Seduced by a Highlander (2 page)

1675

W
ell, we all know that Tristan would have won the competition if not for what happened. No one can outrun him.” Robert Campbell, Eleventh Earl of Argyll, turned to his nephew sitting beside him, smiled, and winked.

Sitting across from them in the earl’s private solar, Callum MacGregor growled in agreement. “Aye, that’s why the bastard Fergusson tripped him and provoked a fight. It should be his nose broken instead of my son’s.”

“I did manage to land a solid punch to his jaw, faither,” Tristan defended. “Besides, it doesna’ pain me anymore.” He lifted his finger to his wounded nose. It still hurt like hell, but MacGregors did not whine or weep about broken bones. “ ’Tis Alex Fergusson’s honor that will be more difficult to repair.”

“Well spoken,” his uncle commended, patting him on the shoulder. “You have the blood of knights in you and will grow to be a man of honor.”

Tristan swelled with pride.

“I like the way it crooks slightly at the bridge.” Kate
MacGregor set down her embroidery to aim her most loving smile at her son. “Now you look even more like your uncle. Does he not, Anne?”

Robert’s bonnie wife looked up from her needle and agreed. “He’s just as pretty. Even with the blackened eyes.”

Tristan blushed and then pushed his shoulder into his sister when she laughed at him.

“I fear the boy’s nose would need to suffer a few more breaks before it resembles mine.” Robert Campbell picked up his nephew’s hand, curled it into a fist, and then covered it with his own. “Remember, blocking is as important as the speed of your punch.”

Sipping his ale by the fire, Graham Grant, closest friend to the MacGregors and the Campbells of Argyll, kicked the tip of his boot into the MacGregor Chief’s ankle. “Callum, ye’re not allowing Robbie to instruct yer son in the art of hand-to-hand combat, are ye?”

“Doubting my skill,” Robert said smoothly, “only proves that you are a poor teacher, Graham.”

“I admit yer skills have improved vastly under my training over the years,” Graham replied playfully. “But had
I
been teaching Tristan, young Alex Fergusson would be missing a few teeth right now and mayhap an appendage or two.”

Robert smiled and looked down at Tristan while the warriors around them all agreed that the troublesome Fergusson lad would someday find himself impaled on someone’s blade—preferably Tristan’s.

“Remember also”—he leaned down so that only Tristan could hear him—“that there are many moments in a man’s life when the choices he makes will decide his destiny.”

Tristan nodded. He understood that while warrior blood ran through his veins, it was not always necessary to do the most possible damage to his opponent—the fact that his father did not always agree with that sentiment sometimes made Tristan wish that the earl was his father instead of the Chief. He thought about his choice to fight Alex after he had picked himself off the floor. He wasn’t expecting the boy’s fist to fly as fast as it did. All he remembered after Alex hit him was the taste of blood in his mouth and his and Alex’s fathers shouting at each other. After that, his mother would not let him compete in the rest of the games—three of which he knew he could have won. He’d changed his destiny all right, and come home with nothing but a bloody nose.

The sudden crash at the door brought the men in the solar to their feet. The shouts from beyond it drew their hands to the hilts of their swords.

“MacGregor!” Someone outside the keep roared. “Come out and face me, if ye have the courage! Ye will not insult me and my kin and live another night!”

Tristan barely heard his father ordering the women and children above stairs. He watched, all color draining from his face, as Graham and his uncle went to the door. It was Alex Fergusson’s father out there. Had he come to kill his father over a child’s fight?

“Tristan, go!” his father commanded, but Tristan could not move. He could barely breathe. This was his fault. The men were going to fight; his father could possibly die because of him. He reached out his hand, as if to stop his father when he strode toward the door. “Dinna’ leave.” He wanted to shout it, but the plea broke through his lips as quietly as a whisper. He was only ten and four. They wouldn’t listen to him.

“Show yer face, Fergusson!” Callum shouted, pushing past his brother-in-law and his best friend and swinging open the heavy door. “Show yer face and I’ll tell ye once again that ye’re the son of a pig!”

More shouting ensued, but his mother pulling on his arm distracted Tristan. As he was led away to a room above stairs, he looked over his shoulder in time to see Graham and his uncle leave the keep behind his father.

“I should be with them.” Tristan’s eldest brother tried to push past their mother, but she blocked the door with her body and held up her hand to stop him.

“Your father will be fine, Rob. Sit down with your brothers. Please, my son.”

Och, God, let him be fine,
Tristan prayed. He felt sick to his stomach and a wee bit dizzy as wave after wave of fear engulfed him. His sister was crying in Lady Anne’s lap. The sound of her weeping made Tristan want to run from the room and dash outside. Would Alex’s father go back home if he apologized? He would do anything… anything to make the pain in his head, his guts, his heart go away. If anything were to befall his father…

A mournful roar pierced his gloom and stilled every other sound in the room. Graham’s wife paled and drew her sword. “I’m going down there.” Without waiting for anyone’s approval, she pulled on the door and ran for the stairs. Her cries an instant later sent terror through the keep and into the hearts of everyone she left behind.

