Torn Between Two Highlanders Read online

  “Very,” Davy said, his eyes misting a bit as he spoke. “Close as brothers, we are. Truly. Not that I’ve ever said as much to him. And suppose he doesn’t wake up… then I never will have the chance to say it, ye ken.”

  He needed her to heal his friend; to rouse Malcolm from his stupor. She wished she knew how. “I’ll do all I can for him,” Arabella promised. “But you mustn’t keep saying that I’m a witch. If such talk got back to the laird, he’d have me burned alive.”

  At that, Davy snorted. “You don’t know our laird well, I see. Because trust me when I say that if John Macrae knew he had a witch in our clan, he’d never burn you. He’d want you at the castle using your witchcraft to defeat our enemies. Our laird is a practical man, and so am I. So if you must smash up eye of newt or speak in tongues or make bargains with the devil to make Malcolm well, then you do it. Because I’d rather lose my soul than let him die.”

  ~~~

  Lorna.

  The wounded warrior moaned this name when Arabella tried to rouse him to sip at the bark tea. But he didn’t wake to drink it. He only whispered again, and again, through chattering teeth. Lorna. Lorna. Lorna.

  “His wife,” Davy explained, and Arabella’s heart squeezed with grief at the thought Malcolm might die calling so pitifully for a woman who couldn’t hear him.

  “Is she nearby?” she asked, wondering if they might risk trying to fetch her.

  “She’s dead.”

  Oh. That made Arabella even sadder.

  Davy checked his friend’s bandage to find that Malcolm was still bleeding—bright red blood was seeping through his bandages faster than they could change them. And Arabella worried that the bark tea would not help that; in fact, it might make it worse. Having lost so much blood, Malcolm was very cold. His skin chilled and clammy. But Davy piled atop him all the blankets they could find, then said, “I think we have to sew it closed.”

  “His wound?” Arabella asked, mildly horrified.

  “Aye. I’ve seen it done on a battlefield.”

  “Just sew together rent flesh like a torn garment?” She didn’t know whether the idea filled her more with nausea or curiosity. But she wasn’t going to let a man bleed his life away if she could help it. “I’ll look for a needle and thread.”

  At her father’s cottage, Arabella would’ve known where to look. Her sister Heather always kept the sewing items in a basket by the hearth. Thankfully Conall kept some thread in the bottom of his trunk; he must have used it for mending, a job that would have certainly been hers if she had married him. Which confirmed again that she wasn’t so very sorry to have broken off the betrothal after all.

  Davy frowned at the delicate needle. “Can you thread it for me? My fingers aren’t so nimble.”

  She did as he asked, then stood by the side of the bed, watching curiously as the freckled warrior prepared to sew up the wound. But the moment she saw the angle at which Davy held the needle, she protested. “Should you really be jamming it into him like a spear?”

  “I’ve never sewed a stitch before today,” Davy said, swaying a bit as if his knees were spongy at the thought of what he meant to do.

  “I’ll do it,” Arabella said, surprising herself.

  Davy eyed her, warily. “I can’t have you swooning away at the feel of piercing human flesh.”

  Arabella reached for the needle, defiantly. “You look more like to swoon away than me. Besides, our clan motto is with fortitude, isn’t it?”

  At that Davy let her take the needle and thread, watched her knot the end. He swallowed audibly when she pushed the sharp end deep enough into Malcolm’s skin to hold, but not so deeply as to penetrate the muscle. It took only three stitches before the pain brought Malcolm awake, and he cursed, thrashing.

  “Keep still, Malcolm.” Davy wrestled his friend still so that Arabella could finish her grisly task. “Unless you mean to bleed to death.”

  Meanwhile, Arabella sewed swiftly, making tight, clean stitches. Or as neat as she could make them anyway. Malcolm stopped struggling somewhere in the midst of the stitching, lapsing from consciousness again, which made it easier for Arabella to do her work. And while it was a sickly feeling to experience a needle sink into living flesh, she ignored it. She ignored the blood. The gore. The fact that she saw parts of Malcolm—deeply impressive parts—below the waist she ought not to have.

