book JdM6x1406931-20978754 (3 page)

“If I say that I have, man, will you allow me to rise?” she said in a choked voice to the hay bale over which she still hung like some shepherd’s wife, chastised for burning her husband’s dinner, or a serving wench who had not laid the fire properly.

For the briefest of moments, she remembered the way she had once been so fascinated by the thought that such women were chastised by their husbands or by their masters and mistresses upon their bare bottoms. She felt herself blush as she realized that she was now no better than they, for she had at last been spanked by this MacGregor man in his uncivilized plaid upon her own bare bottom. At that thought, too—at the image of Angus MacGregor, as if seen from the doorway of the barn, spanking the Lady of Urquhart’s bare bottom a blazing red—she felt herself growing heated and damp elsewhere—in the place between her thighs that in the course of her education at court in Edinburgh she had learned must not be thought of or spoken about until a girl was married.

She quickly turned her thoughts away to the knowledge that her home was in flames. Strangely, despite her love of the castle, she felt little moved by the sight or the thought. Perhaps the vision of her father’s cowardice somehow made the place’s destruction seem natural—sad but inevitable; perhaps her years in Edinburgh had made her restless in a way she could not define, for she could not deny that there was a part of her that, as she had hidden herself in this barn, had thought, adventure at last.

MacGregor removed his arm from her back and stood up. “Say so or say not; rise or rise not, at your pleasure, milady,” he said mockingly. “Our affairs are at an end. We are quits.”

Elisabeth felt a strange pang at his words. She rose and smoothed her chemise and gown down her legs, wincing at the weight of the fabric upon her backside. MacGregor had walked to the barn door and was looking out of it, his back to her. The flames were high enough now and the night dark enough that flickering shadows danced on the stacked hay.

“Did I not say,” she began, in the prideful tone she knew she must use with him, “that I would visit this outrage back upon you?”

He turned to look at her, silently, for a long moment. Then he said, “Aye, lass. That you did. I merely meant that I have no further plans to visit my own outrage upon your arrogant rump. Our future dealings must be as they may.”

Suddenly, to her surprise, Elisabeth began to weep. She felt the haughtiness go out of her, fleeing in terror, and the sorrow at the destruction of her castle rush in upon her heart. She covered her eyes with her left hand and rubbed her brow, trying in vain to control herself.

Then she felt MacGregor’s arms about her. She struggled and shook her head, but his strength enfolded her, and she finally laid her head upon the rough wool that covered his chest.

“Hush, milady,” he said. “It will be alright.”

“How will it possibly be alright?”

“You will get word to your father, and he will come for you and bring you to him in Castle Grant or in Edinburgh, wherever he is bound.”

Elisabeth felt something strange rising inside her heart. She freed herself from MacGregor’s arms, resolutely pushing against him with insistence but without any violence, so that he could tell she had calmed herself.

She took a step back and looked him in the face. “No,” she said. “I will stay in the Highlands.”

MacGregor’s brow furrowed in incomprehension. “How will you do that, now?”

“I will stay with you.”

He laughed in disbelief and confusion. “And how will that be? As my shepherdess?”

“As your servant, if I have to. I will not leave the shores of Loch Ness until Castle Urquhart is rebuilt, or my life is at its natural end.”

“A sentiment worthy of the Highlands, milady, but I am afraid I have no room in my house for baronesses waiting for their castles to rise again.”

“What have you room for, then, MacGregor?” Strange as it was, this path seemed to her the right one, the one along which ran true pride.

His lip curled in scorn. “A wife, milady. Would you wed a MacGregor?”

His scorn roused her ire, but anger was far from the only emotion that made her say the fateful words that came next. “I would, if it kept me on the shores of Loch Ness.”

He laughed a full laugh—the same full laugh that had put him in the pillory just that afternoon, a time that seemed a long age since, now.

“To have the Lady of Urquhart to wife. A very fine jest, milady.” He bowed to her mockingly.

“I am not jesting, MacGregor,” she said, narrowing her eyes and setting her mouth firmly. “You shall have me, if you will.”

