Hard-Hearted Highlander

No one seemed to know about the baby she’d lost, however. No, that was her family’s secret. Her father would have sooner died than have anyone know his daughter had carried a child of that union.

“Bernadette! There you are.”

She hadn’t seen Avaline, who appeared almost from air and grabbed her hand. “I don’t like it here,” she whispered as she glanced over her shoulder at Mr. MacDonald, who was standing in the entry. “There is nothing here, nothing nearby.”

“I’m sure there is,” Bernadette said. “I beg your pardon, Mr. MacDonald, but there is a village nearby, is there not?”

“No’ any longer,” he said.

“Not any longer? What does that mean, precisely?”

“I mean to say the English forces...” He paused. “Removed it.”

Removed it. “Ah...thank you, sir.” Bernadette glanced at Avaline. “It’s all right, darling—Balhaire is very near. Come and help me remember the things your father wants done, will you?” she asked, and pulled Avaline into a sitting room. Lady Kent was within, staring out the window, her arms wrapped tightly about her.

“What things?” Avaline asked.

“Pardon?” Lady Kent asked, turning about.

“I was reminding Avaline that there were several things his lordship wanted done, and asked that she help me remember them all,” Bernadette responded. “We must make this place pleasing for your fiancé,” she said to Avaline.

“Don’t call him that,” Avaline said.

“But that’s what he is. The betrothal has been made.”

“I don’t want the betrothal!” Avaline said, jerking her hand free of Bernadette’s. “He is ghastly.”

She was a petulant child, only a moment away from stomping her foot. “That’s enough, Avaline!” Bernadette said sternly. “Enough.”

Lady Kent gaped at Bernadette, shocked by her tone.

Bernadette groaned. “I beg your pardon, but you both know as well as I that there is nothing to be done for this engagement.”

Mother and daughter exchanged a look.

“This is what you were born to,” Bernadette said to Avaline. “To make your father rich and prosperous by furthering his connections. You can’t pretend it isn’t so or believe that petulance will change it.”

Avaline began to cry. So did her mother. They were like two kittens, mewling over spilled milk.

“For God’s sake, will you stop?” Bernadette pleaded. “Best you meet your fate head-on than like a tiny little hare afraid of her own shadow. He will respect you more if you don’t cower.”

“Oh dear,” Lady Kent said. “She’s right, darling.”

That surprised Bernadette. She watched as Lady Kent shakily swept the tears from her cheeks. “She’s quite right, really. I’ve cowered all my life and you know very well what that has gained me. If you are to make this marriage bearable, you must find your footing.”

Avaline’s eyes widened with surprise at this unexpected bit of advice from her mother. “But how?” she asked plaintively. “What am I to do?”

Lady Kent and her daughter both looked to Bernadette for the answer to that.

Good Lord, they were the two most hapless women she had ever known. Bernadette sighed. “You must prepare to meet him a second time and make him welcome. We’ll start there.”

Avaline nodded obediently.

Bernadette smiled encouragingly, but privately, she could think of nothing worse than having to meet that cold-hearted man a second time and pretend to welcome him. She’d known men like him, men who thought themselves so superior that civility was not necessary. Her first instinct had been visceral, and her humor when he was near quite deplorable. She would give a special thanks to heaven tonight that she was not the one who would have to spend the rest of her days in misery with him.

Poor Avaline.

CHAPTER FOUR (#u7b1b310b-874e-547b-9a13-37371e773316)

HE FIRST NOTICES her at the Mackenzie feill, an annual rite of celebration where Mackenzies and friends come from far and wide for games, dancing and song. She is wearing an arasaid plaid that leaves her ankles bare, and a stiom, the ribbon around her head that denotes she is not married. She is dancing with her friends, holding her skirt out and turning this way and that, kicking her heels and rising up on her toes and down again. She is laughing, her expression one of pure joy, and Rabbie feels a tiny tug in his heart that he’s never felt before. The lass intrigues him.

He moves, wanting to be closer. He catches her eye, and she smiles prettily at him, and that alone compels him to walk up to her and offer his hand.

She looks at his hand, then at him. “Do you mean to dance, then?”

He nods, curiously incapable of speech in that moment. Her soft brown eyes mesmerize him, make him think of the color of the hills in the morning light.

“Then you must ask, Mackenzie,” she teases him.

“W-will you dance, then?”

She laughs at his stammering and slips her hand into his. “Aye, lad. I will.”

They dance...all night. And for the first time in his twenty-seven years, Rabbie thinks seriously of marriage.

* * *

RABBIE’S MOTHER PUT her foot down with him, as if he was a lad instead of a man in his thirty-fifth year. As if he was still swaddled. “You will go and pay her a call,” she said firmly, her eyes blazing with irritation.

“She will no’ care if I call or no’,” he said dismissively.

“I care,” she snapped. “That you are not attached to her, that you do not care for her, is no excuse for poor manners. She is your fiancée now and you will treat her with the respect she is due.”

Rabbie laughed at that. “What respect is she due, Maither? She is seventeen, scarcely out of the nursery. She is a Sassenach.” She was pale and docile and hadn’t lived, not like he had. She had no experience beyond her own English parlor. She trembled when he was near—or when anyone was near, for that matter. He couldn’t imagine what he would even say to the lass, much less how he might inhabit the same house as her.

His mother sighed wearily at his pessimism. She sat next to him on the settee, where Rabbie had dropped like a naughty child when he’d been summoned. She put her hand on his knee and said, “My darling son, I’m so very sorry about Seona—”

Rabbie instantly vaulted to his feet. “Donna say her name.”

“I will say it. She’s gone, Rabbie. You can’t live your life waiting for a ghost.”

He shot his mother a warning look. “You think I wait for Seona to appear by sorcery? I saw her house. I saw where blood had spilled, where fires had burned,” he said, his gut clenching at the mere mention of it. “I’m no’ a dull man—I understand what happened. I’m no’ waiting for a ghost.” He strode to the window to avoid his mother’s gaze and to bite down his anger.

In his mind’s eye, he could see the house where Seona had lived with her family and a father who had abetted the Jacobites. A father who had sent his sons to join the forces marching to England to restore Charlie Stuart to the throne. They’d been slaughtered on the field at Culloden, and her father was hanged from an old tree on the shores of Lochcarron, so that any Highlander gliding past on a boat could see him, could see what vengeance the English had wrought on those who took Prince Charlie’s cause.

But Seona? Her sister, her mother? No one knew what had become of them. Their home had been ransacked, the servants gone, the livestock stolen or shot. There was no one left, no one who could say what had happened to them. The only ones to survive the carnage were Seona’s niece and nephew; two wee bairns who’d been sent to stay with a clan member when the news came the English were sweeping through the Highlands. There was no one else, no other MacBee living in these hills any longer. And judging by the devastation done to the MacBee home, a man could only imagine the worst—every night, in his dreams, he imagined it.

“If you’re not waiting for a ghost, then what are you waiting for?” his mother persisted as Rabbie tried once again to erase the image of the forsaken household.