Page 22 of Highlander's Secret Heiress
However, today he was the loving father, and Davina was taking full advantage of this, using her wiles to get her way. Alyth laughed inwardly; even at the tender age of seven, Davina was learning the art of twisting a man around her little finger, even if the man in question was only her father.
They bent down under a tree to see a patch of tiny white flowers, their heads bent as if in sadness. Davina bent down to pick one, but she had barely touched the flower when Alyth heard a sound that almost froze her heart. She whipped around to see two heavily armed men in the livery of the Robertson Clan crashing through the undergrowth behind them.
Alyth heard Davina scream, and immediately pushed the little girl behind her, then faced the two men armed with nothing but her little knife. It looked quite pathetic compared to the Robertsons’ mighty broadswords, but Alyth knew she could do alot of damage with it if she managed to get within arm’s length. She was definitely the weaker of the two sets of combatants, but she would never give up.
“Alyth MacAdams!” one of the guards, a tall dark bearded man, jeered as he moved in closer to her, holding his sword pointed directly at her. “Your father has put out a big reward for ye, hen.” Talking to the other guard, he said, “There are men lookin’ for ye all over the place, but we have found ye!”
Alyth had surreptitiously taken the knife out of her pocket, but was holding it behind her back out of sight of the two men. “I think ye might have buttoned yer heid up the wrong way this mornin’, pal,” she said scornfully. “My name’s Jeannie an’ I’m a maid!”
The man looked at her doubtfully, then at the other guard, who was much shorter and heavier. In the fraction of a second when their eyes were not on her, Alyth leapt forward and knocked the first man’s sword out of his hand with her elbow, then sliced him across his cheek with her knife.
He screamed and fell backwards, clutching his cheek, which was now pouring with blood. Alyth picked up his sword, which he had dropped on the ground. However, events were unfolding almost too fast for Alyth to keep up with, and a moment later she saw the shorter of the two guards grabbing Davina, who looked frozen with terror.
“Let go of her,” Alyth growled, “or you will be very sorry.”
The man laughed at her and pulled Davina even closer to him, his arm just under her chin. If he had applied just a little pressure, he could have choked her, but Alyth had no intention of letting him do that. She held up the sword and advanced towards him with murder in her eyes.
However, it seemed that Davina had other ideas too. Although the guard was heavily armoured, his hands were bare, and Davina bit him as hard as she could. It was obviouslypainful, not as bad as his friend’s wound, but enough to make him let go of her. He cried out as Davina broke free of him, then he reached out to grab her, but Davina was too fast for him, and ran back to Alyth.
At that moment Lachlan, hearing the noise of fighting, dashed up behind the guard Davina had bitten, his sword unsheathed. The man half turned, but Lachlan’s blade pierced him from behind, and he dropped dead without making a sound. The first guard was running for his horse, but Lachlan tackled him from behind, knocking him to the ground. He took hold of the man’s helmet, wrenched it from him, and hit him on the back of his head with it three times as hard as he could before the guard was completely immobilised. Looking down at him, Lachlan saw that he had killed him.
He stood over the inert body of his enemy for a moment, his face twisted with hate, before he ran back to Alyth and Davina, terrified that they had come to any serious harm. He expected them both to be bloodied and wounded, perhaps even dead, and his heart was pounding, and he prepared himself for the worst, as he ran into the trees to find out their fate.
Alyth was kneeling, holding Davina in a tight embrace. Her face was white as a sheet as she looked up at him, and she jumped, startled at his sudden appearance. Clearly she had been expecting the Robertsons to return, judging by her terrified expression.
Lachlan almost collapsed with relief, and took Davina in his arms at once. She clung to him tightly and laid her head on his shoulder, her whole body shaking.
“This clever girl bit the arm of the man who was holding her,” Alyth said. “Then she ran back to me. She may have saved both of us.”
She attempted a smile, but the muscles of her face would not obey her. In truth, she was scared to death. What if Lachlan hadheard the men calling her by her real name? She had no doubt what her fate would be if he knew her real identity!
Lachlan was still holding on to tightly to his daughter, but now he kissed her and said lovingly, “I am so proud of you, Davina.” When he let her go, Davina looked at the men on the ground. She pointed to them, one after the other. “Bad,” she said with a deep frown.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Very bad. But you scared them away. Now, shall we go back home?”
Alyth was almost limp with relief. She looked at the two bodies on the grass as they walked over to their horses. “What are we going to do with them?” she asked.
“Leave them,” he answered. “If they were still alive, I might get some useful information out of them, but dead… Well, they might be of some use to the wild boars. They are always hungry, and we can take their horses as a reward for this trouble. I like to get horses as a bounty.” He smiled grimly.
Before he helped her onto her horse, he said, “Thank you, Jeannie. I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t been here.”
She shrugged. “But I was, and anyone would have done the same,” she answered, still looking down at the bodies.
“I doubt that very much,” he replied. “There are not many who are brave enough; most people would have run away. I can see you are very shaken, even though I can tell you are trying to cover it up. I will have the healer come to see you to give you something to calm you down, and you must take tomorrow off to rest.”
Then he grasped Alyth around the waist and lifted her into the saddle. She was rather shocked; she had never mounted a horse this way before, but she was not displeased. She loved Lachlan touching her.
Just before he walked back to Davina, their eyes met and held for a moment, and Alyth was surprised to see the warmth in his expression. She had a feeling their relationship was about to change—but did she want it to? It was a question she was too afraid to answer.
10
It was not until a few days later, when Lachlan’s party had come and gone, that Alyth saw him again. She had gone back to reading Davina her bedtime story once more, and to her surprise Davina seemed much more confident than she had before, and was even slowly but surely recovering the power of speech.
Alyth had been afraid that the whole trauma of the attack by the Robertsons might have sent her back into her shell, but the opposite seemed to have happened. After considering the matter for a while, Alyth reasoned that it had been because Davina had been able to defend herself, and therefore she had lost her sense of helplessness and fear.
Alyth wished she could communicate this to Lachlan, but she felt it better to keep her distance for the time being, since the whole horrifying event had been extremely hard on him too. Consequently, she felt that if she approached him, it might bring back memories he wanted to forget.
Lachlan, for his part, had deeply regretted inviting people he had once called friends to his home. He had thought that it was time for him to mix with society again, to hear about the goings-on in the life of people he had once known and cared about.Instead, he found the whole experience stultifyingly boring, and realised that he was no longer the man he had once been.
