Page 78 of Wed to the Highlander
When her mother-in-law turned and walked out, Fiona had to bite her tongue to keep from offering a cup of tea.
Alone in the dead woman’s room, the scent of lavender cloying now, like perfume over rot, Fiona looked at the facts from all angles. Something didn’t sit right.
Isla had been envious and bitter, but she wasn’t what Fiona would consider shrewd. And she was exceedingly erratic. Thiswas calculated and carried out over weeks. A challenge for a girl unraveling at the seams.
Fiona knelt by the trunk again, fingers sifting through the debris. At the bottom, beneath a box of hair combs and a tangle of ribbons, she found pages torn from books, a pile of crumpled notes scribbled in a frantic hand.
One sheet listed herbs and their uses. Pennyroyal was underlined three times.
Another detailed how to start a flash fire using oil and dried grain. A crude sketch of a silo followed then a map—rough, but unmistakable—of the east wing tunnels leading straight to Duncan and Maggie’s room.
At the bottom of the pile lay loose journal entries, written in Isla’s unmistakable scrawl. The top one was dated for last April, at the peak of Maggie’s illness, just before Duncan took her back to London.
It hasn’t worked yet, but he says I must keep trying. If she loses the bairn, there won’t be time for another. The lairdship will pass to him by right, and the clan will praise him for saving them from ruin. They will have lost faith in Duncan’s leadership. He’ll blame the sassenach and send her away. Then he will be mine, just as he always should have been.
Fiona covered her mouth, nausea rising.
This was proof Isla hadn’t acted alone.
The poison tea, the string of accidents, the whispers and shadows had all been devised by someone far cleverer. Someone who had everything to gain if the bairn never saw Duncan’s thirtieth birthday. And that someone was Lachlan.
She rose unsteadily, heart pounding, clutching the papers to her chest. Her husband’s deviousness and cruelty had left her shaken. Loyalty to him, the father of her children, including the one still growing inside her, clashed bitterly with loyalty to her clan. To truth and to justice.
“I must tell Duncan,” she whispered. The choice wasn’t really a choice at all.
When she left the west wing with the incriminating proof, she didn’t seek out the laird. She headed to the east wing instead.
***
Jamie’s chest rose and fell in the cradle’s dim light, each breath a fragile miracle. Maggie sat nearby, legs tucked beneath her, one hand propping up her head, the other curled around a cup of lukewarm tea she hadn’t touched.
She hadn’t slept—not truly—since that night.
Every time her eyes closed, she saw it again: Duncan with Jamie in his arms, her whole world, swallowed by a black hole.
She blinked hard, willing the image to fade.When will it stop chasing me?
A soft knock startled her.
She was on her feet in an instant, crossing the room before another knock could come and wake Jamie.
Fiona stood in the corridor, pale and wide-eyed, her expression stricken—like she’d seen a ghost. And Maggie knew firsthand how harrowing that experience could be.
“What is it?” she whispered, already bracing. Her gaze dropped to Fiona’s very round belly then flicked back up. “Is it time?”
She shook her head. “I wish it were only that.”
A prickle ran down her spine. What now?
For a heartbeat, Maggie almost wished not to know. Instead, she moved aside. “Come in.”
Fiona entered slowly, clutching a bundle of papers to her chest. She didn’t sit. She hovered near the bed, eyes darting toward the cradle then back to Maggie.
“It was Isla all along,” she said. “The whispers. The sickness. She put something in your tea.”
Maggie’s breath caught. “You’re certain?”
“Aye. She thought it was pennyroyal. Thank the good lord it wasn’t.”
