Page 13 of The Groom Wore Plaid
“And ye’re a McCallum.”
As if the two things equated.
“My sister told me about ye,” he continued.
“Your—” She broke off, suddenly seeing the resemblance to another in his short stature and red hair. “Ah, your sister Kathleen,” she said with surprise. Kathleen had been so polite and sunny, as opposite her brother as possible. “Ye must be Gregor. Ye’re practically as new here as I am.”
He took a step toward her, fists on his hips, and spoke with angry defensiveness. “My family’s blood is in this very soil. I was born here.”
“Ye’re right, of course,” she said. Starting her own mini-feud wasn’t going to help. “I didn’t mean to offend.”
“Ye’ve offended just by bein’ here,” he grumbled.
“Then I won’t bother ye again.”
She turned away and began to walk, feeling his angry stare as if it were a dirk piercing the middle of her back. And suddenly, she couldn’t stay in the courtyard, where escaping the dozens of censorious looks would prove impossible. How could one marriage possibly undo centuries’ worth of hatred?
She passed a training yard where men fought with swords. She’d seen no firearms and she knew why—the British government had passed a Disarming Act after the uprising, and continued to pass more, attempting to remove all firearms from the Highlands. But many clans had imported rusty old weapons from the Continent and turned those in for the money, while hiding their own in case they had to defend their land against the British. Certainly they weren’t going to display their weapons in front of a McCallum.
And with that thought, she headed through the gatehouse under the watchful, skeptical eyes of the guards, wrapped in their Duff plaid and their Duff righteousness. She felt like she could breathe again away from the high walls of the courtyard that had seemed to trap the air. The water near the arched bridge was still, covered in large oval leaves that floated around whitelilies, as befitted a moat that seemed more like a pond. The sky was overcast, but didn’t threaten rain as she left the bridge for the dirt-packed road.
She started across a grassy field that sloped up the side of a mountain in the distance. Heather grew in abundance, scattered between boulders and through the fields, and in just a few more weeks it would decorate these meadows in purple blossoms. Maggie felt some of the tension ease away as she took one deep breath after another.
But she couldn’t avoid thinking about her problems for long. As if she’d conjured the scene, she could suddenly see herself screaming, her beautiful gown spattered with blood, and Owen lying on the floor, barely breathing, his face waxen, his eyelids fluttering.
Her breath came in pants and she collapsed onto a boulder, light-headed. She forced her mind to stay in the scene, examining it, looking for evidence of what happened next. She tried to push herself forward in the dream until her head ached, but nothing else happened beyond Owen lying wounded, near death.
For the first time in years, she let herself go back farther, to other dreams she’d had, the last being when Owen’s first betrothed, Emily, had appeared to her, solemn and dripping wet, foretelling her drowning. There was nothing in that dream that she could have warned the woman about except to stay away from water, but even a bathing tub could have causedher death. Regardless, Maggie had been guilt-ridden that she hadn’t found Emily herself and warned her, though she would have looked a fool doing it.
The guilt had never quite gone away, even though she’d had to move on with her life. Owen had never contacted her after she’d warned him. Seeing him again, she realized that the sting of his disbelief and disappointment in her had never truly dissipated. She’d always thought holding a grudge was pointless, but it seemed she couldn’t take her own advice. His abandonment of her had been a sign that she was better off without him, that they never would have suited. All that seemed to be left was anger and disappointment and a physical awareness that was awkward and uncomfortable and yet . . . arousing.
With determination, she returned to her dreams, going farther back, past Emily. They rose up in her mind as if coming out of water, surfacing intact, practically bobbing, ready for her to pick from them. She saw the little boy shivering under the cliff, the girl who’d killed herself after Maggie’s father had abused her, then back farther still, to her childhood, when she hadn’t understood that her dreams were something that might come true.
With a gasp, she remembered the little boy who’d come to her occasionally in those dreams, her secret friend, she used to call him. It was as if she’d looked through a window into his life, saw when he scraped aknee, when he’d hidden from his father’s wrath, when he escaped the castle to—
And suddenly she turned her head and stared hard at Castle Kinlochard—the same castle as in her dreams. The little boy had lighter hair then Owen’s sandy color, but many children’s hair darkened through the years.
Was it possible she’d been connected to Owen throughout her life?
Guards paced along the battlements, and horse-drawn carts rattled over the bridge. Clouds scudded across the sky, giving the building a forbidding yet vibrant backdrop, as if framed in reality as it was framed in her mind.
What was she supposed to make of this new twist? When she’d been hiding from her drunken father, thoughts of her dream friend had consoled her. When she’d watched her brother take a beating in her place, memories of her dreams were what she’d retreated to.
As she’d grown, so had the little boy, and she’d seen him less and less. Her dreams had become scarcer, and only truly powerful ones appeared to her, like the girl who’d killed herself. She’d told herself that she’d simply outgrown the need for a make-believe friend in her dreams, but there’d always been a part of her who’d missed him.
And as if her thoughts had conjured him, she saw the Duff chief himself striding through the heather, his blue and green plaid swaying above his bare knees.And in that moment, she remembered what it was like to be with him when she was a young woman, the excitement building as he came toward her, the breathless wonder of being in his company, basking in his humor, admiring his dedication to learning, something she knew was forbidden to her. It was still so thrilling to be the focus of his intense gaze, to feel a clenching deep in the pit of her stomach that made her feel weak, betrayed by her own body.
As she sat upon the rock, his eyes swept over her as if he could see beneath her skirts. She kept her legs tightly together, though she wanted to lean back, languid with longing, brazen enough to display herself for him.
“I wondered where you’d disappeared to,” he said.
“Ye didn’t confine me to the castle, now did ye?” To her relief, she sounded almost normal.
“I would not do that. This is your home now.”
Home.Just the thought shocked her back to her life, but instead of the truth she knew she had to say, she mused, “I’ve never been sure where home was.”
She quickly looked away from him, back to the beautiful picture of the double arches of stone over the calm moat waters, the castle rising up behind like a solitary mountain. She shouldn’t be talking to him about this, but the words had just . . . spilled out.
