Highlander Enchanted(13)

“M’lady, the laird wishes me t’show ye t’yer chamber,” said a young girl with copper hair, blue eyes and freckles. She, too, wore flowers in her hair.

“Thank you,” Isabel murmured.

“Yer hurt.” The girl leaned into Isabel to peer at the bruises forming on her face.

Isabel did not put her in her place as she might an English handmaiden. After traveling with Ailsa, she understood better that the normal bounds of privity did not exist with the barbarians.

“I can ‘elp ye,” the girl said. “Come, m’lady.” She started away at a trot.

Isabel moved more slowly. She cast a look towards Richard. He was speaking to his knights. Every day she was not wed to him was another day he resented her. She dreaded the day she wed him, or any man, most of all. She hastened her pace the best she could, not letting her hunched shoulders relax until she was out of his sight in the keep.

The girl led her through the stone dwelling to the second floor and down a hallway littered with fragrant rushes and sprinkled with flowers, tiny pops of color that brightened the dreary interior of the stone hold. Isabel was impressed by the cleanliness and order of all she saw, and the bedchamber was no exception.

He has given me the best in the keep. The massive room was appointed with paintings, tapestries, weapons and baubles he had to have brought back from the Crusades. Their colors and shapes were too exotic for it to be otherwise. A hearth was lit, the drapes open and the large pallet befitting a laird.

“This is beautiful,” she breathed. It was cozy and quaint compared to her bedchamber in Saxony, but after a fortnight of sleeping on a horse or on the ground, the room before her was exquisite.

The girl beamed with pride.

Black Cade’s scent was in the air, a combination of man, leather and dew. It confused her once more to feel the fever return and the fluttering in her stomach. How did she lust after the man she came to kill, who slayed her brother and drove her father into madness?

Isabel centered herself. She was here for vengeance and death, whether it was his or hers. “Thank you,” she said to the smiling girl. “You may go.”

The girl left whistling and closed the door behind her.

Isabel sagged against a chair, too exhausted to think about whether she should have turned down the chamber, and any other luxury offered by Black Cade, out of a sense of loyalty to her dead brother. She did not care about what Lord Richard might say if he were to discover she had been provided the laird’s chamber. The tinge of guilt was for her brother’s sake.

Fist closed around her medallion, her last link to her brother, she went to the bed and sat down heavily. Her boots came off with effort and she observed her bloodied, blistered feet with a grimace.

She examined her hurt leg next and saw the black bruise forming beneath the lump on her shin. The skin on her cheeks was tender from Richard, the bruising on her neck painful from where he had started to choke her, after the laird left them by the river. Distraught by her injuries and appearance, she unwound her hair from the braid to let it dry. With a jolt of awareness, she reached for the satchel that had been with her for a fortnight at least.

It was gone, and with it, every chance she had at any future.

The mettle binding her emotions cracked. She began to cry, fatigued and bereft.

Isabel rested across the bed with its thick coverlets. Unable to quell her desperation, she rolled onto her stomach and sobbed away the pain and sorrow of knowing she had come so close, only to fail at the feet of the laird she intended to slay.





Chapter Eight


“I doona like this man,” Niall whispered for the third time.

“I ken,” Cade replied.

They strode through the halls of his keep towards the bedchamber of Father Adam. The day had been spent with Lord Richard, and every word the arrogant man uttered made Cade despise him a little more. Finally, he and his knights had retired for the night.

At his limit with the noble, Cade was also less clear about what was going on around him than he had been before. Lord Richard spoke as if he and Lady Isabel were already wed and had been for many years. He avoided answering direct questions about why his betrothed had fled and claimed ownership of her father’s lands.

Of her.

It doesna matter. She is nothing to me. He had uttered the chant to keep from leaping across the table to slash the haughty lord’s head off. He had been able to control his unseillie streak well now for a year or two, but first Isabel, then Richard, made all his work containing the dark, violent streak seem for naught.

The downpour outside left his cousins no doubt what he felt, even if he managed to remain civilized with Lord Richard.

“She is wealthy, if he’s t’be believed,” Niall said, his bemusement shared by Cade.

“If,” Cade echoed. He stopped outside the door of the priest and pounded on it. “Father Adam!”

The muffled sound of something heavy hitting the floor – probably the priest’s bible – reached Cade, an indication the elderly man had dozed off while in the middle of his duty.

“Enter, Cade,” the priest called.

He did so. The priest’s bedchamber was the largest in the hold, save for Cade’s. Father Adam kept a trove full of books, scrolls and parchment with which to write letters on Cade’s behalf. Brian was leaning over the priest’s shoulder to peer at the writs.