Her Wicked Highlander: A Highland Knights Novella (8 page)

He rose, the chair scraping against the floor. “Let us go, then.”

She stood. Suddenly her limbs felt terribly heavy. The dagger was in a place even farther away from her neighbors than her house was. If he struck her down, she’d rot there.

At least she’d be at her parents’ side.

She left the house and turned to enter the forest behind it.

“Wait,” Sutherland said, grabbing her arm again and making her wince in pain.

He tugged her around the cottage to the cart, where he retrieved some of the rope he’d used to truss her last night. He deftly tied one end of it to her ankle and wrapped the other end around his left hand.

He unfolded his long body and tugged on the rope experimentally, yanking her leg out from under her. She stumbled, limbs flailing awkwardly, but he released tension in time for her to regain her balance. “In case you decide to run,” he said with a grim smile. He made a gallant gesture toward the forest. “Proceed.”

She entered the forest, stepping onto the path that led over a hill and then to the far edge of the property. The path was muddy from the recently melted snow, but it was well traveled, for she walked it at least two or three times a week.

Sutherland remained close beside her, silent. Their breaths made white puffs in the morning air. Aila realized she should be cold—for she was only wearing her dress. But she didn’t feel the cold. She didn’t feel much of anything.

It took about ten minutes for them to reach the plot at the edge of her land that had been used as a cemetery for the last two generations. Her grandparents were buried here, as were her stillborn sisters. And her parents.

She walked straight to the grave where her Grandfather MacKerrick had been buried. There was a huge flat sandstone tombstone laid over the grave.

Dohmnall MacKerrick

Departed this Life the 26
^th
March, 1792

In the 62
^nd
Year of His Age

Above the lettering, the sandstone was carved to look like a dagger in relief atop Dohmnall’s name.

Aila stared at the stone. Beside her, Sutherland did the same. Then, he groaned. “Dinna tell me you buried it with your ancestors. I’m in no mood to be unearthing corpses this day.”

“Well, it’s buried, but not with my ancestors.”

“Where, then?”

“There.” She pointed at the tombstone—specifically at the dagger carved into the top of it.

Sutherland sighed irritably. “Dinna toy with me. Explain.”

“’Tis in the tombstone. The dagger relief—it’s not just a relief. The stone is layered, and the real dagger lies between the layers, beneath the carving.”

They both gazed at the relief. The blade was long and curving. The hilt was carved in intricate detail, with the contour of a large gem—the ruby—set in its center. Aila’s da had told her that it was carved in the exact likeness of the actual dagger beneath.

Sutherland scowled. “Do you possess a hammer?”

“I’ve a mallet and chisel back at the cottage.”

“You should have thought to bring it,” he said crossly.

She bit back the retort on her tongue—that she had been too busy thinking about the danger to her life to worry about chipping tools.

They walked back to the house while Sutherland rattled on about his plans to raise an army in Inverness, and Aila fetched the tools as her stomach growled loudly. She gave a sidelong look at Sutherland, who ignored her clear signs of hunger. It seemed Sutherland didn’t eat—or didn’t much care to. She hadn’t seen him so much as partake of a sip of water. That was probably why he was so rangy and thin—he thought too much about his warped notion of becoming a great Scottish leader and not enough about sustenance.

They returned to the gravesite. At the edge of Aila’s grandfather’s grave, Sutherland handed her the mallet. “Go ahead, then. Get started.”

She quirked a brow but took the mallet. It seemed manual labor was beneath her future liege lord.

“But dinna come near me with it, mind.” He withdrew his pistol and pointed it at her. “In case you’ve thoughts of smashing my head in.”

Holding the mallet with her two bound hands, she stared at her grandfather’s stone. He had died before she was born, but her father had told her what a good, honorable man he’d been. Her father had carved the tombstone himself, telling Aila about the dagger’s location when she was a wee lass.

“Sorry, grand-da,” she murmured. Then she aimed the mallet at the sandstone and brought it down as hard as she could.

Pain radiated through her injured left arm, but the surface of the sandstone crumbled under the blow.

This might not be so difficult.

She regretted that initial optimism twenty minutes later when her shoulders were screaming, sweat had begun to run down her temples, and she’d hardly made any progress at all. Her injured arm sparked with pain every time she brought the mallet down.

