Sinful Scottish Laird--A Historical Romance Novel Read online

  He lifted his hands shoulder high to show he was unarmed. “We’ve no desire to harm you; I give you my word as a Highlander and a gentleman.” He didn’t tremble, didn’t seem to be the least bit concerned. He seemed only impatient, as if he wished this meeting to be done.

  “You expect us to believe it?” Mr. Bellows snapped.

  “There is no’ a man among us who is inclined to haul so many boxes and trunks down the road.”

  One of the riders behind the Scotsman spoke in the Scots language, and when he did, Mr. Bellows made the mistake of looking at him. In the space of no more than a moment, the Scotsman lunged so quickly for the barrel of the musket that Daisy couldn’t help but sound a yelp of alarm. He yanked it cleanly from Mr. Bellows’s hands and twirled it around in one movement to train it on him. “You’ll tell your companions to put away their firearms now, aye?” he asked, his voice deadly in its calm.

  Daisy believed she would be bargaining for her son’s safety at any moment and frantically thought what to do. Should she find him and run for the lake? She glanced toward the chaise where Ellis was hiding, and saw Mr. Green furtively begin to lift his musket and take aim. Mr. Green, her groundskeeper, who’d likely never before fired on another man. “No!” she cried out inadvertently, the desperate sound of her voice startling her. “All of you! Do as he says, sir, please.”

  The Scotsman did not take his eyes from Sir Nevis. “Heed your lady.”

  “I urge you, madam, put yourself in the coach!” Sir Nevis shouted.

  “If these men intended to rob us, would they not have already done it?” she asked, tripping over the traces of the chaise as she picked her way around the coach, desperate to avert a crisis. “Would not our hired men have interceded? I think he speaks true.”

  “Ah, a voice of reason, then,” the Scotsman drawled.

  There was no reason in Daisy at all—she had no idea what these men intended and spoke only with the frantic hope of avoiding bloodshed. “Please, Sir Nevis, tell your men to lower their sights,” she begged. “We want no trouble here.”

  Sir Nevis jutted out his chin, but he turned slightly and nodded at the other men, and slowly, suspiciously, they lowered their guns.

  The Scotsman smirked, then twirled the musket in one hand so that the butt was facing away from him and handed it to Mr. Bellows. “Now...might we help you repair the wheel?” he asked as if the tension had not just simmered so menacingly between them. As if none of them had, only moments before, feared for their lives.

  “That is not necessary,” Sir Nevis said stiffly.

  The Scotsman shrugged indifferently. “Aye, then. We’ve no desire to toil under the hot summer sun.” He turned as if he meant to depart, but he caught sight of Daisy and he hesitated, his eyes locking on hers.

  Daisy’s breath quickened; her first instinct was to step back, to run. Her second instinct overruled the first, however, for he had a pair of astoundingly blue eyes. Cerulean blue. She was moving without thought, stepping away from the coach as she nervously pressed her damp palms to the front of her gown.

  His heated gaze slowly traveled the length of her, his eyes like a pair of torches, singeing her skin as he took in every bit of her gown and the tips of the shoes that peeked out from beneath her hem. Then up again, to her bosom, where he unabashedly lingered, and finally to her face.

  Daisy self-consciously brushed her cheek with the back of her hand, wondering if she looked dirty or worn.

  He continued to stare at her so boldly and unapologetically that Daisy couldn’t help but smile uneasily. “Ah...th-thank you for your offer,” she stammered. What the devil was she to say in this situation?

  He stared at her.

  “Madam, I must insist that you return to the chaise with your lady to wait,” Sir Nevis begged her.

  “Yes, I will,” she assured him, but she made no move to do so, not even when she heard Belinda call for her. She simply could not look away from the Scotsman.

  “Who are you?” he suddenly demanded.

  “Me?” she asked stupidly, but then she remembered herself and stepped forward, her hand extended, and sank into a curtsy with the vague idea that if all else failed, perhaps civility might work. “I beg your pardon. I am Lady Chatwick.” She glanced up, her hand still extended. The Scotsman scowled down at her. He showed no inclination to take her hand.