The Highlander shook his head, clearly sure that her grief had stolen her wits away. “Think on it, milady, for a moment. I should have to be mad, shouldn’t I? Your father will return someday, and your castle may well rise again, and what would then become of Angus MacGregor, who wed the laird’s daughter when the laird fled down the loch?”

“He would be my wedded husband, and I should stand by him as would be my duty before heaven.” She could hardly believe she was uttering the words she heard herself saying, but they seemed to come from a part of her deeper than any she had ever plumbed. Was she like her loch, then, whose greatest depths no man had ever sounded?

Angus seemed to consider this more seriously than he had considered any of her previous statements, but he still seemed convinced that either she was out of her mind or he was dreaming. “I do not deny that you are comely, lass,” he said bemusedly, “and if you are as taken with the idea of never leaving these shores as you claim, I can see no other way for you. And…” he added, as if as an afterthought, “if you can ask me to propose matrimony after I have spanked you as hard as I just did—well, daft as it is, I suppose, just to get you to come away with me to safety, I will say that I shall consider it. In the meantime, I shall take you into my protection at least until we reach Glanaidh. If you still have this notion when you see my home, then, lass, perhaps we shall be wed.”

At least he had spoken the words, she thought, though he was clearly merely humoring her.

They regarded one another for a moment. His handsome face, with its skin tanned by many summers out of doors upon the braes, seemed entirely unknowable to her. Was he truly considering the strange offer of herself that she had just made? Then a thought that made her blush sprang into her mind, and she spoke almost without meaning to. “If I should be your wife, I should like to know, would you spank me?”

Angus tilted his head slightly and looked steadily back. “Yes, my girl, I would spank you as often as I felt you needed spanking.”

“Oh,” said Elisabeth, regretting that she had blurted out the question and feeling again the way the burning of her spanked bottom cheeks seemed to make its way forward into the loins she had thought before today so innocent of any of the things confessed to her by her cousins back in the Lowlands.

Angus put his hands on his hips and seemed to lean forward slightly. “And, Elisabeth—” She started at the sound of her Christian name from his lips, and he noted the reaction and chuckled, then began again, as if trying to dissuade her and break the spell of her foolishness. “And, Elisabeth, I do not know what they taught you in Edinburgh among your mother’s royal kin about the ways of the matrimonial bed…”

She could not help her blush at that.

“But my wife will serve me in my bed as I see fit. You must make no mistake on that score, Elisabeth.”

A sound rose in her throat like what a puppy might make were it pining for its mother, and her knees seemed to shake beneath her. His words had struck upon a chord in her heart she had always tried to pretend was not there within her, lying in wait for a man like Angus MacGregor to say “serve me in my bed as I see fit.” Even more shamefully, she felt anew that wickedness her governess had said she must avoid and flee at all cost: the unbidden wetness in the very maiden furrow she knew Angus meant that he would plow exactly as he liked, should she indeed give her troth to him before God and man. She did not know what her cousin had meant about the plowing, even, but the thought of it made the strange feeling grow and grow until it seemed unbearable.

Had he noticed the way her body had responded to him? If so, he did not acknowledge it.

* * *

They walked through the night. Elisabeth would have been terrified of brigands, she had to admit to herself, if she had not been with Angus. He seemed so perfectly sure of himself along these roads that she had not the slightest doubt they would reach Glanaidh safely.

“Where is your cart?” she asked, when after a half hour or so they had left the town palisade behind and were headed west along Glen Urquhart on the road that ran through Inverness-shire all the way to the sea. The flocks of the Urquhart clansmen had, she supposed, long been driven away west. Elisabeth had realized belatedly that he must have come to Urquhart upon a cart rather than on foot, for had he not said that he had fleeces to sell?

“My kinsman took it, I am sure,” he said. “Perhaps he is waiting for us along the way, perhaps not. Are your slippers sturdy?”

“I think they are,” Elisabeth replied. “I can walk barefoot if I must, though. How far do we go?”

“I have run it in half an hour, across the braes,” Angus said. “With you, upon the road, at night, I think we have three hours before us.”

“I shall do fine,” Elisabeth said proudly.

