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The Highlander's Maiden
Elizabeth Mayne
Her Heart Was In The Highlands Indeed, every hill and vale seemed a mapping of her soul. Cassie MacArthur doubted any man could ever understand the freedom of roaming high road and low. Especially not Robert Gordon, enemy to her clan - yet, ironically, the one man in Scotland who made her blood sing!Driven by a questing spirit, Cassie MacArthur would make a bonny bride - Robert Gordon felt it in the marrow of his bones. Truly, the legendary Lady Quickfoot would be the perfect partner for his life's work - and his life! But was he fleet enough to catch her?
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ufcd60e3a-65e3-5758-afa7-f870da1ee087)
Excerpt (#u72d1162c-2f9c-54d3-a3fe-23d808e28cb0)
Dear Reader (#u8205131b-ee74-5398-a374-a7d74fec3295)
Title Page (#udad62daa-86f1-5416-9646-81a5f59ed6ed)
About the Author (#u5853a06d-7d1a-5d23-ad58-03e95cfd72cf)
Dedication (#u7917d563-4f82-5e88-ab69-6169eea61072)
Chapter One (#ud1667497-efdb-5208-9007-83eb2765fe97)
Chapter Two (#u12253cf7-b54b-5ff9-8dba-a454a551c870)
Chapter Three (#u8cd0a5bf-952c-586b-96a1-cf3b6c4b09fd)
Chapter Four (#u3f052c7e-324a-5fcc-b6fc-e7f910aee7d0)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Dear Reader (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Had she a blade on her, she’d certainly have run him through.
Unarmed, Cassie settled for jabbing a stiffened finger in the middle of his chest. “Stop mincing words and say what you mean, you blackguard, else I’ll cut out your heart and make you eat it. Don’t think 1 don’t dare. You’re beginning to make me very angry.”
Robert caught her hand and restrained it, infuriating Cassie even more. Her already flushed face hovered just under his in a delicious temper. The urge to pull her into his arms and kiss her quivering lips was almost more than he could bear. He hesitated to be that imprudent.
“Let go of me!” Cassie tugged to get her hand free. He didn’t let go.
“Och! You’re a proud Highland maiden, full of temper and spirit and as hotheaded as your own fearless father!” Robert laughed.…
Dear Reader (#ulink_7297f612-2065-508b-ab83-4f673d76e6e3),
If you’ve never read a Harlequin Historical, you’re in for a treat. We offer compelling, richly developed stories that let you escape to the past—by some of the best writers in the field!
Author Elizabeth Mayne is notorious for her alpha heroes, and has won the hearts of many readers with previous books such as Heart of the Hawk and All That Matters. Her latest, The Highlander’s Maiden, is a tension-filled Medieval tale about a handsome Scottish mapmaker who, by king’s decree, must join forces with a fearless female mountain guide from an enemy clan. He vows to make this the partnership of a lifetime!
Be sure to look for Hawken’s Wife by talented Rae Muir. In this continuation of THE WEDDING TRAIL series, a beautiful tomboy falls for an amnesiac mountain man. A Rose at Midnight by Jacqueline Navin is a dark and passionate Regency tale about a powerful earl who thinks he’s dying and must find a wife to have his child. He never intended to find love…
Rounding out the month is For Love of Anna by multipublished author Sharon Harlow. In this sweet, heartwarming Western, a young widow with children finds her happily-ever-after in the arms of a cowboy who is running from his past. Don’t miss it!
Whatever your tastes in reading, you’ll be sure to find a romantic journey back to the past between the covers of a Harlequin Historical® novel.