  All she knew in that moment was this man’s pain and her need to heal him. And when she’d washed up and Davy went to fetch firewood, she lay down beside the wounded man on his straw mattress in utter exhaustion, telling herself she meant only to keep him warm.

  In spite of the scar on his cheek, Malcolm was, she thought, the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. Stern, dark, stony. But beautiful somehow, in a savage way. And like a savage creature, he seemed to sense her there. His eyelashes fluttered open, and he murmured, “Lorna?”

  “No,” Arabella said, softly.

  But he seemed not to hear her, reaching to stroke her hair with a longing tenderness, trying to turn as if to take her into his arms. “Lorna.”

  She pressed one palm to his broad chest to fend him off. “Please don’t move or you’ll open your wound again. I’m not Lorna. I’m just a girl you tried to save today…”

  He stopped stroking her hair, and blinked glassy eyes. “You looked like my wife. In the firelight.” Then Malcolm let his head fall back upon the pillow, poised to drift off again.

  Arabella thought it might be better to keep him awake. “You must have loved her very much.”

  “Aye.” Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to want to say more than that.

  To keep him talking, and because she was painfully curious, she asked, “Do you mind—would you care to say—how—how did she die?”

  Malcolm didn’t answer for a very long time. So long, in fact, she believed he had fallen again into a deadly slumber. But when he spoke, it was like a curse. “Donald clan warriors took her, years ago.”

  Arabella startled. Was he confused or was it possible that his wife had also been kidnapped? She hated the Donalds for it—making her twice as glad that she’d poisoned the lot of them. “They killed her?”

  Shivering, Malcolm squeezed his eyes shut as if he wished she would go away and leave him be. It obviously pained him to speak of it, and he wasn’t going to answer. It would have been cruel to press him, so she resolved to say nothing more about it, and tucked the blanket around his shoulders.

  That’s when he murmured, “I killed her.”

  Arabella’s blood ran cold. She had seen this man kill—seen him cut through his foes with savagery. Could he kill a woman with his own hands? A woman he loved? Suddenly fearful to be alone with him, she began to sit up. “You killed your wife?”

  “Aye,” he said, with a bitter scowl, never opening his eyes. “I never laid a violent hand on her but there are ways to kill a woman by not touching her. And I did that.” A little breathless with confusion, Arabella realized he wasn’t going to explain himself. He merely swallowed, then swallowed again. “I’m thirsty.”

  “Take some bark tea,” she said, rising to get the cup. “It will help with the pain.”

  Grimacing, Malcolm spilled more of it than he got down his gullet. And it pained Arabella to realize that such a big strong warrior was too weak to hold his own cup. She held it for him, even though his dark eyes burned with some emotion she could not name. “T’was the shame that did it,” he finally murmured into his cup. “I don’t like to speak of it. Haven’t spoken of it nearly at all, but—I thought after what they did to her—that my Lorna would not want to be touched, so I kept my hands off her. I suppose I made her feel like a sullied thing. Made her too ashamed to live. They say she fell from that cliff. Lost her way, lost her footing. But I know she jumped.”

  These were more words than Arabella had heard the wounded warrior string together before, and they were words that broke her heart. Words that spoke of guilt and pain and heartbreak. Words filled with such regret that t
hey made tears well up in her eyes for him. “Don’t think she jumped, for it is too great a sin.”

  “T’was my sin. I s’pose it’s why she haunts me to this day.”

  But he sounded glad of it. Arabella had never heard anyone be glad of a haunting before, but he was. She wished that Lorna might be at peace, and Malcolm too. But it was such a sad story that she was sure it would now haunt her, too. “Enough?” she asked, of the tea.

  He nodded, pushing upon her hand. Then, after some moments, Malcolm added, “Seeing you as we did, being mauled like that…”

  Arabella bit her lip, realizing why he’d told her the story. Why he’d confessed such heartbreaking details to a stranger. “I reminded you of your wife.”

  “Aye. I saw not you, but my Lorna upon the ground, and it rattled me to my bones. I canna think how else I would ever be clumsy enough to leave myself open to take such a wound.”