She looked imploringly at Sutherland, who sat serenely on the bottom edge of the stone, watching her. “At least untie my hands. I dinna think I’ll be able to finish this otherwise.”

He considered her for a moment, then nodded. He took the mallet from her, laid down his pistol, and untied her hands.

She thought frantically of escape. But his legs were twice as long as hers, and he’d catch her for certain… if he didn’t shoot her first.

Swiping the back of her arm over her forehead, she gripped the mallet handle in her right hand and began to hammer on her grandfather’s tombstone again.

After another fifteen minutes passed, she landed a blow on the rock, then chipped it away with the chisel, revealing a bit of metal.

“Dear God in heaven,” Sutherland murmured in disbelief. “There it is.”

“I told you ’twas there, didn’t I?” she muttered.

“Continue, continue.” He waved his hand wildly, excitement widening his eyes.

Almost an hour later, she’d chipped away the stone all around the dagger, revealing it inch by dusty inch. Curved steel blade, untouched by rust. Silver pommel, and the giant ruby, its facets dulled by the dust of the sandstone.

She reached out to pull it away from the broken stone, but Sutherland stayed her hand.

“Nay. I’ll do it.”

He took the chisel and mallet from her, laid them down out of her reach, then began to retie her hands. She jerked her arms back, but he gripped both her hands firmly in one of his huge ones. The other one reached for his gun.
Damn him.
“You said you’d be letting me go,” she gritted out.

“Not yet.” He tied the twine tighter than last time, and it dug into the already sore skin of her wrist.

He pressed the chisel to the edge of the pommel and tapped it with the mallet. The dagger came free almost immediately, and he tossed the tools away. They landed—far out of reach—over Aila’s mother’s grave.

On his knees as if praying, Sutherland reached forward, grasping the pommel and lifting the dagger, then holding it up and out before him, a look of such utter bliss on his face, Aila’s stomach roiled in disgust.

The seconds ticked by, turning into minutes as he stared at his beloved new possession. Aila waited impatiently, but finally she couldn’t stand another second. “Let me go now,” she ordered him.

He ignored her.

“Did you hear me? I said, let me go. You agreed to let me go once you held my dagger in your hands. You promised, damn you.”

He turned to her, his gaze registering her without recognition, as if it were the first time he’d ever laid eyes on her.

Then he squinted at her. “I agreed to no such thing.”

“You did!”

He stroked the blade of the dagger, his blue eyes flat and emotionless. “We’ll go back to your cottage, then.” He pointed the dagger at her. “It’d be poetic justice for the last MacKerrick to die by the blade of the King Richard Dagger, methinks.”

She stepped back as far as the rope tied to her ankle would allow. “You promised not to hurt me.”

Shaking his head, he lowered the dagger. “Too bad it hasna been sharpened. It would be an untidy death, and I canna countenance untidiness.”

They walked back to the cottage, Aila’s mind roiling. There was no way to tell what Sutherland was planning to do to her at her cottage, but she had a terrible feeling it couldn’t be anything good. She had to get away. God knew, though, that she’d kept alert to any opening, any chance to escape, but he hadn’t given her any.

Back at the cottage, he tied his end of the rope to one of the wall posts. “Why are you doing that?” she asked.

“Och,” he said mildly, “just making sure you wilna be following me to Inverness.”

He untied her hands but then yanked her arms behind her.

Panic began to swell in her. “What are you doing?”

“Tying your wrists behind you,” he said.

“But how will I get free?”

He simply shrugged.

“Nay! You canna do this!” She began to fight, ignoring the pain shooting through her arm and the fresh trickle of blood she felt moving down her shin. “Nay!”

The bastard was twice her size and far stronger. He threw her facedown onto her bed, the rope at her ankle going taut and biting into her skin. Digging his knee into her upper back to hold her down, he tightened the twine over her oozing skin.

Then he stepped calmly off the bed. As Aila turned over to her side, she saw him through her bedchamber doorway, stepping over the strewn items on the floor and heading toward the front door.

“Wait!” she called.

But he swung open the door and stepped outside, his palm fondling the dull hilt of the dagger he’d strapped to his waist.
Her
dagger.

