Seduced by a Highlander (35 page)

“Tamas”—Tristan stopped them—“I am grateful ye fought on
my
side tonight.”

Miracle of miracles, Tamas smiled at him and then looked up at his sister. “I am thirsty,” he complained as she closed the door.

When they were alone, Cameron remained quiet and
pensive while Tristan sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “Hell, I hate drinkin’.”

“Tristan? Will ye keep yer word and wed her?”

“Of course. I always keep my word.”

When Cameron began to pace in front of him, Tristan looked away to stop the room from moving. “If ’tis my kin ye worry over, rest assured I will deal with them,” he said. “My father is no’ so merciless as ye all believe. Ye would be astonished to learn who my brother Rob brought home to Camlochlin recently and made his wife. Dinna’ fret over things, I shall work them all oot.”

Tristan was thankful when Cam stopped moving—and taking the room with him. Now, he stood as still as a rod and looked at Tristan with something akin to dread in his eyes.

“There is something I need to tell ye. Before ye marry my sister, ye should know the truth.”

Tristan rose to his feet and moved toward him. “What is it?”

“I cannot keep it in me any longer. Whenever ye speak of him, the weight becomes heavier fer me to bear, and now it is not just fer my father, but for him as well.”

“Fer who?”

“The earl. Yer uncle. It was I who killed him. My father took the sword fer what I did.”

Tristan stopped moving. He stopped breathing. In an instant, images of his uncle’s limp body in the rushes of Campbell Keep flooded his thoughts, his mother and his aunt wailing in anguish, his father promising to kill every last Fergusson. He shook his head. Nae, Cam could not have been responsible for that. “The life I knew ended that day.”

Cameron closed his eyes, unable to face him. “As did mine.”

Tristan’s blood went cold. He didn’t want to hear this terrible confession from a lad whom he had come to love as a brother. He didn’t want to think of the guilt Cameron had carried for a decade over the death of his father. He only felt his own pain bubbling to the surface from the place he’d kept it since that fateful night. He’d lost so much, and the man who had taken it from him stood before him now.

He snatched Cameron’s collar in both hands and dragged him closer. “I…” Isobel’s brother did not try to escape the rage he saw in Tristan’s eyes. He looked away from them instead, ready to take his punishment.

It did not come. Already Tristan was calculating Cam’s tender age at the time of the shooting. He had been a babe! Too young to even know…“Och, hell, Cam.” Tristan released his shirt and hauled him in for a tight embrace instead. “Fergive me.”

“No, brother, it is I who needs forgiveness. It is I who robbed ye… yer family of such a good man.”

Releasing him, Tristan slumped back onto the bed. Dear God, if his father ever learned of this…“How did it happen?”

“It was dark.” Cameron’s voice quaked with torment as he spat the awful truth from his lips and finally from his heart as well. “My father was shouting. I was afraid that the men who came out of the keep were going to kill him. I fired my arrow hoping to frighten them away. I—I did not mean to kill him. I did not want to kill anyone.”

Tristan knew in that moment that the noble ideals his uncle had taught him were the right ones. He’d been correct about the feud, correct in his opinions against revenge. “Ye were a babe,” he said quietly. “ ’Twas no’ yer fault.”

“I will understand if ye must tell yer father. But Isobel… she is afraid.”

Tristan looked toward the door. She was afraid of his finding out and rushing back to tell his father. Her caution with him, her mistrust… they made sense now. She had thought this truth was what he was after. She was right to keep it from him. He would have tried harder to keep himself from loving her if he’d known his father’s wrath against her kin could be rekindled by this secret. Callum MacGregor had killed seven of the Fergusson men he’d seen at Campbell Keep that night. He had killed them just for being there. What would he do if he discovered the one whose arrow had pierced his brother-in-law’s heart and his wife’s along with it was still alive? Did Tristan’s mother have the right to know who had killed her brother?

He’d begun this quest to find honor, to end the pain both families had suffered. He had found much more. He would never again lose anyone he loved over this tragic accident. The journey was not yet over, but it had just become more difficult.

If true honor was easy to attain, Tristan,
his uncle’s patient voice whispered in his thoughts,
most men would have already attained it.

He turned back to Cameron just as the door to his room burst open. Tamas stood on the other side, his sling dangling from his fingers, his eyes wide with a mixture of fear and excitement.

“Ye better come quick. Yer father has just arrived.”

I
will ask ye again, Miss Fergusson. Where is my son?”

Isobel looked up, past a broad chest cloaked in Highland plaid, beyond a jaw chiseled from granite and just as unyielding, to hard, blue-gold eyes that scalded her soul. Eyes that had filled her childhood dreams with nightmares.

“Does he…” The mighty MacGregor Chief paused to tighten his jaw around words he clearly found difficult to utter. “Does he still live?”

Isobel nearly tripped over her feet trying to back away from him. The drink she still carried for Tamas spilled onto her kirtle. A large hand from somewhere to her right steadied her before she landed on her rump.

“Careful, lass.”

Her rescuer sounded like Tristan. He spoke the same first words Tristan had ever spoken to her, but this man was bigger, broader, and less delighted to see her than Tristan had been when he discovered her and not his sister in the king’s garden that first morning.

“We didna’ mean to come upon ye so suddenly.” Though his words were kind enough, his deep blue eyes, as hard as the Devil MacGregor’s, glinted at her from behind a raven forelock. “We didna’ expect to find ye here. Is my brother with ye?”

