Page 25 of Beloved Enemy
Charlotte snorted softly and dropped her head forward. “Made peace with the fact that...? No, I have not made peace with it.”
When she said no more, curiosity bade him press on. “But ye’ve nae mentioned it at all, have nae said anything as a matter of fact.”
A gusty sigh preceded her response. “Whining and complaining won’t help. And I can hurl questions at you all day long, but I have a feeling you don’t understand what’s happened any more than I do. So then, I’m only relentlessly vocalizing all my fears and even I’m sick of listening to me.”
A grin curved his lips.Nae doubt.
“And frankly,” she continued, “I’ve already realized you’re not going to be any help in that regard. I take it sympathy is not something you’re used to practicing. You’ve shown me hardly any—none, in fact. I mean, a woman discovers she’s just been thrown back many hundreds of years and all you’ve done is basically shrug and tell me the problem is mine.”
“I dinna ken ye, nae at all. What would ye have me do?”
“Be a little more sympathetic to my plight, for starters. Christ, pretend if you have to, so I don’t feel like I’m all alone in this, which I understand I am, but”—she closed her eyes and willed herself to calm down. She held up her hands, fingers pointing toward the sky. “No, no. I’m sorry, I said I’d stop whining about it. I get it. I’m on my own.” She clamped her lips.
A shadow of displeasure crossed his face. “I dinna ken how to be...” he let that go, shaking his head with frustration and defended instead, “And I dinna ken, nae fully, that ye are nae a witch.”
“Yeah, you said that already. Many times. If I were a witch, if I had any magical power at all, do you think I’d be here with you? In this time period?”
She hadn’t emphasized ‘you’ in her query, but he heard it that way, causing the crease between his eyes to deepen.
“It is so much better in your time period?” He queried with a hint of disbelief.
“Hmph. Um, yeah. For starters, I don’t run into issues with kidnapping and murder—and I probably won’t in all my life, let alone both in the same day.”
“There is peace then?” He concluded.
“Well, no. Not exactly,” she acknowledged, “but there is a rule of law and though it’s broken daily all over the world, the vast majority of people aren’t running around committing violent crimes.”
“Ye ken the vast majority of people in this time do so?”
“Well, everyone I’ve met so far has—that’s the full majority—so odds are pretty good that it’s just how people live now.”
It wasn’t, of course, but her prickly attitude discouraged him from explaining this to her.
Of course, it made no sense that he rather liked the way she leaned back against him when she spoke now, turning her face to the right and angling it upward. Undoubtedly, she did so that she might be better heard over the persistent clomping of more than forty horses trotting. It suggested she had grown more comfortable with him, her previous unease now greatly diminished. And yet, he wondered if there was some danger to himself for being so aware of her as a woman, a soft and beguiling woman. Her back curved languidly against his front, and her loose, disheveled hair brushed softly against his chin and sometimes his cheek, while her small hand rested casually over his forearm at her middle.
She asked next, after a small silence, “So, what’s at Kingswood? Or—pardon me—who is at Kingswood? You have a big family, I presume—parents, siblings, wife, kids, more cousins.”
“More cousins, aye, and my sister, Fiona. But nae wife, nae bairns, and my parents are nae more.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, her voice softer now, “about your parents. But no wife or kids? I thought people married young in the middle ages.”
He nearly grinned again—almost twice in the space of a few minutes—since she’d just implied that he was not young.
“War often interferes with the natural course of life,” he said. Though he kept his arms around Charlotte and his hands on the reins, his mind went to a thin strip of fabric attached to his belt, where it had lived for more than seven years. Hethought of Elspeth, the woman to whom it belonged, the scrap of embroidered linen.
Sometimes a woman’s treachery dictated a man’s path in life, he thought, his jaw tightening.
“And what of your sister?”
“Fiona, aye,” Reid said, pausing as he considered how to put it. He’d never had to describe his sister to anyone before. “She’s... strong-willed, I suppose ye might say. Always had her own mind about things.” He hesitated, choosing his words with care. “She can be difficult at times, but she means well, even if she dinna always see the bigger picture. She’s nae one to bend easily.”
“How old is she? Is she married?”
He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “She might be about yer age,” he replied. “She’s set against the marriage I’ve arranged for her, which will take place this fall, but it’s a necessary one. She’s to wed Ewan MacDonnell, of a strong Highland family, they’ve land to the north of ours. 'Twill be a good match for both our families, strengthen the bond between us.” Reid paused, frowning. “But Fiona...she sees it as a cage, something forced on her.” He exhaled slowly, shaking his head. Fiona had been wed before, when she was just ten and six, for almost seven years, a marriage contracted by their father. It hadn’t been a good or kind marriage, had produced no children, and had ended when her husband was felled at Falkirk. Fiona had returned to Kingswood bitter, angry at the whole world. “Ewan’s a decent man—steady, capable. It’s nae a love match, but he’ll treat her well. She refuses to see it, though. She fights me on it, as if I’m doing her some great harm.”
“I can’t say I blame her,” Charlotte offered. “Being told who she will marry? Not a love match? Her first marriage being a bad one? Yeah, I don’t blame her at all if she’s cranky about it.”
Miles accumulated behind them, the great mountain slowly receding and Kingswood growing closer by small increments with an easy ride over rolling hills and shallow glens. Reid gave some thought to what might be done with and for Charlotte at Kingswood. To avoid drawing too much attention, she would need a change of clothes, and while Fiona would be the natural choice from whom to request assistance, Reid wasn’t sure he wanted his sister spending too much time in Charlotte’s company. Or Charlotte in Fiona’s company, for that matter.