  Daisy self-consciously rose. She’d never seen eyes so blue, she was certain of it—the very color of an early spring day. “I do so appreciate your offer of assistance. We’ve come a very long way and have not seen roads as bad as these.”

  His gaze narrowed menacingly, and he took a step toward her. And another. He tilted his head to one side, studying her, as if she were a creature he’d never seen before. “What is an English noblewoman doing in these hills?” he demanded, his voice tinged with suspicion.

  “We are to Auchenard,” she said. “It is a lodge—”

  “Aye, I know what it is,” he said. “No one goes to Auchenard now but rutting stags. What business have you there?”

  She was slightly taken aback by his crass comment. “Ah...well, Auchenard belongs to my son now. I thought he should see it.”

  He frowned as if he didn’t believe her. His gaze fell to her lips, and there it lingered.

  Daisy’s blood fired and flooded her cheeks. She nervously touched a curl at her nape. “I beg your pardon, but might I know your name?”

  He slowly lifted his gaze. “Arrandale.”

  “Arrandale,” she repeated.

  He took another sudden step forward, and now he stood so close that she had to tilt her head back to look up at him.

  “Stand back!” Sir Nevis shouted, but the Scotsman ignored him.

  Daisy’s heart was seizing madly in her chest. She could clearly see the emerging shadow of a dark beard and the dark lashes that framed his eyes. And the nick of a scar at the bridge of his nose, another one on his jawline. She looked at his mouth, too, the dark plum of his lips.

  “You should no’ have come here,” he said quietly. “This country is no’ safe for Sassenach women and children. Repair your wheel, turn about and head for the sea.”

  Daisy blinked. “I beg your pardon, but we’ve—”

  He abruptly turned his back on her and strode to his horse, swinging himself up onto its back. He said something to the others, and, just like that, they rode away, in the direction from which Daisy and her party had labored all day.

  It seemed several moments before Daisy could breathe. She exchanged a wide-eyed look with Sir Nevis, who at last instructed the others. “To the wheel,” he said. “Make haste.”

  “What has happened?” Belinda’s voice cried out behind Daisy. “Where have they gone?”

  “Be thankful they have gone and left your purse and your virtue intact, madam,” Sir Nevis said darkly and whirled about, marching to assist in the repair of the wheel.

  Daisy felt Belinda’s hand on her back. “You are shaking,” she said. “Calm yourself, Daisy. They’ve gone—you’re quite safe for the moment.”

  Daisy wasn’t shaking with fear. She was shaking because she had never in her life been so bewitched by a man.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MORE THAN TWO hours after the Scotsman and his group had left them deserted on the road, the wheel repaired as best it could be, Daisy and her party began the arduous progress east once more.

  As they bumped along, her heart still fluttered a little. She couldn’t rid herself of the image of that man. She listened idly to Belinda, who hugged the small window, peering out at the landscape, remarking on the vast emptiness and dangers lurking, but Daisy thought of him.

  “I’d not be the least surprised were we attacked by those wild men,” Belinda said, shuddering.

  “They didn’t seem so very wild in the end, d
id they?” Daisy asked. She thought of the warnings her friends had given her before she’d departed for Scotland. She’d invited several ladies over for tea. “What trouble you’ll find there, what with all the traitors among them,” Lady Dinsmore had cried. “You can’t go! I’ve heard they slaughter the English.”

  “They’re savages,” Lady Whitcomb had added gravely. “They have been unnaturally influenced by the Stuarts and are quite impossibly untrustworthy! You won’t be safe for a moment among them—everyone knows the greatest prize is an Englishwoman.”

  Daisy didn’t share their pessimistic view. She’d been married to a man who was himself a Scot by blood, and he had never given her any reason to believe she should fear them. Then again, she’d never seen a Scot like the one she’d encountered today.