  “Oh,” Arabella said, softly, because felt somehow guilty for it.

  But even knowing now that she was not his wife, he reached up for a lock of her hair, and stroked it softly between his fingers. “I’m sorry, lass. We shouldn’t have let them take you and ruin you even if you are a witch.”

  Arabella’s throat tightened as the realization of her situation came home to her anew. Given her broken betrothal, there was likely not a man in the clan who would believe she hadn’t been ruined. Not even the men who had put a stop to it believed her. And that made her angry. “I’m not a witch, but I suppose I’m to be taken as a fallen woman no matter what I do or say.”

  Malcolm’s eyes half-closed in his pain-addled state. “Worse things to be than a fallen woman.”

  Arabella snorted. “What’s worse than being a fallen woman?”

  “Being a dead woman.” He said it harshly. Bitterly. Honestly.

  It was an answer that made her fists curl by her sides, but one that she supposed no other man might be able to tell her with any sense of authority. Well, she certainly wouldn’t be leaping off any cliff-sides. “If anyone should die of shame it should be men who steal women away.”

  Malcolm sighed a heavy sigh. “But that isn’t the way of the world.”

  Chapter Four

  “How is he?” Davy asked.

  “Still cold and thirsty, but better, I think,” Arabella said, leaning heavily with exhaustion against the door frame. “He was awake and speaking for a time. But now he’s sleeping again.”

  Davy stooped to stoke the fire. “When he was awake, what did he say?”

  “Not much.”

  Davy nodded. “Even when he’s uninjured, Malcolm is a man of few words.”

  “Well, he had words enough to tell me I ought to be glad to be alive,” she said, with a sigh. “Even if I’m a fallen woman now…”

  Davy winced, rubbing the back of his neck. “Well, he isn’t wrong.”

  Arabella had nothing to say about that. Dark night had fallen and she was so weary she thought she would drop to the floor. But she was hungry, too, and when she heard Davy’s stomach growl, she found a sack of oats to make some porridge.

  To her surprise, Davy took the bowl from her.

  “They’re not cooked yet,” she murmured.

  “I’ll do it, lass. You sit a spell. You have run yourself ragged.”

  Startled by the gallantry of his offer, she asked, “You can cook?”

  He dimpled her a smile. “How hard can it be? Some hot water, some oats, and a wee bit of salt, am I right?”

  She was bewildered by a man whose pride would let him fix his own meals, much less cook for a woman. “Thank you. But you must be tired and hungry yourself.”

  “Aye, but there weren’t any flowers in the field so this is the best I can do to make an impression on a bonny lass.”

  In spite of herself, she felt her pulse skip at his flirtation. “You’re trying to make an impression upon me?”

  “Aye. That was neat work you did with the needle and thread today,” Davy said, with admiration. “I thought you’d swoon away, but you were magnificent.”

  Magnificent. No one had ever called her that. And she tried not to flush at his praise. “Wouldn’t have done any good to swoon away.”

  Davy grinned. “Nevertheless, I thank you.”

  “You needn’t,” she said, sinking down into the chair by the fire. “It’s the least I can do for you both, given what you risked for me. Not that you needed to risk. The poison was already doing its work.”

  “I suppose you had the situation well in hand,” he said with a smirk. “And even if you didn’t, well, you have my word that I’ll say you did.”

  Arabella’s head snapped up. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that the story you told your betrothed about how they didn’t have the chance to swive you…you can count on me and Malcolm to support it.”

  “It wasn’t a story,” Arabella argued. “They didn’t—I wasn’t—”

  Davy held up his hand. “Alright, lass. You don’t need to convince me that Donalds are limp-pricked bastards who canna accomplish anything they set their minds to, no matter how evil.”

  Arabella drew her knees up under her chin and hugged them, wondering if it was only her anger about everything that was keeping her upright. If she stopped being angry, would she simply fall asleep on the spot? No. There was no chance of that with Davy chattering. “Did I ever tell you about the time that Malcolm and I won a bet using a salt fish we’d hidden in a pond?”