Sincerely,
Tracy Farrell, Senior Editor
Please address questions and book requests to:
Harlequin Reader Service
U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269
Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3
The Highlander’s Maiden
Elizabeth Mayne
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ELIZABETH MAYNE
is a native San Antonian, who knew by age eleven how to spin a good yarn, according to every teacher she ever faced. She’s spent the last twenty years making up for all her transgressions on the opposite side of the teacher’s desk, and the last five working exclusively with troubled children. She particularly loves an ethnic hero and married one of her own eighteen years ago. But it wasn’t until their youngest, a daughter, was two years old that life calmed down enough for this writer to fulfill the dream she’d always had of becoming a novelist.
For Gabriel
You promised all,
and wouldn’t settle for anything less.
My hero.
Chapter One (#ulink_225d864c-1881-5d30-a7e6-37c8487eb2a1)
Glencoe, Scotland
February 20, 1598
“Aunt Cassie.” Five-year-old Millicent MacGregor caught a handful of Cassandra Mac Arthur’s snood and yanked on it urgently. “Did Lady Quickfoot sink to the bottom of wee Black Douglas’s bog?”
“Millie!” Cassie exclaimed as her eyes were blinded by the sudden drop of her cloak’s deep hood over her face. Thick wool muffled the rest of her words. “I’m trying to tie this skate on your brother’s foot. You’ll hear the rest of the Lady Quickfoot story tonight.”
“But now is a verra good time to tell it.” Millie smiled winsomely.
“Annie Cass, lookie! Soldiers!” Ian swung his hand over Cassie’s head to point behind her.
“One thing at a time!” Cassie pleaded. She pushed the cloth behind her head, and gave more effort into fastening a wooden skate to a child’s wiggling brogue. “Sit still, Ian!”
“Tickles!” Ian chortled, squirming restlessly as Cassie’s fingers tied the laces firmly around his ankle.
“Lord, for another pair of hands,” Cassie proclaimed, pulling a knot secure.
“I dinna think I can wait till bedtime to find out if Black Douglas saves the last jewel of the Highlands.” Millie danced about, looking for the soldiers Ian had spotted.
“We’ve come here for a skating lesson.” Cassie firmly redirected the girl. “You’ll hear what happened to Lady Quickfoot, Black Douglas and the bard of Achanshiel at bedtime, not a moment sooner, lassie.” She sat back on her skates, muttering, “How does your mother keep clothes on your back, wiggle worm?”
“Whisht, Aunt Cassie,” Millie scolded. “Those men will think y’er daft. Y’er always talkin’ to yerself.”
“And what makes you think I care who hears my private conversations, eh?” Cassie winked at her dark-haired niece before she glanced over her shoulder. “Maybe I’m talking to my angel.”
“‘Twouldn’t be an angel,” Millie proclaimed. “‘Twould be a fairy.”
“No difference there.” Cassie shrugged “I hear fairies were angels in the beginning of time, till God sent them to stay in the Highlands because their queen was so vain.”
“Go on.” Millie shook her head. “What they need a queen for if they had God to look upon all the time?”
Cassie tweaked one of the girl’s braids. “Now that is a very good question, lassie. I don’t pretend to know the answer…save that fairies were the most beautiful angels God ever made…and I think it must have something to do with vanity. So God had no choice but to banish them from everyone’s sight. Vanity is an excessively awful sin to this very day, is it not?”
“Aye,” the child agreed solemnly.
They were high up in the north meadow, a wee stretch of the legs from Euan MacGregor’s farmstead. Within hailing distance, Euan claimed—if one had lungs as capacious as a blacksmith’s bellows—as Euan did. Cassie had heard him yell his clan’s battle cry once. He’d scared the daylights out of her.
This was a time of peace, a lull between the clan wars. Still, it paid to be alert at all times. Cassie continued to look for men in sight of the frozen pond. Here the air was frosty enough to keep ice solid until April. Lower on the mountain, everything melted in today’s mild sun.
Cassie spied the men on the mountain. Two scruffy travelers hiking through the mud-bound mire of MacDonald’s cow pasture. They led two packhorses weighted down with a great number of rucksacks, poles and bags. Cassie’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. Tinkers, maybe.
