At The Laird's Command (Sword and Thistle Book 3) Read online

  “Aye but a man likes to have something to fight for. And if the worse should happen, I would like to give the woman I love the protection of my name if nothing else.”

  Gods blood. Something about those words crashed into the laird, conquering his will and demanding his surrender. “Fine, then. You have my permission,” the laird began, but before Davy could grin, he added, “But the wedding itself won’t happen until you’ve complete the task I’ve set for you. As you said, a man needs something to fight for, Davy of Clan Macrae.”

  “A hard bargain,” Davy said, grudgingly. “But I s’pose I’ve never been one to have my affairs be too settled before I do something reckless. Still, if I don’t succeed, laird…”

  If he died in the attempt, he meant.

  The laird promised, “If there’s still breath in my body, I’ll see to it that your Arabella is cared for. You have my word on that.”

  “Not good enough. For I need to know that she’ll be cared for even if we’re both dead.”

  The laird nodded, his mind already turning that way. “I’ll do my best to think of a way.”

  Then the two men shook hands, then the laird stalked away, cursing himself all the while. Because he couldn’t get Davy’s words out of his head.

  And if the worse should happen, I would like to give the woman I love the protection of my name if nothing else…

  There was a potential for negotiating a truce with the enemy if the laird was willing to take a Donald or MacDonald bride. This was the way of the Highlands. Marriage alliances brought estates together. But even if he were to defy that great tradition in some grand gesture of devotion to the woman he loved—he still couldn’t marry Heather because he’d flaunted her about the castle as a plaything. He’d even once stripped her down in front of his men.

  He’d allowed his kinsman to witness the taking of her virginity.

  No, his men would never respect such a marriage.

  They’d have his head on a pike faster than the enemy.

  So he could not marry Heather; he’d seen to that.

  She’d be safer as a harlot in truth.

  But he’d kept her to himself. She was his. His alone. His mistress. And that was the crime of it. If the worst should come to pass, the enemy would treat all harlots the same. But a mistress? They would feel free to take out their vengeance upon a the laird’s woman. Knowing they had a woman who belonged to him—and only him—the moment he was dead, they would do unspeakable things to her.

  How had it come to this? Heather had promised to be his in exchange for her father’s life. She promised to give herself over to him for his use, until he was sated of her. And the laird accepted her offer both because he was fascinated by the temptation—and more importantly, because it allowed him to show mercy to one of his crofters. For reasons that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time…he decided he would punish the man by ruining his daughter. He’d been relieved. He wouldn’t have to hang a man and he wouldn’t actually touch the girl, he had promised himself.

  Just ruin her reputation.

  Instead, he’d ruined himself. Not simply because it was monstrous of him to let a lass take on such shame for the deeds of her father. Nor even because he had—in spite of his promises to himself—touched the girl. But also because he shouldn’t have shown mercy to her father in the first place.

  Men who would steal from their laird were as like to turn traitor as not. Given that the laird was constable of a castle now under siege, with men bleeding in the infirmary below, he saw where softness and mercy had gotten him. His moments of softness and weakness had endangered his clan.

  Worse, they endangered the woman he loved.

  He couldn’t afford to be soft or weak. Not even with himself.

  Chapter Four

  HEATHER

  “I’m betrothed!” my little sister cried excitedly. “Again.”

  Letting Arabella spin me around in the tiny chambers that I had surrendered to her now that I spent all night every night in the laird’s bed, I was quite bewildered. My sister had been wooed by two of the laird’s warriors and once we collapsed together upon the small straw bed, I said, “Congratulations, Arabella! But which man did you choose?”

  “I’m marrying Davy,” she said, emphatically, as if I was daft to think otherwise. “But I didn’t have to choose,” Arabella added, meeting my eyes with mischief. “Neither Davy or Malcolm will insist upon it. I will marry Davy, but we will simply carry on together, all three.”