  Neither had Belinda apparently, for her head snapped around, her brows almost to her hairline. “I thank the good Lord we escaped unharmed!”

  Ellis lifted his head and looked at his mother, an expression of worry on his face. Daisy smiled reassuringly and hugged him to her side. “We are safe, darling.”

  She’d often privately wondered if she’d done something while she carried the boy to produce such a fretful, fearful child. What else could explain it? He was nine years old and had never wanted for anything, had no outward ailments to speak of, and yet he was so timid. Their London physician had warned Daisy a few years ago that her son suffered from a weak constitution. “No doubt he shall be sickly all his life,” he’d said as he’d closed his bag.

  That news was not what Daisy had expected, and she’d looked at him with confusion. “Sickly? What do you mean?”

  “Just that.” The physician had no regard for her, much less Ellis, who was old enough to understand what he’d said.

  “Do you mean he will have a chronic ague?” Daisy had asked, for certainly that particular winter, it had seemed her son was perpetually ill. And then she’d led the physician from Ellis’s bedside and whispered, “Or something worse?”

  The physician had shrugged and said absently, “One never knows how these things will manifest themselves.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir, but that is why I sent for you,” she’d said impatiently. “So that you might explain to me what his illness is and how it may manifest itself.”

  “Lady Chatwick.” The physician had sighed, as if she was testing his patience, then had said quite loudly, “You will not understand the nuances of the boy’s medical constitution. You must trust me when I tell you that he will never be a robust lad.”

  Ellis had burst into tears as one might expect having just heard such a callous delivery about the state of one’s health. Daisy had known then that the physician meant only to collect his fee and didn’t care a whit for her son. “Then we have a problem, sir, for I don’t trust you at all,” she’d said, then called for the butler to dispatch the good doctor.

  When she’d complained of his demeanor later that evening, her husband had chastised her for being disrespectful to the doctor.

  Nevertheless, Daisy refused to believe the man’s prediction of Ellis’s future. Frankly, her son’s health was the second reason Daisy had undertaken what had become an increasingly dangerous journey north.

  Robert was the first reason. If Robert had only reached her in time, this travel might well have been avoided.

  She mindlessly touched his letter, kept safe in the pocket of her gown. I will come with great haste as soon as my commission has ended, he’d written her.

  But not soon enough, as it turned out.

  “If they don’t find us now, they’ll surely find us at this lodge,” Belinda warned, settling back against the squabs, still intent on worrying them all.

  “We are perfectly safe,” Daisy said, and tried to convey a warning to her cousin with her expression, which, naturally, Belinda did not notice. Daisy smiled and squeezed Ellis’s knee. “Pay Cousin Belinda no mind, darling. It’s been a trying day for us all.”

  “I am not unreasonable in my concern,” Belinda said. “We were all of us frightened by those dangerous men.”

  “Need I remind you that those dangerous men offered to repair our wheel?” Daisy asked, then impulsively covered Ellis’s ears with her hands and leaned forward, whispering, “Forget that now, darling. Did you not see the gentleman? He was so...alluring.”

  Belinda blinked. “The Scotsman? Alluring? Daisy!” She gasped, clearly appalled. “What is the matter with you? Scotsmen are not alluring. They are traitors to the Crown!”

  Were she not so exhausted, Daisy would have argued that Belinda was not acquainted with any Scotsmen, and, therefore, couldn’t know if they were all or any of them Jacobites. Instead she was disappointed that Belinda had not noticed the man’s allure. She could not share in the observation of how a man with his extraordinary presence could be found on an abandoned road in what seemed the most remote region of the earth. With a sigh, she let go of Ellis’s ears and turned her gaze to the grimy window as Belinda began to speculate if they would be forced to camp on the road tonight.

  He’d been so utterly unexpected. Daisy flushed again, thinking about the Scotsman. Oh, but she was a hopeless cause. Quite possibly even mad! She shuddered to think how foolishly beguiled she’d been, particularly in the face of what could have been terrible danger. She’d long been an admirer of healthy men, but this...this bordered on lunacy.