A small alarm ran deep in her chest. They weren’t the Watch or king’s soldiers if their dun-colored plaids meant anything. No, they couldn’t be from the king, not coming from the south. No one knew Cassandra was at Glencoen Farm save her parents. Cassie shielded her eyes to lessen the glare of the wintry sun, studying the men more intently.
“Da says it’s fey to talk to yerself. You do it ‘cause y’er redheaded. Tha’s why he married Mama instead of ye,” Millie continued, proud of her scolding. So big she sounded and all of five. Cassie looked back at her niece and laughed over what she’d said.
“Och, and marrying yer mam wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that yer da wanted a woman to wed when he sweet-talked my poor sister Maggie into taking on this farm of his, eh? And me naught but a flat-bosomed lassie like you at the time.” Cassie tapped her niece’s nosy nose. “Fey, am I?”
She turned her chin in the direction of the two strangers, saying casually to the children, “Do you know them, then?”
Ian’s baby blue eyes rounded as he shook his head.
“They’re no’ MacGregors!” Millie’s identical eyes fixed upon the newcomers with calculating interest. She had the soul of a gossip and knew all her kinsmen and everyone who lived within thirty miles of Glencoe. “Could be MacDonalds. Da says they’re thick as flies ‘round shite hereabouts.”
“Millie! Mind your tongue!”
“Weel, Da says it.”
“And ladies don’t!” Cassie scolded.
“How come Da can say things that leddies shouldn’t?”
“Och, that’s because men say wicked things to keep all the wickedness inside them from festering like a rotten egg put on the boil. It can’t do anything but explode and ruin everything around it for a little while. Men can’t hold their passions quiet like we ladies do.”
“So we’re gooder?” Millie asked.
“Aye, we are better.” Cassie stressed the correction on the assumption that Millie’s grammar would improve with exposure to proper speech. “It’s nice to be a lady and refined like your dear Grandmother MacArthur. We must strive to be more like her every day. Besides, my child, men like doing hard and dirty work. Why, even the best of them can’t keep clean from the time they crawl out of the cradle until they fall into the grave.”
“Tha’s verra true.” Millie cast a wise look at Ian.
Not many strangers wandered into Glencoe in the wintertime. The pass to the north was beautiful but stark. You had to know what you were about to travel it in the winter. Neither of Maggie’s children had any innate fear of Highlanders walking the land their father worked. Soldiers, Englishmen or reivers were another matter. Cassie decided to wait and see.
“No’ stalkers neither.” Ian mimicked his sister’s acumen for quick judgment. “No bows or spears.”
“You’re right there, my lad,” Cassie murmured, though she saw the butt of a musket poking from between the saddlebags, and both men wore claymores and dirks, slung from broad leather belts fitted around their hips. That told her they were prepared for trouble if they came upon it.
“Can I run and ask who they are?” Millie said eagerly.
“I think we’ll wait and see if they have any business with us, first,” Cassie decided. “Speaking of which, we did come here to skate, did we not? Up you go, Wee Ian.”
She set the little one on his feet and guided him to the icy pond. His legs wobbled unsteadily on the rough skates, but he was game to give it a try.
Cassie kept a cautious eye on the strangers as they came up the steep incline from MacDonald’s meadow. They weren’t showing the slightest interest in the activities of the children or the cattle in the high field. Not reivers, then. But who were they? A sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach told her they were the king’s surveyors, damn their eyes. What luck! That didn’t mean they knew who she was.
They seemed absorbed in the tall one’s pacing. The other stood back and counted his companion’s steps, letting out a cord, the end of which the other carried.
At the stony rise where MacGregor’s high field jutted up and away from MacDonald’s grazing pasture, they stopped and talked heatedly. The drum of their conversation carried on the north wind. At the peak of the hill, the lean one made a great commotion of pointing east, north, south and west, all of his motions becoming a sort of comic dance.
