Page 13 of My Scot, My Surrender
“Don’t insult my family.”
“You’d defend them, even after how they’ve treated you?” Brandt asked, his brows furrowing in confusion. The expression cut small lines around his eyes. It was skin that had seen sunshine and wind, harsh elements and a rugged life. It was stunning how clear and perceptive his eyes were.
“Of course I do. They’re…they’re my brothers,” she said, her throat constricted. They were untamed jackanapes most of the time, but they were still her blood. They defended her as much as they bullied her. They teased her as much as they protected her feelings. But with Malvern, they’d had no choice. Neither had her father. A part of her hoped, at least, that Finlay and Evan had been relieved to find her kissing a stranger at the festival, if only because it allowed them to order her to marry someone other than Malvern.
She heard the riot of clomping footsteps in the upstairs corridor and twisted away from Brandt’s judgmental glare as a heavy fist came down on the locked door to their room.
“Mr. Pierce!”
It was Gavin, and by the loud voices joining his in the background, she assumed her brothers had come to fetch them as well. Someone pounded again, and then the doorknob jiggled.
“Open the door,” Evan said.
Brandt rolled each of his shoulders as he opened it and stood within the frame. Evan and Finlay looked ready to push inside, while Gavin stayed in the center of the corridor. But Brandt didn’t give an inch. He wouldn’t let them pass.
“Is it done?” Finlay bellowed. It took Sorcha a moment to understand what exactly he was asking, and then a blush rushed to her cheeks.
Brandt said nothing, but turned, and with his mouth set in a grim slash, went to the bed and pulled the bottom sheet from the mattress. He balled up the linen and lobbed it at Finlay. Her brother caught the sheet, and Sorcha watched with mounting humiliation as he and Gavin inspected it for the telltale sign of her innocence lost. She thought she might be ill, not just because it was brash and barbaric, but because it was yet another lie.
Finlay lowered the sheet and dropped it onto the floor. He entered the room and picked up her portmanteau. “We leave for Maclaren immediately.”
And with that, Sorcha’s brothers and her cousin departed. She and Brandt stood, motionless, for a few seconds. The room seemed to deflate around them. Their ruse had worked. She had the notion she should have felt more relieved than she did.
“Are you ready?” he asked, without looking at her.
She nodded and followed Brandt out of the room, trying not to look at the bundled-up sheet on the floor. Her brother had accepted Brandt’s blood as her own. If they knew the truth, what would they do? Force him to commit coitus? While standing over them with forbidding glares and sharpened claymores?
Sorcha bit back a crazed giggle at the image.
Those intense hazel eyes met hers, tinder to her ribald thoughts, and the laughter died on her lips. Neither she nor Brandt spoke a word as they descended into the inn’s main room, where a handful of revelers were still drinking and dozing. The conscious ones raised their tankards in acknowledgment and made sputtering comments that Sorcha pretended not to hear or understand as Brandt stopped to speak to the innkeeper. He asked for pen and paper, and after jotting something down quickly, folded the parchment and handed it to the innkeeper with hushed directions. Sorcha strained to hear, but couldn’t make anything out under the sudden and off-tune rendition of “Johnnie Scot” now making its way around the room. Brandt then took her by the arm and led the way outside, to the inn’s stables.
Her brothers and their men were busy saddling their mounts. They loaded the wagons with the goods they’d purchased and traded for at the festival, including a few fat hogs, several bolts of woven wool, cotton, and linen, a crate of pipe tobacco, small casks of gunpowder, and several more of barreled mead.
Sorcha had ridden to Selkirk on Lockie, and as she approached her beloved gray stallion standing beside a Maclaren groom, she saw he’d been saddled and readied for her. With a stroke of sorrow, she reached for him, her eyes skipping to the enormous, scarred horse closed into the next stall over.
With its ragged coat of scar-torn midnight jet, the animal looked like a beast born of nightmares. Brandt went to him, clicking softly and whispering words Sorcha could not decipher. The animal nickered a brief hello to its master, its great nostrils expelling misty clouds into the cool spring morning air.
“Rest well, Ares?” he murmured to the horse, taking an admiring, and entirely too possessive, glance at Lockie. “Make a friend?”
Sorcha’s chest constricted, but there was nothing to be done for it. Lockie was now his as well. “Ares?” she asked, running a hand up Lockie’s velvet snout and scratching him behind the ear. “He certainly looks like a warrior.”
She wondered how he’d come by his scars.
“He is,” Brandt said as he saddled him. “Brave enough to carry my backside into any manner of hellish situations, at least.”
Like the one he’d found himself in the day before. She was certain it was what he was thinking, too.
“I’m sure he and Lockie will get along fine,” she said, drawing him to the stable entrance and feeling another pang of regret.
“He’s magnificent,” Brandt replied, taking the time to look at Lockie and even run his hands along the gray’s flanks and neck. “Even though he’s young, he seems rather good tempered. Easy to command.” He slid his gaze to Sorcha and with a salty grin, added, “Nothing at all like his mistress.”
She parted her lips to let loose with a biting retort when a shrill whistle parted the inn’s stable yard.
“Finlay!” one of the Maclaren men, Bogan, shouted as he entered the yard, mud splattered up his ankles and onto the hem of his tartan. “’Tis Malvern.”
The ground beneath Sorcha’s feet turned to sand. She gripped Lockie’s traces and felt the horse stiffen with alarm, reflecting her own sudden panic.
“Malvern?” she repeated, her throat closing. “He’s here?”