  I had never heard of such a thing. Such a scandalous thing. I didn’t see how it could possibly work. Two men and one woman—such things usually ended up in bloodshed. But as I had very little room to judge anyone else’s personal arrangements, I merely bit my lip. “Our father hasn’t given his permission…”

  “Davy says the laird’s permission is the only thing we need.” Arabella sighed a happy sigh. And I sighed with her, because in all the gloom and terror of living in a castle under siege, this was one bright spot.

  Love, however unorthodox, in whatever shape it took…love was a beautiful thing, was it not? “When will the wedding be?” I asked, wondering how we would possibly celebrate such a thing with every meal rationed and every glass of liquor watered down.

  “Now that part’s a wee bit o’ a mystery,” Arabella said, her eyes widening conspiratorially. “Davy says he must do something for the laird and prove himself, and when he’s done it, then we may marry. He was slippery about the whole thing, and he was gone from the bed before dawn, so I haven’t had a chance to ask anything else.”

  I fought down my urge to scold her for so openly admitting that she shared a bed with a man who was not yet her husband, but I did the same thing, did I not? And unlike my sister, I wasn’t going to get a marriage from it. No, my sister, who had never wished for a respectable hearth and home was going to get one…of a sorts. Whereas I was going to be the laird’s harlot until he cast me off. And yet, it was only the last part that frightened me.

  “I have something for you,” Arabella murmured, a glint in her eye.

  “For me? But you’re the one who is betrothed this day!”

  “Heather, did you forget your own birthday?”

  “Oh, that,” I said, blushing a bit. “A nineteenth birthday isn’t important.”

  “T’is important to me,” Arabella replied, and pushed up from the straw bed to rummage about in a trunk at the foot of it. She came back to me with a tiny glass vial. “The physicker doesn’t believe in the healing properties of rose oil—but I made some anyway and you might like it to scent at your pulse points.”

  She’d made for me a perfume. A fitting gift for my circumstances, and a thoughtful one too. I pulled the stopper and inhaled the scent, then sputtered with delight. “Oh, but it’s a beautiful scent! Do you want to try some?”

  “Get away with you,” Arabella said, pulling her wrist away with a laugh. “I’m no laird’s lady, swanning about, smelling sweetly, with flowers in my hair. I am more like to roam about smelling of pungent herbs with dried bark powder under my nails.”

  She took pride in it, I thought. In being useful. In having a place at the castle where she was valued as an assistant to the physicker. I envied her that more than anything.

  I did my work at night, in the laird’s bed. But by day, I was lost.

  When the sun rose, everyone in the castle seemed to have useful work to do but me. The warriors repelled attacks, shot at any approaching boats, and kept watch over the enclosure against tests of our defenses. The castle staff went about their work. And even the villagers found ways of assisting by hauling water or seeing to it that ammunition was easily available to the men on the walls. And the guards kept watch over my laird and his larder.

  I was worried for my little siblings, far from my reach now. For most of my life, I’d been the mistress of my father’s cottage, tending to farm chores and to the little ones. Keeping them fed and clothed, since our mother had died giving birth to the littlest one, and
there was no one but me to care for them. After the laird had taken me, I relied upon Arabella to care for the little ones. But who was caring for them now? My father hadn’t come into the castle for protection. He’d fled with the children into the mountains to stay with kin. With the enemy roving the countryside, my heart ached wondering who was cooking up the meals and seeing to it that their little bellies were full.

  Perhaps that’s why I found my way to the castle kitchen, where the cook saw me lingering near the door. “Out!” the intimidating woman said, waving her spoon at me like a sword. She hadn’t liked me much since the time I boasted that I could make the best meat pie in the clan. She’d liked me even less when I proved it. Though I’d sensed a brief appreciation for me when she’d tested the flake of my crust, the siege—or discovering that I’d stolen her cast-off paddle—had made her hostile again.

  “I only want to help,” I told her.

  “Keep the laird happy,” she said. “That’s how you can help. That’s your job.”

