Her Highness and the Highlander: A Princess Brides Romance (22 page)

Mercedes said nothing, just stared.

Sara Cameron was proving to have a far more vivid imagination than she would ever
have given her credit for possessing.

“Oh, but listen tae me prattle on when I need tae be aboot making ye somethin’ tae
eat, especially yer mister. He and Dougal must be near ready to leave aboot now.”

Flying into a flurry of action, Mrs. Cameron unhooked a slab of bacon from where it
hung from the rafters and slapped it on a wooden board. She took up a sharp knife
and began slicing pieces, which she put into a heavy iron skillet that she set on
an iron frog in the fireplace. Immediately the room filled with the savory aroma of
cooking meat.

She went next to retrieve a loaf of bread from under a plain cotton cloth, then wiped
off the knife and cut several neat slices. Darting back to the hearth, she turned
the sizzling meat, then reached into a nearby basket and brought forth several eggs,
which she placed in a bowl.

Mercedes could not remember ever seeing anyone quite so busy.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” she offered, then wished she could retract the
words. She knew absolutely nothing about cooking or working in a kitchen. Until today,
she’d never even set foot inside a kitchen.

The baby chose that moment to start crying, big round tears leaking down his pink
cheeks that seemed to grow pinker by the second. The other woman paused long enough
to toss a look toward the boy and his sister, who had obviously grown weary of entertaining
him.

“He’s hungry,” Sara said. “Ye couldn’t feed him, could ye? Just a cup of milk should
do.”

Feed him?

She knew just as little about babies as she did cooking, but how hard could it be
to give the boy some milk?

“Yes, all right,” she agreed.

A moment later, she found herself with a tin cup half-filled with milk in one hand
and the screaming boy in the other. She and the baby stared into each other’s eyes,
his tiny lashes wet with tears.

“He’ll settle down once he starts tae eat,” his mother advised.

Mercedes prayed she was right.

It took a couple of attempts before the two of them settled into a manageable routine,
since on the first try she gave him
too little milk and the second too much. After a small cleanup with a kitchen towel
Sara had wisely handed her before the start, she and little Samuel began to get on
well.

He was a happy boy, who smiled and made cooing sounds in between swallows of milk.
His sister seemed a sweet girl as well, if a bit shy. Her name was Mary, she’d volunteered
as she’d edged nearer a couple of minutes later. Encouraged by Mercedes’s attention,
Mary soon began telling her about life on the farm and a newborn foal she loved watching
gambol in the fields with its mother.

“Mary,” Mrs. Cameron said in a tone that ended her daughter’s chatter. “Here are the
bacon sandwiches for your da and Major MacKinnon. Take these to them in the barn and
don’t dawdle on the way. Ye’re to come straight back, do ye hear? No wandering off
to pet White Star.”

White Star was the foal.

“But, Mum, he likes it when I pet him.”

Sara rolled her eyes skyward. “An’ I like puttin’ up my feet and lazin’ in the sun,
but I’ve no time fer that and ye doona neither. Straight back tae the house and no
delays, my girl.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl said obediently.

Behind her mother’s back, Mercedes gave the child an encouraging smile. Mary shyly
returned it before darting out the door, cloth-wrapped sandwiches in hand.

“That child,” Sara stated. “I declare she’ll wear my nerves to the bone. But she’s
a good un for all that. Of course, you’ll know just what I mean once ye have yer own.”

Mercedes glanced up from where she sat with the baby on her lap.

Sara Cameron smiled. “Ye’ll be a natural with ’em too. Just look how Sammie has taken
to ye, not to mention Mary. She hardly e’er talks to folks she doona know, and she
was babbling away like ye two are best friends.”

“She’s a lovely, engaging child and Samuel too. They are a credit to both you and
your husband.”

Sara beamed, motherly pride radiating from her like a burst of sunshine. “Och, listen
tae me prattling on while ye’re
still waitin’ on yer breakfast.” She glanced at the baby, whose eyelids were beginning
to droop. “I can take him now if ye want.”

Without thinking, Mercedes’s arms tightened around the baby. “I’ll keep him…for a
little while longer. I’d hate to wake him when he’s just fallen asleep.”