  And yet...she hoped she might see him again one day. She would very much like to make him smile, to see the light she was certain could be coaxed from those blue eyes under the right circumstances. She quivered a little, imagining just how she might.

  Oh yes, she was mad—completely and utterly mad.

  This tendency to fantasy was something that had been slowly building in Daisy since her husband’s death more than two years ago. She’d since dabbled liberally in the art of flirtation in salons across Mayfair, had imagined any number of handsome gentlemen in varying degrees of compromise, so much so that now that tendency often felt impossible to control. The truth was that Daisy very much missed a man’s touch.

  Her husband, Clive, had been robust when her marriage was arranged, but he’d contracted a wasting illness soon after Ellis’s birth. In the last years of his life, he’d suffered gravely, too sick to be a father, too sick to care for her as a husband ought. Now, at nine and twenty, Daisy felt desire flowing in the vast physical wasteland of her life like a river that had overrun its banks.

  Her steady stream of suitors since Clive’s death were the raging storm waters that fed that river.

  But the Scotsman was not a suitor, and she thought of him in an entirely different light. She closed her eyes and imagined being kidnapped by him, carried off on the back of his horse, tossed onto a bed high in some rustic castle. She imagined his large hands on her body. She imagined resisting him at first, then succumbing to his expert touch. She imagined feeling his body, hot and thick inside her, and those blue eyes boring into her as she found her release.

  Daisy shifted uncomfortably.

  “Are you all right?” Belinda asked.

  Poof. In an instant, the image of him disappeared. “Pardon?” Daisy’s cheeks warmed as she shifted again. “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “Is it your stays?” Belinda asked sympathetically. “Stays can be quite dangerous, you know,” she said, launching into conjecture about the dangers of corsets.

  Daisy sank into the squabs and resolved not to think of the stranger again. She would think of London, of all the reasons she’d been so determined to leave.

  Ah yes, that stream of suitors.

  Her husband’s will had made London unbearable for her. It was no secret to the gentlemen bachelors about town that Lord Chatwick’s widow must remarry within three years of his death or risk forfeiting her son’s inheritance.

  Clive had explained this to Daisy from his deathbed. �
��You must understand, darling. I should not like to see you refuse to marry again and deplete Ellis’s inheritance to live as you like. You will rely on Bishop Craig to help you find a suitable match. He will see to it that the man you agree to marry will ensure Ellis’s education in the finest institutions and will possess the proper connections for Ellis when he reaches his majority.”

  Daisy had been horrified by his unexpected edict. She could scarcely embrace her husband’s looming death, much less the plans he’d made for her for after he’d gone. “I can look after him, Clive,” she’d said. “I am his mother—of course I will.”

  Her husband had lost a moment in a fit of coughing, then patted her hand. “You will do as I decide, Daisy. I trust you to understand.”

  But she didn’t understand. She would never understand.

  Daisy and Clive’s match had been made on the basis of compatible fortunes and family interests. He was fifteen years her senior, and Daisy had been his second wife, his first having been lost in childbirth along with the child. It was the sort of match she’d been brought up to expect, and she’d been somewhat prepared for it. Duty first, wasn’t that what had been drummed into her?

  But something miraculous had happened in that first year—she’d discovered affection for Clive. She’d been a steadfast and true companion, and she’d given him a son. She’d remained at his bedside when other women might have sought diversion elsewhere, and she’d held his hand when he felt searing pain rack his body. She’d been the wife she had promised him she would be.

  And for her devotion, in the last weeks of his life, he’d made his final wishes known to her. Plans he’d already made. None of them included any regard for her.

  Daisy had felt used and unimportant. As her husband lay dying, she’d realized that she was and always would be nothing more than a conduit to provide a son and then bring that son to his majority. That was her worth to Clive. Her feelings, her wants, were irrelevant to him.