  Well, it was, wasn’t it? And it was work I had come to treasure. The easiest, most pleasurable work of my life. Work made even more pleasurable that evening when the laird sniffed at my neck, and said, “Roses?”

  “Aye, do you like it?”

  He pulled me closer against his broad chest, smiling all the while. “I like the scent of roses. Reminds me of warmer days. T’is not my favorite flower, though.”

  “What is?” I asked, for I wanted to make a study of him.

  “Heather,” he said at once. “I love the purple blossoms of heather, just like your eyes. Heather has always been my favorite, even before I met you. Now that you have come along, no other shall ever supplant it.”

  My breath caught at the seriousness with which he spoke these words and I desperately hoped to believe he meant more by them than a discussion of flowers. “I—I don’t know if there is such a thing as heather perfume, or I’d wear it for you.”

  “I like the perfumed scent of you now, but your own scent is no less perfect. Especially when you are aroused,” he said, stroking my nude hip to bring us closer together in the bed. Arousing me so easily with his touch, as he always did, even though we’d already been intimate. “But I have something else for you to wear…”

  “Oh?”

  “Aye,” he said, grinning. “Go to my wardrobe and open the little chest inside.”

  I rose from the warmth of his bed, naked, as I crossed the room. And inside the little chest he indicated, I found such a remarkable thing that I gasped to see it. Pearls. A long strand of them, with that peculiar sheen that drew the eye and made the heart skip a beat. I could not begin to imagine the expense of them. “I’m afraid to touch them.”

  “They were my mother’s,” the laird said. “Now they are yours.”

  I whipped my head around to look at him, to be sure he was not jesting. For it would be a cruel jest, one that would wound me, truly.

  To mention his mother even in the same breath as me…

  “You can’t give such a thing to me!” I cried.

  Smugly, he replied, “I’m the laird. You must not tell me what I can and canna do.”

  I stood there, still as stone, my fingers yearning to touch the beautiful pearls, my heart warning me never to touch them. These pearls were more expensive than anything I had ever seen. Worth more than my father’s croft if he were to buy it outright, I should think. Worth more than me. “But my laird—”

  “I cannot spoil you with dainty cakes from the kitchen when we are rationing. I cannot woo you as I would like to. If I had my way, I would shower you with jewels and fine dresses and flowers and foods so rich they would make you moan with pleasure. Alas, in this moment and in these circumstances there is very little that I can do for you or with you that I would like to, but this no one can stop me from doing. These beautiful pearls were meant to grace your lovely neck. Show me, lass. I want to see you in them.”

  It was a command, a sweet command, and so I dared to scoop the strand out of the box and loop them around my neck, luxuriating in the strangely silky feel of them on my bare skin. There was an eroticism to this and he must have felt it too, because a dark heat banked in his eyes, burning like a coal. “Happy birthday, my sweet.”

  I lifted my gaze to his. “But how—how did you know it was my birthday?”

  “Your sister has a rather vexing habit of speaking before she is spoken to. Of addressing her betters without permission. And doing so in passing with scarcely a curtsey as if she were a man, instead of a modest girl. But in this case, she managed to get word to me that it was your birthday and I am grateful to her for that. For such a day is truly worth celebrating.”

  I love you, I thought. I love you so desperately.

  But how would I ever dare speak the words aloud? Ours was not that sort of arrangement. The love I read about in poetry books was never the kind that would be mine. The laird had said to me once that he might love me, and feared he might never tire of me. That was likely the most a girl like me could hope for. It was more important to me that he said I belonged to him. And that he would defend and protect what belonged to him.

  That would have to be enough.

  “I want you to wear these pearls always,” he said, when I came back to the bed, and he trailed the string of them over my breasts in a way that made my nipples tighten and peak into pink nubs.

  “Always?” I asked, not wanting to speak. Wanting only to feel as he teased me with the pearls. But fearing not to ask. “Won’t your kin take offense to my wearing what belonged to your family?”

