Highland Grace (24 page)

A knock came on the door just then and
Branwenn started. “Enter!” she called out a bit too loudly.

In the next second, Jesslyn moved across the
threshold into the chamber. “The meeting has ended,” she said,
giving both Maryn and Maggie a steady look, “and all went well.
Tho’ whether he will be chieftain has still to be decided.”

“I’m pleased that Robert MacVie came first to
Daniel with his tale instead of spreading it through the ranks, as
it likely had been intended,” Maggie said.

“Aye,” Maryn said. “And thanks be to heaven
that Daniel learned that another soldier had overheard the tale as
well before he could cause trouble for Bao.”

Branwenn sighed loudly and dramatically flung
her arms wide in frustration. “What was the warrior
told?
”
she prodded.

“That is for your brother to reveal, and he
is not yet ready for you to know of this,” Jesslyn told her. “Just
know that it is something about his past and be glad that all has
turned out well.”

Branwenn groaned behind clenched teeth and
shook her head in disgust. She rolled her eyes, but prodded no
further. ‘Twas evident she’d get no information from this quarter.
Nay, if she was to learn anything, she’d have to wait and speak
with Bao. Her heart ached that he was keeping a secret from her.
Especially when the rest of the family had been made fully aware of
it.

“Do you know who gave Robert the tale?” Maryn
asked.

“Nay, I do not,” Jesslyn said. “They spoke
not of it while I was in the great hall. However, I believe the men
know who it was but are not speaking of it, yet.”

“Aye. I’m sure all will be revealed in time,”
Maggie said.

* * *

Jesslyn was just passing Callum’s chamber on
her way to the stairs leading to her own when the door swung open.
“Lara! Are you well? Callum said you were in need of a bit more
rest this morn.”

“Aye. In fact, I was just coming out to find
you. Have you a moment to speak with me?”

Alarm bells sounded in Jesslyn’s head, but no
polite excuses for refusal came immediately to mind, so she nodded
and said, “Aye.”

“Come inside, then. The hearthfire is warm
and quite pleasing on such a cold day as this.”

Once the two were comfortably seated near the
hearth, Lara said, “You must be in utter delight over the
attentions you receive from your husband. I know I certainly
was.”

Her stomach trembled. “What mean you?”

Lara laughed. “Lord, that mouth of his, those
fingers! He knows just how to combine their strumming to send a
woman into her utmost bliss. Several times.” She sat forward, as if
a kindred conspirator. “And don’t you adore that enticing brand he
has on his chest? ‘Twas given him by a jealous lover, you know,”
she said. “Of course, the long scar on his hip is from a blade,
‘tis clear. What a warrior! Oh, Lord! And doesn’t he have the
mightiest
cock?” She giggled. “However do you take it? All
at once, or a bit at a time?”

Jesslyn hadn’t been able to drag in more than
the smallest of breaths since Lara’s first volley. “When?” she
managed to say, though it was barely audible, even to her own
ears.

“Ah,” Lara said, giving her a knowing nod.
“Several times, actually. I paid my price for him each time I
visited my sister in Perth these five years past. But most
recently, the night of the
Hogmanay
feast, first in one of
the tower chambers and again in the stables.”

A warm damp began under Jesslyn’s arms. “The
tower room was untouched.”

“Aye, we didn’t even make it to the pillows,
so wild was he to mate with me.” She sat forward a bit more. “He
took me where we stood—we never even shed our clothing!” she
trilled.

Her look turned conspiratorial again. “Tell
me, does it burn a bit for you as well when he first enters you? I
shall wager it does. No matter how prepared he makes a lady, it
still hurts at first.”

Jesslyn was torn between rage and heartbreak.
Disillusion and disgust at herself for being gulled again so easily
with a soft word, a sensual touch made her physically ill. Rising
from her seat, she said jerkily, “I must leave.” Then she stormed
across the room, threw open the door and fled down the corridor,
the stairs, across the antechamber, through the door of the keep
and across the courtyard. Anger and horror put wings to her feet
and on she sped, through the arched gateway of the fortress and
down the pebbled path toward the village. She didn’t stop until she
had her back pressed flat against the inside of the door to the
cottage.

