Page 3 of The Beast's Bride
A Man’s World
“YE will haveto choose a husband sooner or later, lass. Don’t make me choose one for ye.”
Malcolm, clan-chief of the MacLeods, glared at his daughter before spearing a leg of roast fowl with a knife. Next to him, his wife, Una, cast her husband a reproachful look. She’d been trying to get him to eat less of late. He was a big, bearded man with a wild mane of greying auburn hair. At fifty winters the clan-chief’s girth was increasing with each year; over the past few months, gout had pained him terribly.
“Aye, Da,” Rhona replied, favoring him with a contrite smile, “but let it not be Dughall MacLean. The man’s a brute.”
She was merely trying to appease him. Rhona had no intention of wedding anyone. She’d seen nothing of marriage in her twenty winters to make her want to shackle herself to a man. Her mother had died many years earlier, yet Rhona remembered how oppressed she’d been, how Malcolm MacLeod’s word was law in all things. Her father treated his second wife no differently, although Una didn’t seem as cowed as her mother had been.
Beside Rhona her elder sister, Caitrin, shifted uncomfortably on the wooden bench, a hand straying to her swollen belly. Next to Caitrin, the youngest of the three sisters, Adaira, bowed her head. Her silky brown hair fell across one cheek, her mouth twitching as she fought a smile.
“Most men are brutes,” Caitrin murmured, censure in her sea-blue eyes. “I wish ye well finding one that isn’t.”
Rhona’s gaze narrowed. “Those are fine words coming from a wedded woman with a bairn on the way.”
Caitrin’s gaze held hers a moment before dropping to the trencher of pottage before her. Rhona continued to watch Caitrin, her own frown deepening. Her sister would never have said such a thing if her husband, Baltair, had been present.
Fortunately for them all, he was away hunting, and Caitrin—who was heavy with bairn—had come to live in Dunvegan until after the birth. Once the child was born, she would return home to the MacDonald’s broch, Duntulm, which lay upon the northern coast of the isle.
Caitrin’s situation was just another reason why Rhona had no intention of choosing a husband.
Her sister had changed since wedding Baltair MacDonald two years earlier. It was as if a light had gone out within her; she seemed so distant these days.
“What kind of man would sway ye then, sister?” Adaira asked, observing Rhona over the rim of a cup of wine, her hazel eyes mischievous. “Must he be handsome, strong, or kind?”
At the head of the table, their father snorted. “Spare me the witless chatter of women.”
This comment drew a snort of laughter from his son, Iain. Like his daughters, Iain was born of his first wife, who had died when Rhona was eight. He’d just reached his sixteenth summer and had recently developed a sneering attitude toward his elder sisters.
Rhona cast her brother and father a withering look, before her attention shifted to her step-mother. Una was a beauty with clear skin, sharp blue eyes, and raven hair. She’d once been the wife of the chieftain of the Frasers of Skye. Ever since she’d left her first husband for Malcolm MacLeod, there had been a rift between the two clans. Una was now favoring her husband with a simpering smile, as if he had not just insulted her sex.
Rhona gritted her teeth. She hated that it was a man’s world, and that women like Una would play down their own cleverness to flatter their husbands’ egos.
I’ll not wed.
Picking up her cup of sloe wine, Rhona took a sip. They sat at a long table in the Great Hall. The chieftain’s table took pride of place at one end, next to a hearth set into the wall. Even now, in summer, a log burned—for inside the thick walls of Dunvegan Keep the air was always cool and damp.
Above them rose a ceiling of wooden rafters, like the ribcage of a great beast, blackened with smoke. This was the grandest space in the keep, but this evening Rhona felt constrained by it.
Caitrin with her sad eyes, and Adaira with her headful of girlish fancies.
Una with her smug smile.
Iain with his smirk.
Rhona’s father with his insistence that his daughters be bred like sows.
I should have been born a man.
Rhona’s gaze shifted across the hall then, gliding over the tables where kin and her father’s warriors ate their supper. The rumble of voices was like the sound of the surf on a shingle shore. Her gaze alighted on Taran, seated at the far end of one of the tables. Even at meal times, he was still clad in his mail shirt—ready to serve her father at a moment’s notice.
He might have been scarred and ugly, but she envied him.
No one insistedhewed or bore sons. Taran MacKinnon was free to live as he pleased.
“Show me how to free myself from a man’s grip.”
“What, like Dughall had ye in yesterday?”