Tristan was not the first one to leave the room. When he stepped out of it, though, he wished he had remained and bolted the door, never to come out again. He had been afraid for his father’s life. It hadn’t occurred to him that someone else might die. And never, never him.

“They are goin’ to die fer this!” he heard his father cry from somewhere deep in his chest. “They are all goin’ to die.”

Tristan descended the stairs so slowly it felt as if he wasn’t really moving at all. Everything felt… unreal. It had to be. That could not be his uncle’s limp body being set on the floor by his father’s trembling hands, an arrow jutting from his chest. Robert Campbell could not be dead. He was too strong, too courageous and honorable to be struck down under cover of night, over a choice a child had made to fight. Too numb to cry just yet and too filled with despair and guilt to do anything but stand frozen in that terrible moment, he watched his mother and Anne fall to their knees, their anguished wails filling every corner of Campbell Keep.

The man he loved more than anyone in the world had been shot in the heart and was gone in a moment. A moment that altered the course of so many lives. Most of all, those of Tristan and the lass who would someday heal him.

E
NGLAND
, 1685

A
rrogant imbecile!” Isobel Fergusson pushed through the heavy wooden doors and entered Whitehall Palace’s enormous privy garden with a dozen venomous oaths spilling from her lips. Finally, eleven years since her mother had died and ten since her father had left his seven children orphans, the full weight of taking care of her family had taken its toll on her. Her brother Alex was going to get them all killed. Oh, why had they come to England? And damnation, if they had to attend the Duke of York’s coronation, it should be Patrick, her eldest brother and heir to their late father, the Fergusson Chieftain, here with her and not Alex. They were only supposed to stay for a sennight or two, but when the future king invited all his guests to remain at Whitehall for another month, Alex had accepted. She kicked a small rock out of her path and swore again. How could she have raised such an imprudent, thoughtless bratling?

It wasn’t that Isobel was impervious to the lure of Whitehall’s luxurious feathered mattresses, its grand galleries with vaulted ceilings where even the softest whispers
uttered by elegant lords and ladies, powdered to look like living, breathing statues, echoed. It was all quite… unusual and beguiling in a queer sort of way. But Alex had accepted knowing the MacGregors of Skye were here! Oh, how could he? Had he forgotten the hatred between their clans? Or the trail of dead Fergusson Chieftains left by a devil bent on revenge a decade ago?

“Dear God,” she beseeched, stopping at a large stone sundial in the center of the garden, “give me strength and my witless brother wisdom before he starts another war!”

A movement to her right drew her attention to a row of tall bronze statues gleaming in the sun. When one of them moved, Isobel startled back and bumped her hip against the sundial.

“Careful, lass.”

He wasn’t a statue at all, but a man—though his face could have been crafted by the same artist who had created the masterpieces lining the garden. Isobel took in every inch of him as he stepped out from behind the golden likeness of an archangel, wings paused forever in flight as it landed on its pedestal. He wore the garb of an Englishman, but without all the finery… or the wig. His hair hung loose to his shoulders in shades of rich chestnut and sun-streaked gold, almost the same blend coloring his eyes. He wore a cream-colored linen shirt belted to flare over his lean hips. The ruffled collar hung open at his throat, giving him more a roguish appearance than a noble one. He was tall and lithe, with long, muscular legs encased in snug-fitting breeches and dull black boots. His steps were light but deliberate as he moved toward her.

“I didna’ mean to startle ye.” The musical pitch of his voice branded him Scottish, mayhap even a Highlander.

“I thought ye were my sister. I am infinitely grateful that I was mistaken.” His smile was utterly guileless, save for the flash of a playful dimple in one cheek, and as warm and inviting as the heavenly body perched behind him. But the way his eyes changed from brown to simmering gold, like a hawk’s that spotted its prey, hinted of something far more primitive beyond his rakish charm.

For a moment that went completely out of her control, Isobel could not move as she took in the full measure of his striking countenance. Save for the slight bend at the bridge, his nose was classically cut, residing above a mouth fashioned to strip a woman of all her defenses, including reasonable thought.

She took a step around the sundial, instinctively keeping her distance from a force that befuddled her logic and tightened her breath.

Damnation, she had to say something before he thought her exactly what she was—exactly what any other woman with two working eyes in her head was when she saw him—a doddering fool. With a tilt of her chin that suggested she was a fool for no man, she flicked her deep auburn braid over her shoulder and said, “Yer sister thinks ye are an arrogant imbecile, also?”

“Aye,” he answered with a grin that was all innocence and innately seductive at the same time. “That, and much worse.”

As if to prove his statement true, a movement beyond the statue caught Isobel’s attention. She looked in time to spy a glimpse of sapphire blue skirts and flaxen curls rushing back toward the palace.

“My guess,” Isobel muttered, peering around his back to watch the lady’s departure, “is that yer sister is likely correct.”

“She most certainly is,” he agreed, not bothering to look behind him. The cadence of his voice deepened with his smile. “But I’m no’ completely irredeemable.”