The door slammed behind him, leaving Aila alone for the first time all day. She tested the rope at her ankle. If she went to her knees and turned, she might be able to work the knot loose from behind her. Then—if she could get to the kitchen, she could find a knife and cut her wrist bindings loose. It would take a while, but she didn’t think she’d starve to death before she was able to free herself.

She sighed, her body shuddering with relief. The day had been like nothing she’d ever experienced. In the presence of an unstable, violent zealot who’d killed her maid and could very easily have killed her. She’d never been so on edge for so long, her senses so attuned to every little movement.

She was absolutely exhausted. She couldn’t wait to fall back into her ruined bed and sleep until she couldn’t sleep anymore.

But first, she had to free herself. And find Max.

A smell wafted over her, and Aila looked up, suddenly alert all over again. It smelled like…
Oh no.

Fire.

Outside, there was a crackling noise—the sound of burning thatch.

Oh God. William Sutherland had set her cottage on fire.

Chapter Eight

Max opened his encrusted eyes painfully, then squinted against the harsh glare of light. Where the hell was he?

He sat up carefully, fighting a surge of dizziness. Pain sliced through his skull, and he reached his hand up to feel a tender lump the size of an egg on the side of his head. Below the lump, his hair was caked with blood, and he felt dried blood streaked across his ear.

He looked around, seeing that he was near the well behind Beauly Castle. Stumbling to his feet, he tried to remember what had happened.

It had been night when he’d come out here, but it was daytime now—about eight in the morning, judging by the position of the sun. He’d spent the night unconscious on the ground. Thank God he hadn’t frozen to death. It had been an unseasonably warm night, all the snow gone—melted away in the afternoon of the previous day.

But why was he out here? What had knocked him in the head?

And then he remembered—the face he’d seen for just a flash of a second before he’d fallen unconscious.

Sutherland?

Bloody hell. Max lurched toward the castle, battling through another wave of dizziness.

Aila would have come out to find him if he hadn’t returned in a timely fashion last night, but she hadn’t. Which could only mean one thing.

Sutherland had her.

After a quick, fruitless search of the castle, Max rushed to the stable to saddle his horse. He was at least twelve hours behind Sutherland now. God only knew what that villain had done to Aila in all this time.

He reeled to a halt just inside the stable.

The horse was dead.

The goddamned bastard had killed his horse.

Rage knotting his innards, Max set out on foot at a jog—each step jarring his head and threatening him with unconsciousness. But he willed himself to stay alert. At the village of Beauly, he cajoled an innkeeper out of a horse and rode south as if the hounds of hell were lunging at his heels.

It was well into the afternoon when Max finally arrived on the edge of Aila’s land, about a mile from her cottage. The poor mare was lathered and half-dead, he’d worked her so hard.

At the top of a rise, he slowed her for a moment to see if he could spot Aila’s cottage in the distance.

He couldn’t see the cottage—the terrain was rocky, hilly, and uneven, and the cottage was tucked in between two small rises. What he did see, however, made his blood curdle in his veins. A plume of smoke rose up from the treetops, creating a roiling black cloud in the watery blue sky.

Fire.

He urged the poor animal to a gallop, praying she didn’t trip in a hole in the uneven dirt of the road.

Minutes later, Aila’s cottage came into view. It was nearly engulfed in flames—one side of it completely ablaze. It looked on the verge of collapse.

Max raced to the burning structure, then stopped the horse, dismounted, and ran as close as he could to the heat. “Aila! Aila, are you in there, lass?”

No answer. Probably because she wasn’t inside, he reasoned.

But damn it. What if she was in there and gagged, or not able to speak for some other reason?

The thought of her in there, of her being burned, did terrible things to his insides. He had hated knowing Aila was in danger all day. But knowing she might be dead… or near death…
nay
.

If she died, he wouldn’t survive it.

He loved her. He loved her vigor, her diligence, her hard-working spirit, her wicked intelligence, her adventurousness in their bed… He loved her petite body and her red-blonde curls and her green eyes and her quicksilver smile. He loved every single thing about her. In the past days, she’d become an essential part of his existence. He could no longer imagine a future without Aila MacKerrick.