Page 1 of Love with a Scottish Outlaw
Chapter 1
Scotland, 1727
The rain woke her first, hard and pelting against her face. For a long moment, she kept her eyes closed in confusion and uncertainty—and pain. God, her head hurt, the distant ache exploding as she came more and more to consciousness. The rain plopped on her eyelids and cheeks, and slid down into the wet mass of hair beneath her. Something was wrong, something beyond the rain, the aching head, and the sodden, uneven ground upon which she lay. Thinking about it only hurt more, so she tried to move, flexing her hands and feet, shrugging her shoulders. A wave of nausea roiled through her, but she couldn’t let it overwhelm her. She shivered, teeth chattering, skull throbbing.
Why was she lying outside on the ground? Nothing came into her mind—nothing at all.
Surely it was because of the ache in her head, she told herself, fighting a growing feeling of anxiety. She needed warmth and release from the pain. Nothing would change if she just continued to lie there.
She crinkled her eyes, blinked several times, and opened them again. The sky was gray with patches of even darker clouds, letting loose a torrent upon the countryside. She forced herself to turn her head and saw a steep hillside above her, with the occasional bush clinging to the infertile ground. There were marks etched in the earth, like a giant had taken its fingers and gouged downward, leading right toward her.
With a groan, she rolled to the side, feeling every muscle protest like little screams erupting inside her.
And then she saw the blank stare of a dead man.
She screamed aloud, hoarse and choked, unable to look away. There was blood on his face, and his neck was at an unnatural angle.
She had to cover her mouth with both hands to stop the sobs from leaking out. Though she wanted to look away, she couldn’t let herself. He was dead, poor soul, but he was also a stranger. He was lying at the foot of a hillside, right beside her, and his face meant nothing.
She meant nothing.
She had to accept it now—there was nothing inside her head about who she was or why she was lying next to a dead man. Nothing existed before the moment she’d been awakened by the rain.
As she rolled away from the body, she told herself that she knew what things were—that hadn’t left her. There was the sky and rain and mud. She had hands that shook, a head that pounded, hips that ached as she arched away from a rock beneath her.
With a groan, she leveraged her hands beneath her and pushed until, trembling, she was in a sitting position. And then she saw another crumpled, unmoving body. She let out a moan of fear, looking around as if for the enemy who’d done this. But she was alone, with only the vastness of barren hills and wild water.
The person behind her was dead, but maybe not this one. On her hands and knees, she crawled the short distance, rocks cutting her palms, mud oozing between her fingers.
“Sir? Are you well?”
But when she touched his sodden coat, she knew; he was hard and cold and very dead. She forced herself to look into his face, eyes half-closed and staring at nothing. He was a stranger, too.
She sank back on her heels and hugged herself as despair washed over her, the feeling as wet and miserable as the rain itself. But she could not let herself surrender to fear. She wouldn’t die out here, alone. Looking around, she saw water flowing down the ravine, overrunning its banks. The uneven, rocky ground stretched downhill, away from her, rising into the slopes of barren brown hillsides, and between them, the darker green of valleys, dotted with the occasional copse of trees. There was nothing else in the world but the forlorn emptiness of countryside, no houses, no villages, no roads.
Turning her neck, she looked back up the ravine. She must have come from up there with these men, fallen down, maybe caused those gouges in the earth. But if they’d been riding horses, they were long gone, taking with them any belongings that might have explained who she was or where they were going.
She wasn’t sure when night might fall, but she needed to find help or at least shelter, before the cold killed her as the fall had killed these men.
Staggering to her feet, she began to walk downhill, away from the dangerously high river. Each step jarred her bruises, but at least nothing seemed broken—except her head, which pounded so hard she could only keep her eyes half open. Her soaked gown and cloak weighed her down, making each step an uneven lurch.
Duncan Carlyle, outlawed chief of the Clan Carlyle, rode his chestnut gelding, Arran, slowly through the rain along the narrow dirt path that wound between the hillsides of the southern Highlands. A fast-flowing burn overflowed its banks from the deluge, sending a rush of water on its way to the sea. It was a cold September day, nothing unusual for the Highlands. His wool plaid kept some of the heat in, and his horse’s flanks steamed against his bare thighs. He still had an hour’s journey back to his encampment, but he didn’t let his mind drift. He was ever alert for enemies. There’d been a close call when he’d almost been captured six weeks ago. It had taken two days of hard riding to elude his pursuers. Since then, he and all his men had stayed close to their encampment and avoided outsiders.
As the path took a turn, Arran’s ears went back, and Duncan felt the tension in the reins. A woman walked toward him, her hood draped back from her shoulders, her bare head dark with rain—and something else? Standing in the stirrups, he looked about, but saw nothing but the harsh Highland hills scattered with drooping purple heather. She was far too close to his encampment for comfort, and he wondered where the rest of her party was.
He urged his horse into a trot until he approached her. Her uneven gait came to a halt as her lowered gaze took in first the legs of his horse, then rose slowly. He inhaled at the sight of the ugly bruise on her forehead, and the wound beside it that streamed with blood. Her eyes were rimmed with blue shadows of distress, her face blanched white. She stared up at him unseeing, allowing him only a glimpse of her golden eyes before they rolled back in her head as she collapsed.
Swearing, Duncan swung down from his horse and hovered over her still form, years of wariness guiding his actions. “Mistress? Can ye hear me?”
As he touched her shoulders, he felt the fine material of her cloak. After straightening her limbs, he lifted her upper body into his left arm, cradling her head so that he blocked the rain. He probed near her wound gingerly with his right hand, and she frowned and weakly tried to turn away.
His wariness deepened. There was something about her, a familiarity that echoed inside his head but refused to take shape.
“Where am I?” she whispered, her accent English. “What happened?”
An English lady in the Highlands? He chose to answer the second question rather than the first. “Ye’ve a nasty wound to your head, mistress. Did ye fall?”
She blinked as if she might lose consciousness. “Where am I? What happened?”