Bao and Lara had evidently enjoyed each other
many times. The hypocrisy of his words the night before, of his
pretense of disgust at the lady’s shameless betrayal of Callum, hit
her all at once and a strangled cry burst from her throat. She bit
down hard on her lower lip to keep from splitting the air with a
second, more deafening one. What a fool she’d been! Why, oh why,
had she not paid more attention to the qualms she’d felt upon
finding the lovers’ nest that night? Instead, she’d proceeded with
her plan and given him her body again. Revulsion filled her as she
recalled how openly eager she’d been for his attentions—and that,
mere hours after his adulterous tryst with Callum’s wife! The
lecher! When would she ever learn?

She groaned. Thoroughly humiliated, her chest
tightened and her breath hung suspended like a noose in her throat.
She was bound for a lifetime with a man who broke, and likely would
continue to break, his vows of faithfulness willfully and without
regret. When she thought of how fiercely she’d defended him, waxed
on about his good character, his strength, his courage, she wanted
to retch. Pressing the heels of her palms over her eyes, she
whispered aloud, “And I was the one to
initiate
the
loving!”

Lord, how she dreaded telling the others of
her disgrace. But she must. Pushing herself away from her position
against the door, she stood with her spine straight and her
shoulders back. Because she wouldn’t live with the man a moment
longer.
Not one moment longer
. Wiping the tears from heated
cheeks with the back of her hand, she gazed around at the front
chamber where she’d cooked so many meals for herself and her son
and began to scheme. It wouldn’t take long to have a few things
brought down from the keep. Just enough to make the place habitable
once again. Walking over to stand in the doorway of one of the
bedchambers, she scanned the empty bedframe. First, she would need
two freshly filled mattresses brought down. Her and her son’s
personal belongings were meager and wouldn’t take long to gather. A
few cooking and eating utensils, linens for the beds, kindling and
wood for the cookfire, peat for the hearth, and mayhap a bit of
food as well, just to get them started. Aye, it shouldn’t be more
than an hour, mayhap two, before she and her son were settled once
more in this tidy cottage.

* * *

Bao stood in the courtyard watching as
Callum, Lara, and their retinue slowly made their way through the
gate of the fortress. Bao absently took the familiar pouch from his
belt and held it in his palm for a moment, feeling the weight of
the treasure that was hidden in its folds. Callum had given it to
him only moments ago. He slowly loosened the string that held it
closed and peered inside. It held two smaller pouches, and he knew
what they contained: More of his mother’s dowry and trousseau that
his father had stolen from her and then, ultimately, given to
Callum when they’d journeyed here not long after Branwenn’s birth.
He’d been angered, yet powerless at the time to retrieve his
mother’s possessions his father had so callously given away.

Callum had apologized for not returning them
sooner, but Bao saw no reason for such, as he’d not been back to
the Maclean holding for any length of time since Bao’s first
arrival this summer past. Besides, Bao had known where the coins
were: he’d found them during the time he and Branwenn lived in the
wood. He’d almost taken them back then, but had decided against it.
They were not his to take, they were his mother’s, and she was
dead.

Bao scooped out a handful of the Cathayan
coins and allowed them to slide off his palm and back into the
pouch. Then he unfurled one of the black scarves with its red woven
symbols and imagined it covering his mother’s thick, silky black
hair. With a sigh, he tucked the scarf back in it’s pouch and set
his mind to current matters.

‘Twas time to find his wife. Believing her
most likely to be with the other ladies in the solar, he headed
there first, but was quickly informed that she had quit their
company close to an hour past with the intention of resting in her
bedchamber. He headed there then, glad that they’d have this time
to themselves, but again was thwarted in his pursuit of Jesslyn
when he found the chamber empty.

Stepping back into the passage, he closed the
door behind him and stood for a moment in thoughtful debate as to
where else to look for his wayward wife. Mayhap she’s visiting
Niall’s mother, he thought. Or mayhap, she decided to inspect
Alleck’s fortress once more after the lads’ unwise use of the
mangonel this morn past.