His brother. This had to be Rob MacGregor, the eldest of the Devil’s sons. But who were the other two Highlanders rising from their chairs? Where were the other patrons? Likely, Isobel answered herself, they had all run for their lives at the sight of the murderous Chief.

“Miss Fergusson”—his thick burr dragged across her ears like rolling thunder—“I have never in my lifetime harmed a lass. I want an answer from ye.”

Isobel wasn’t going to give him one. She couldn’t. Clear, logical reasoning had abandoned her and left her with cold, raw panic. She tried to tug free of her captor’s hold, but his fingers did not budge.

“Faither,” Tristan called out from the stairs. “What the hell are ye doin’ here?” Without waiting for a response, he stepped around his father and glared at his brother. “Let her go.”

Only after Rob complied did Tristan turn to the Chief. “How did ye find me?”

“We stopped to quench our thirst on our way to the Fergusson holdin’.” His father raised a cup in his hand as if to prove his words true. “Rob’s wife told us where ye might be when yer mother began to fear that ye were dead.”

Tristan cut a sharp scowl to his brother—who merely shrugged, his expression unchanged.

“So ye hunted me doun like a babe?”

“Ye left fer our enemies’ holdin’ almost a month ago, Tristan,” his father argued. “Did ye think I would no’ try to discover what happened to my son?”

Tristan looked only mildly remorseful. “As ye can see, I am fine.”

“What the hell happened to yer lip?” One of the other Highlanders left his chair and narrowed his cool gray eyes at Tristan’s face.

“A fight,” Tristan told him.

His curiosity piqued, the Highlander raised a dark brow. “Any broken bones?”

“Nae, Will, just the lip.”

“Ye call that a fight?” Will sneered and walked away, no longer interested.

“Son,” his father said, regaining Tristan and Isobel’s attention, “why have ye come here?”

Tristan turned to her. “To see her. And ye should know—” His words were halted when Will suddenly sprang for the stairs. Isobel whirled around in time to see him snatch Tamas’s sling from his hand and haul him up by the back of his shift.

“One of yers?” he asked Isobel, while her brother dangled two inches off the ground.

“Damn it, Will”—Tristan came to Tamas’s defense—“put him doun.”

“He was aboot to fire this thing at yer faither!”

“Put him doun,” Tristan repeated more forcefully. When the tall brute released him, Tamas pulled back his foot and kicked him in the shin, then ran to his sister’s side.

“Lucky fer him,” Will said, limping back to his chair, “I dinna’ hurt children.”

Isobel breathed a deep sigh of relief and pulled Tamas’s ear hard enough to make him squeal.

“Rob,” the Chief growled, eyeing the stairs, “there is another one to yer left. Relieve him of his sword.”

Cameron held up his palms as Rob reached him. “I do not carry one.”

“Ye should,” Rob told him, and yanked him forward.

Isobel had had enough. Who did these MacGregors think they were anyway? She didn’t care if every man in Dumfries was afraid of them. She had been afraid all her life, and she was damned good and tired of it.

Lifting her skirts over her ankles, she marched straight up to Rob and gave his arm a stinging pinch. “Get yer hands off my brother, thug. I warn ye, I will not tell ye twice.”

Tristan probably would have grinned at her had she been so bold with him, but this one did not flinch when she pinched him, nor did he let go of her brother.

“Are ye deaf or just terribly thick-skulled?” She fisted her hands on her hips and did all she could to control the growing tightness in her lungs.

“Thick-skulled.” Will laughed from his chair. “Now there’s an understatement if ever I heard one.”

When Rob still did not release Cam, Isobel turned to the Chief and tilted her chin at him, then wished she hadn’t. His gaze was so intense and powerful it coiled her nerves and quickened her breath. She understood why armies fled from him, why Cromwell himself had never pursued him.

It took every ounce of courage she possessed to speak to him, but she was determined to stand her ground—the way she couldn’t for her father. “Tell him to take his hands off my brother this instant.” She knew Tristan had come up behind her when his father’s gaze lifted there. She didn’t want his protection. Not in this.

“I am not afraid of ye anymore.”

The MacGregor looked down at her again. “I am glad to hear it. Rob, let the lad go.”

Was it her imagination, or did his eyes soften on her when he spoke? If they did, it lasted only a moment. “Tristan, why are ye still standin’ there? Get whatever ye came here with and let us go home.”

“I’m no’ leavin’ her.” Tristan pulled her to him and closed his fingers around hers.

His father noted the gesture with alarm cooling his fiery gaze. “Ye canna’—”

“Aye, I can. She’s to be my wife.”

Isobel’s knees nearly gave out at Tristan’s unexpected confession. She would have preferred it if he had taken time to prepare his kin for what he’d done, but Tristan was not one for caution. Slowly, she turned to glare at him for setting this entire debacle in motion. He smiled at her, somehow soothing her roiling emotions instead.

His father was not so easily persuaded. The Chief’s mouth hung open, the remainder of his words caught between disbelief and anger. His eyes raked over her, both of her brothers, and then back to Tristan. “Of all the women…” He rolled his jaw around the words he wanted to say, but didn’t. “D’ye wake in the morn thinkin’ of ways to defy me?”

Tristan’s empty laughter cooled the air and pulled at Isobel’s heart. “Of course no’, faither. There are many more interestin’ things to do in a day than fall short of yer expectations.”

The inn was quiet save for the fourth, younger Highlander, who until now remained silent, whispering in disbelief that Tristan was finally going to take a wife.

“Ye fall short of yer own expectations, son, no’ of mine.”