  Davy told this, and a number of other funny stories while they waited for the porridge to be done. He was trying to lift her spirits. He was a sanguine sort with a love of adventure if his stories were to be believed. Arabella thought he might stretch the truth here and there, but he had her laughing, truly laughing, by the time the porridge was cooked.

  She could only get Malcolm to take a few bites, but when he drifted again to sleep, it seemed not as fitful and deadly as before. When she returned to the main room, she found Davy stretched out on the floor with his back to the door.

  “Malcolm’s a little warmer,” she reported, approvingly.

  “That’s good,” Davy said, with a forced smile. “Now maybe you can get some rest yourself. You needn’t worry; I’ll stand guard.”

  “That’s hardly fair,” Arabella said, wondering how it was he so cheerfully took care of things. Though all Arabella wanted in the world was a good night’s sleep, she slid down next to him and said, “I’ll keep you company.”

  “What’s the sense in both of us being tired, lass?”

  “I couldn’t sleep anyway,” she lied.

  She expected she was tired enough to sleep a dark, black, dreamless sleep.

  “It must be hard to sleep with a broken heart…”

  Arabella shrugged. “I never loved Conall. My heart isn’t broken. Just my reputation.”

  “Good,” Davy said, with satisfaction. “About your heart, I mean. Not your reputation. Though…”

  He trailed off in a way that made her curious. “Though, what?”

  “Well, I always thought that if the faeries got up to some mischief and I had to be a woman, I’d rather be a ruined woman than a virtuous one.”

  Arabella sputtered with unexpected laughter. First, because he was a grown man who worried about the mischief of the faeries. Second, because she could not imagine the muscle-bound, sword-wielding warrior as a woman, even if he did cook porridge. And thirdly, because of what he’d actually said. “Why, pray tell, would you rather be a ruined woman?”

  Davy flashed her another of his dimpled grins. “Virtuous women lead such dull lives. Obedient to the man they marry, and dependent, too. I’d chafe under that and buck like a wild horse.”

  So would I, Arabella thought.

  But she hadn’t ever considered that there were other options.

  “Don’t even let me start raving about the kertch,” he continued. “If I were a married woman, I couldn’t bear wearing a strip of white cloth upon my head. T’would be a crime to cover up al
l this glorious red hair of mine.”

  She laughed again, as he meant her to. He said silly things and knew a heavy heart when he saw one. And it made her grateful to have something to laugh about when all she really wanted to do was curl up and cry. It helped, of course, that his mane of hair really was quite glorious, and she had the strange urge to run her fingers through those fiery curls. An urge she resisted, saying, “ I s’pose the dullness and the obedience and even the kertch is the price to be paid for a woman’s respectability.”

  “Too high a price, if you ask me. More choices in being a fallen woman; more adventures to be had.”

  Arabella raised a curious brow. “What kind of choices and adventures?”

  Davy shared a bit of his plaid with her, to warm her where they sat, side by side. And she thrilled a bit when their shoulders touched. “Well, a virtuous lass can enjoy nothing without a man putting a claim on her. No sighs of pleasure for her that aren’t caught up in promises. She kisses only the man she marries without ever sampling the talents of any others. But a ruined woman can kiss whomever she chooses and claim whatever pleasure she wants for herself.”

  Arabella raised an eyebrow at these wicked ideas, but all she could think to ask was, “…kissing is a talent?”

  “Oh, aye,” Davy said, mirth in his voice. “But if you have to ask the question, your betrothed mustn’t have had any talent for it. Or did you never kiss him?”

  “I did,” Arabella said, starting to blush at her confession.

  He slanted her a very interested glance. “And how did you like it?”

  Arabella’s blush grew hotter and swiftly burned its way across her cheeks. “It was pleasant…”

  “Pleasant,” Davy scoffed. “It’s meant to be a wee bit more than that!”

  “I’m sure it is,” she said, softly, her eyelids beginning to feel quite heavy, in spite of the fascinating conversation.

  He must have mistaken her exhaustion for upset because he said, “I’m sorry, lass. I don’t know what the devil I’m thinking of to be speaking of kisses after—”