A half hour later Bao was out of ideas. He’d
looked in every place he could think of to look for Jesslyn and had
yet to find her. He was coming back through the village when he
glanced up and saw her with a bucket in her hand stepping through
the doorway of the cottage. Highly curious at her reasons for being
there, as ‘twas not her usual ale-making day, Bao rushed to meet
her before she’d had time to shut the door behind her. With his
forearm resting against the door, he asked, “What do you here, my
love?” He took the bucket from her and placed it on the table by
the hearth.

She didn’t answer right away, and her face
looked grim, which immediately brought an answering tension in the
tendons of his neck and shoulders. Folding her arms across her
chest, she said, “I’m preparing the place for habitation. Mine and
Alleck’s.”

“What? Why?” Moving around her, he closed the
door and leaned against it with his arms crossed as well. “Were
your words to the elders all lies, then?” Dread, like an iron fist,
gripped his insides. “Are you sickened by what I revealed to you
last night—have you realized you can only despise a man such as
me?”

“Aye, I
am
sickened.” Bao’s knees went
weak. “And aye, I
do
despise you!”

All the air went out of his lungs and it was
all he could do to remain standing. Every part of him started to
tremble, his legs, his arms, his stomach, his cheeks, his lips.

“But I am not sickened in the way that you
mean. I’m sickened by the fact that a lad so young was forced to
sell himself and go against his nature to perform the works of Eros
in order to survive.”

He’d not told her that, and yet, like so much
else, she’d somehow figured it out. The vise grip around his lungs
released and he was finally able to take in air. It made his head
spin. “All right then, why have you left me?”

She turned away from him and, with jerky
movements, took one of the folded cloths from the table and dropped
it into the bucket.

He wanted to rush over and shake her, force
her to give him her answer.
Tell me!
But he didn’t. He was
treading kraken-infested water here. ‘Twas best to let her say what
she would in her own way, her own time.

So he watched her in silence. After she wrang
the cloth of most of its moisture, she rolled a cake of lye soap in
it to lather it up before using the worn piece of material to scrub
the table. “Because I’ve had enough of your fickle nature,” she
finally said.

Bao dropped his arms and pushed himself away
from the door. “My fickle nature?” His heartbeat tripled. “What
mean you ‘my fickle nature’?”

“Lara.”

Christ’s Bones!
“Whatever she told
you, it isn’t true,” he ground out. He walked a step closer to
where she stood, bent at the waist and furiously scrubbing the
non-existent soil from the tabletop. “Will you tell me what lies
the woman gave you so that I may defend myself?” he asked with less
heat in an effort to soothe her anger.

Her movements came to an abrupt halt. Rising
from her position, she looked him straight in the eye. “Not only
did she tell me, very precisely, a certain way you have of making
love, but she described your body as well. And in a way that only
one who’d had intimate knowledge of both would be able to do.”

His hands balled into fists at his side, his
heart started its pounding again, and Bao stood motionless. He
forced in a deep breath and released it before he answered.
“Jesslyn...” He wanted to tell her the whole sordid tale, starting
with his discovery of Lara’s identity and ending with her attempt
at revenge for his destroying the deed. “Jesslyn, I…I…” But he was
unable to turn his jumbled thoughts into coherent words.

Her eyes moved away from his, down to the
cloth, lying in a wet mound on the table. She picked it up and
threw it with a
plop!
into the bucket of water. “She had the
gall
to ask me if I could take your manhood inside me all at
once—or if I had to take you a bit at a time! I was mortified.”

Oh, God.
“The woman was a client of
mine,” he began carefully, “but I-I only learned it when she
arrived here and revealed such to me. She…always wore a mask, you
see.” Jesslyn’s eyes lifted to his again, but there was skepticism
in their depths. “I should have told you of this sooner,” he rushed
to say, “but I feared it would ruin the fragile accord we’d managed
to build o’er these past sennights, so I remained silent. I see
now, I should have told you of this as soon as I found out who she
was.”

“Aye, you should have. How many more former
lovers will I be obliged to meet, do you suppose? The number must
be legion, I suspect, after so many years spent in such amorous
pursuits.” She threw the rag on the table again and started
scrubbing. “One probably cannot travel more than a mile in any
direction without meeting up with one or more of them.”