Sara gave her a knowing look and smiled. Then she turned and resumed her cooking.

Mercedes gazed at the boy, enjoying the solid warmth of him nestled in her arms, and
the sweet, faintly milky scent of his skin. She watched him sleep, something inside
her unwinding like a gentle sigh.

Sara said she was a natural, whatever that might imply. She’d never spent time around
children, had never given much thought to being a mother, though she, of course, had
always known that someday she would have sons and daughters. But in her world, women
did not participate in the day-to-day rearing of their children. Nursemaids and nannies
did all the changing and feeding with children brought down from the nursery wing
to spend time with their parents when duty did not demand otherwise.

Her own parents had been kind and indulgent, giving her pretty dolls and little bites
of sweetmeats on her visits to their apartments. But it was her nurses to whom she
had turned when the thunder scared her in the night and she could not sleep, and when
she was sick and crying from the misery of feeling ill.

What would it be like to be more like Sara? To take an active role in the rearing
of her children? To have her own little boy to cradle and soothe, a child with wavy
auburn hair and brilliant green eyes who looked just like his father?

Exactly like Daniel.

Her pulse jittered at the thought and she jumped ever so slightly, enough that the
child stirred briefly in her arms before he resumed his slumber.

The same easy return to normalcy could not be said for her.

A child? She and Daniel MacKinnon? The idea was unthinkable. Insane.

Yet she had thought it, had she not?

When contemplating future motherhood she had thought not of some royal who would suit
her parents and bring nobility to the family line, but of Daniel—a man who would suit
no one in her world but her.

And he did suit her, she confessed.

He might infuriate and exasperate her, but he charmed and intrigued her just the same.
He made her angry as no one could and pleased her in ways she could not recall ever
being pleased.

And all that despite his refusal to believe the truth of her identity.

Yet perhaps it was that very denial that made the difference, that allowed him to
see her not as a princess but as a person with likes and dislikes, needs and feelings
and desires. And heaven knew when she thought of Daniel, it was impossible not to
think of the desires.

She ought to have been shocked, even appalled, she supposed, by the liberties he had
taken so far.

By the liberties she had allowed.

But she couldn’t seem to deny him or herself. He made her feel as no one ever had.
So many things, forbidden, wonderful things that turned her blood to steam and her
nerves endings to jelly.

Yet if desire had been all she felt for him, she sensed she could have handled it,
could have controlled her reaction and kept him at arm’s length—or at least far enough
away not to ruin her virtue.

But what she felt for him was of a far more dangerous nature than mere attraction.
Until now, she’d told herself the closeness she experienced when she was with him
was simply her own loneliness and fear urging her to seek comfort. She was lost, alone,
without the means to adequately protect herself. She needed him. He was, after all,
the man she had hired to be her bodyguard.

Still, when they were together as they had been last night, gazing at the stars and
talking like old friends, he wasn’t her bodyguard and she wasn’t a princess.

She was Mercedes—a woman.

He was Daniel—a man.

Her man
, if she let herself follow her heart.

For in this moment, she greatly feared that if she let herself, she might well be
in love.

“Here ye go. Breakfast is served at last,” Sara said, breaking abruptly into Mercedes’s
thoughts.

Mercedes stared, trying to collect herself.

Sara, apparently misinterpreting her sudden unease, came forward and reached for the
baby. “Yer arms must be near ready tae fall off. Let me take him so ye can finally
break yer fast.”

“Yes,” she murmured, releasing the child into his mother’s hold. “Breakfast.”

Getting to her feet almost like a sleepwalker, Mercedes went to the table and took
the seat that had been laid there for her. A plate of crisp bacon, golden toast, and
fried eggs, their yolks runny and golden, stared up at her.

She’d been famished five minutes before; now she had no appetite at all.

But Sara waited, obviously hoping her cooking met with approval.

She could not disappoint.

Taking up her fork, she pierced one of the eggs and began to eat.

“A
ye, the axle’s snapped clean through, jest as ye thought.” Dougal Cameron nodded from
where he’d squatted down to inspect the underside of the carriage.

