Page 55 of My Scot, My Surrender
Brandt nodded, his fingers shifting to wind around hers. “I know. My father told me my mother had already been married when I was born, but perhaps she had been staying here at the keep only for a time. I don’t know.”
It could have been the long shadows of the fading light outside and the flickering flames from the fire, but for the first time Sorcha noticed circles under his eyes. He’d been sleeping lightly in order to keep watch over their encampments every night for days on end. He had to be exhausted.
“I’ll dress, and you can bathe,” she said, attempting to pry her fingers from his. “We are eating soon.”
He held on, though, his thumb rubbing the heel of her palm in slow strokes.
“It wasn’t an act,” he whispered, looking up into her eyes. “It wasn’t just a role.”
He was speaking of that morning.
“We needn’t discuss it again,” she said, dropping her eyes and twisting her hand to free her fingers from his. He stared down at his hand, looking torn, like he wanted to say more. After a protracted moment, Sorcha expelled a slow breath. Regardless of the hurt she suffered, she knew he would need her for what was surely to come at supper, and like her touch, she would not withhold it. “I’m here for you, Brandt. With the Montgomerys.”
His eyes met hers. “How can you be so kind after I’ve been such a beast?”
Kindness was the least of her worries. She wanted to shake him until his teeth rattled. She wanted to run from this dank, ugly place with its maudlin ghosts. She wanted him to let go of the past that haunted him. Sorcha shook her head and formed the brightest smile she could manage. “The only beast here is me, and don’t you forget it. Now bathe, or we shall be late.”
She kept the toweling around her as she took up the blue muslin dress Morag had left for her and moved toward a wood paneled privacy screen. She dressed and braided her hair while Brant washed. After a decent amount of time had gone by without splashing noises, a furtive peek through a thin gap in the screen showed he had finished and had dressed himself in a pair of clean buckskins and a linen shirt. Which was well and good, for if she had to look upon his sleek, muscled limbs again, the keen ache she already felt for him would have sharpened into something unbearable.
Once she’d wound her braid into a loose knot and secured it with a few of her own pins and combs, she and Brandt walked together toward the great hall. They had both agreed that it would be wise to leave her wedding ring tucked away in Brandt’s pocket. At least for the moment.
Sorcha expected to hear a boisterous cacophony of voices and laughter, along with the clink and crash of cutlery and glass as they entered the hall, but instead, she found a muted din. There were two long tables with benches set up in the hall, each one filled with Montgomery clansmen. Sorcha’s feet faltered as she and Brandt walked toward the dais at the end of the cavernous room upon which the laird’s table stood. Though there was a fire within a giant hearth, candles on every table, and a number of guttering wall torches, the room was still cloaked in shadows.
Eyes turned toward them as they approached the laird. Stares were nothing new to Sorcha, but what Brandt had whispered earlier was unmistakably true: these stares were not solely aimed at her and her scars. These were fastened on Brandt.
There were five open seats at the laird’s table—the one to Rodric’s right, and four more placed farther down the table, two on the side closest to them and two next to two younger men. Each man stood, their resemblance to the duke clear, though one was fairer than the other. The dark-haired one, to the right of the duke, speared Brandt with a narrow-browed stare and an unmasked grimace.
“Welcome, my honored guests,” Rodric boomed, banging his tankard down on the table so that the entire hall went silent. Sorcha was certain she didn’t miss the sarcastic emphasis on honored, as if it was some kind of well-intentioned slight. Or maybe it was the way the laird enunciated each syllable with such cold, courteous precision. It felt like she was caught in a Shakespearean production she’d seen once in London with her mother.
“Thank you, Your Grace,” she heard Brandt say.
“These are my sons,” Rodric said, a loose hand gesturing toward the two men. “Patrick,” he said, and the dark-haired man nodded once, “and Callan.”
Patrick looked to be Brandt’s age, perhaps a few years younger, and Callan, the lighter-haired one, closer to Sorcha’s own age. He pulled out the chair beside him, and Brandt took it. Sorcha started to sit beside Brandt, but the duke cleared his throat. “Ye are to sit over there, Lady Pierce,” he said, indicating an empty seat on the other side of the table.
Surprised, Sorcha paused, but she kept her back straight and her shoulders pressed down, and moved toward the three open seats on the other side. She had always been welcome to sit wherever she liked at her father’s own table, and when visiting other keeps, she would sit beside one of her brothers. It was also customary at Maclaren, and with most other clans, for wives and husbands of the laird’s family to sit beside each other. She would have liked to have been able to sit beside Brandt as his wife, if only for the familiar comfort of the only face she knew within the room. But as she took the seat farthest to the left, directly opposite from Brandt, she refused to show her unease.
Tankards were filled with ale and goblets with wine, but the food had yet to be served. Sorcha was starving, and yet she knew she wouldn’t feel like eating a bite of anything the maids would be whisking in on large platters soon. Across the table, she met Brandt’s eyes. They were hard and watchful. He didn’t like this place any more than she did, and she had no doubt the endless looks being thrown his way every few moments were frustrating him. She understood how wearying it could be.
Patrick and Callan got to their feet as a young woman entered the great hall, her strides swift and sure as she approached the tables. She appeared to be no more than sixteen, with sparkling brown eyes set in a heart-shaped face. Her long, fair hair matched that of Callan’s and had been woven into one thick plait down the center of her back. Brandt stood as well, though Sorcha noted Rodric did not.
“Father,” the young woman said, stopping at the head of the table to bob a curtsy to Rodric.
“Mr. Pierce, Lady Pierce, this is my daughter, Aisla,” Rodric announced, and when Aisla turned to bob a curtsy to Brandt, she did not falter or stare as the others had. Perhaps she had already heard about his resemblance, and she was too well-bred to make any open notice of it. Aisla then turned to take her seat on the left-hand side, and Sorcha prepared herself. It was instinct, really, the steeling of her spine before meeting a person for the first time. But again, the girl only smiled and murmured a soft, pleasant greeting. Her eyes stayed firmly hitched to Sorcha’s own, without roving over her scars.
“Welcome to Montgomery,” she said, leaving the chair directly next to Rodric open.
“Thank you,” Sorcha replied. Just then, a few words rose above the subdued conversation in the room. “Face” and “worse than I heard” reached her ears before Aisla picked up her goblet of wine and asked her a question, loudly, as if trying to distract her.
“Where do ye and yer husband travel to, Lady Pierce?”
She took a sip of her wine and, looking into Sorcha’s eyes, smiled. She was a pretty young woman, a few years younger than Sorcha. She had sharp, memorable features, with a wide mouth, pale hair, a sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of her nose, and a pair of eyes—not brown as Sorcha had first thought—almost the color of copper.
“West,” she answered, thankful for Aisla’s attempt to spare her from the gossiping tongues of the Montgomery men. It hadn’t been necessary, and it made her feel only guiltier for lying about their destination. But she didn’t like the bleak, tense air of this keep, or the pointed, appraising way Rodric looked at her and Brandt. If Malvern’s men tracked them here, she didn’t trust him or his people to guard the truth of their true destination.
Aisla, perhaps sensing her reticence, did not ask for anything more specific. Another kindness.
“Yer husband,” Aisla said next, her attention flicking down the length of the laird’s table. “He’s Sassenach?”
