brought her hand to her throat. “What happened when Aine learned of it?”