“Can you repair it?” Daniel asked, watching as the other man straightened from his
crouch.

“Nae, don’t have the tools.”

Daniel muffled a curse. Now what were he and Mercedes going to do, since this area
wasn’t exactly teeming with carriages for hire?

“But I know a man who does,” Cameron continued, as if the long silence between his
first statement and the second had been no more than a slight pause. “Has the next
farm up the road.”

Daniel’s spirits lifted. “Do you think he could do the work right away?”

“Hafta ask him that, but I expect he’ll find a minute here and there. He’s a good
lad, Tommy is.”

And so they set off for Tommy’s farm, which lay a couple of miles up the road and
along a winding dirt lane.

Robbie, who had run after them when they’d left Dougal’s place, rode happily in the
wagon bed. Having been banished
from the house, he’d decided to accompany Daniel, and Daniel hadn’t seen the harm
in letting him follow.

Tommy was a huge, strapping man, who looked as if he tossed the caber in his spare
time and crushed rocks with his bare hands in the other. But he had a big wide grin
and an easy temperament that immediately set a man at ease.

As Dougal Cameron said, Tommy was a good lad.

Daniel explained the difficulty with the curricle, and Tommy said he’d be glad of
the work and that he’d take the job.

“But it willna be done today,” he told him. “Or tomorrow, fer that matter. Day after
next is the best I can manage, an’ even then it’ll be a push.”

Daniel knew there was no point arguing. Country people worked country hours, doing
the hard labor that came with such a life on their own terms. Instead, he passed him
some coins that made Tommy’s smile widen even further; he hoped it would also encourage
him to “push.”

Back they rode to the abandoned curricle, Tommy following in his own wagon.

With a hammer, nails, and a spare piece of wood, Tommy patched the axle enough that
the curricle could be pulled on a hitch behind his wagon. Daniel took a moment to
retrieve the belongings he and Mercedes had left in the boot, and then he and Dougal
waved the other man off.

“Is there an inn nearby?” Daniel asked once they were under way back to the Cameron
farm. “Mercedes and I are grateful for your hospitality, but we’ve no wish to impose.”

“Och, an’ ye’re not imposing. Sara and I are glad tae have ye.”

So there would be no arguing there either, Daniel realized. The Camerons’ hospitality,
whatever it might prove, would have to suffice. For himself, he had no quarrel. He
could sleep in the barn, if necessary. It was Mercedes whose comfort concerned him.

She’d done well sleeping under the stars last night, but he doubted she would relish
less than commodious quarters for the
next two to three nights to come. Well, maybe there would be a small parlor with a
sofa on which she could sleep.

He wasn’t sure what she’d told Mrs. Cameron about the two of them, but it might be
better if they slept away from each other for a few nights. It would certainly make
it easier to resist temptation, since Mercedes was a temptation he no longer seemed
able to resist.

Gazing ahead, he forced himself not to dwell on what was to come, uncertain which
would unsettle him more, being compelled to sleep with Mercedes or being made to sleep
without her.

“But of course it’s no trouble fer ye tae stay,” Sara Cameron declared once she heard
the fate of the curricle and Tommy’s timetable for repair. “Ye’re more than welcome.
Truly.”

And Daniel was inclined to believe her, since she and Mercedes had been sitting together
at the kitchen table when he and Dougal had arrived, the pair of them laughing happily
as they shelled fresh green peas into a bowl. The two women had looked quite the picture,
Mercedes especially, with her cheeks flushed pink and her dark eyes alight with good
humor.

“I’ve just the place,” Sara continued. “There’s a small cottage no’ far over the rise
that me sister and her husband used fer a few months afore they moved tae Edinburgh
last year. It’s been standin’ empty ever since. It’s naught except the one room, but
if ye don’t mind clearing a bit of dust and turning the mattress, it’ll do, I think.”

Daniel met Mercedes’s gaze and watched her cheeks turn a little pinker. He got the
distinct impression that she needed to fill him in on whatever conversation had been
shared while he and Dougal had been away.

So he let her answer for them.

“Yes,” Mercedes said, “it should do quite nicely.”