  “Ian, you mean?”

  “I daresay Ian Macrae is not a man to notice a woman’s jewelry. I speak mostly of his sisters and his mother, Lady Fiona.”

  The laird gave a sudden bark of laughter. “Oh, so then you have crossed paths with my aunt, the dragon, have you?”

  Inwardly, I cringed at the memory of every time the woman or her high born daughters turned in the corridor so as not to meet my eyes lest she be stained with my sin. “I shouldn’t like to antagonize her.”

  “Fiona is an old prune,” the laird said. “I don’t care if you antagonize her.”

  I smiled, but thinly, because it was in my nature to care what people thought of me. I had once been such a good girl, and I didn’t take easy to shamelessness.

  “Lass, I have never seen a woman so troubled by the idea of wearing a beautiful strand of pearls before. Why aren’t you happier at the idea?”

  “It is only…at a time like this, when everyone in the castle is coming together in common purpose and under such privations, for me to wear pearls…and for the clan to know that you gave them to me…”

  My laird slowly let the pearls slip through his fingers, then brought his hand to my cheek. Brushing me there with the pad of his thumb, he stared into my eyes with an intensity I’d never seen before. “Like a wise counselor, you are thinking of my standing with the clan.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling the flush on my cheeks at what he must see as an overstep. “I have no place to advise you.”

  “Don’t apologize, lass. You have touched me deeper than you know. And there is something I must make clear to you. Something I should have said before now. Whatever I might say in the heat of passion—when I am thinking only of your body—I know that I have in you a woman of uncommon grace and wisdom. Which is why you are worthy of my mother’s pearls, and which is why you may wear them when and if you see fit.”

  A woman of uncommon grace and wisdom.

  I couldn’t think of anything kinder that a man could say to a woman.

  He thought I was worthy of his mother’s pearls, and because I wanted him to be right, I decided that I must find a way to assist with the day-to-day work of the castle.

  In the morning, I set aside the pearls with a wistful sigh, then donned the most respectable garment I had. When Brenna came to tend me, I had her help me loop my braid at the nape of my neck for modesty.

  Then, mustering m
y courage, I went to billeting room where the respectable ladies and Macrae kinfolk were gathered to make cloth for the effort. I knew how to spin and sew; I was eager to do it. But no sooner had I appeared in the doorway than did Lady Fiona rise and block my entrance. Smiling brightly—too brightly—she escorted me from the sewing room to say, “My dear, I have my daughters and their reputations to think about. I cannot have them associating with a woman of your ilk.”

  She was the daughter of a laird and the sister of a laird and the aunt of my laird. Even before the laird ruined me, she would likely have said the same thing. I was a crofter’s daughter; she was a lady of landed wealth. But now that the laird had taken me to his bed, I knew that my lowly social origins were not her foremost objection. “My lady, surely at a time like this, all hands are needed—”

  “This isn’t the first siege I’ve lived through,” Lady Fiona snapped. “And it probably won’t be the last. But a lady’s virtue must be guarded well, so that it may endure eternal.”

  I swallowed, waiting for the pain of my shame to blossom in my chest.

  Yet, it did not.

  Because if the laird was pleased with me, then I ought not care what Lady Fiona thought. Nor her daughters. And I suddenly realized what a blessing the laird had given me by asking me to devote myself to his pleasure and his alone.

  Why he’d given me some manner of armor!

  “I find my virtue in doing my duty by the laird,” I said simply.

  Then I turned and left her gawping, for she could hardly argue with that.

  Having no where else to go, I wandered down the stairs to where my sister worked with the physicker, madly grinding something to a powder with a mortar and pestle. She knew herbs—healing herbs—and was determined to keep the castle well-stocked or well-organized. I had to confess, while she’d never been terribly reliable at home on my father’s croft, away from our father’s oppressive presence, my little sister had recently come into her own.