Just then, however, they heard a man’s voice saying from within one of the little stands of trees that now dotted the side of the road as they approached the River Coiltie, where it joined the River Enrick, “Angus?”

Angus replied, “Calum! Tell me true, now, are you not here past when you should be?”

“Well,” said the voice, “I grew so wistful looking at the flames going up from yonder castle that I quite lost any sense of the passing night.” The kinsman who had freed Angus from the stocks stepped out onto the road.

“What have we here?” he asked on seeing Elisabeth, in a tone that reminded her uncomfortably of the one Ian MacDonald had used in the market square.

“Well, Calum, that’s hard to say in one way, and easy in another,” Angus replied. “Calum MacGregor, be presented to the Lady of Urquhart.”

“Angus, I am not so easy to dupe as that, I suppose, but let me play along and give this poor girl who seems to have accepted your protection a welcome worthy of her.” Calum made an elaborate bow. “Milady,” he said.

“I am pleased to meet you, sir,” Elisabeth said.

Calum straightened as if he had been hit by an arrow. “How in heaven?” he asked.

“I beg of you, kinsman, do not ask tonight. There will be time enough to tell the tale. Bring the cart out, and let us be on our way.”

The oxcart was brought out from the trees, and Angus helped Elisabeth onto the board and got up after her. Calum climbed up on the other side and they started.

The road wound west, and then north across the Coiltie and the Enrick, and then away from the shores of the loch and along the steep hillsides that climbed up and out of the Great Glen itself. Now they traveled, from the sound of it, along a little burn that came splashing down from a loch high above. There was no light but the faintest glimmer of moonbeams through high clouds that showed only a darkling landscape and, very rarely, the sight of what Elisabeth thought must be the distant window of a croft-house.

Then, however, one of those lights appeared before them and stayed there and became three fainter lights instead of one, and abruptly, the road ended and Elisabeth could see that there were three croft-houses there, alongside a barn. So suddenly did it all seem to happen that she thought she must have fallen asleep, and then she realized that she had indeed fallen asleep on the board of the cart, leaning against Angus as he drove, and that he had his powerful right arm about her waist.

She straightened abruptly and shook his arm off.

Angus laughed. “A strange sort of betrothal this is, my girl. I was beginning to think you might be warming to me.”

“Oh. Yes, er, MacGregor. Thank you,” she said as she hastily clambered off the cart. That same new, warm feeling had filled not just her loins, but somehow also her whole body at the feeling of his arm around her, and she was at pains not to show it.

“Even your husband,” her governess in Edinburgh had said, “must not know the mysteries of your body.”

“You are welcome, milady,” he said in a tone that indicated that she had indeed managed to mystify him. “Let us get inside and warm. Let us say nothing of my… proposal until the morning.”

Chapter Four

After he showed Elisabeth to his own bed in his tiny croft-house, Angus went to Calum’s house, ten paces distant.

“You
are
daft, Angus. You have the Lady of Urquhart in
your
bed—the nineteen-year-old, fair-as-a-lily Lady of Urquhart—and here you come to infest
my
bed with your lice.” He was not serious, to be sure. Angus knew what he assumed, which was what any sane man would assume if he saw a MacGregor escorting the Chief of Clan Grant’s daughter into a croft-house: Angus would receive a lordly reward for delivering her safe to her father’s people at Castle Grant or her mother’s people in Edinburgh.

“Mind your manners,” said Angus, sourly. “If I cannot find a way out of it, she will be my wife come dusk tomorrow.”

Calum merely gaped at that and stood aside to let Angus pass into the one room house with the hearth in the middle and the bed at the end. At least Elisabeth had not commented on the smell of peat and the billow of smoke that came out of his own hearth when he had banked it and that had taken its good time to find its way to the chimney in the thatch above.

He cursed himself inwardly for putting the slightest bit of store by what Elisabeth Grant thought of his croft-house and unbelted his plaid. He hung the belt on a hook by Calum’s bed and wrapped the plaid around himself and lay down on the straw-filled mattress, his feet towards the fire.

Calum came and stood over him. “Are you going to thank me, then?”