Reluctant (Heroes of the Highlands) (The MacKays #3)

Other
Heroes of the Highlands
Novellas

by Kerrigan Byrne

Unspoken

Unwilling

Unwanted

Unleashed – The First Highland Historical Trilogy

Released

Redeemed

Reluctant

Reclaimed – The Second Highland Historical Trilogy (coming soon)

RELUCTANT

Kerrigan Byrne

Reluctant © 2013 Kerrigan Byrne

All rights reserved

Amazon Kindle Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. The ebook contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, or stored in or introduced into an information storage and retrieval system in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles and reviews. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This ebook is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Cover Art © 2013 Kelli Ann Morgan / Inspire Creative Services

Interior book design by

Bob Houston eBook Formatting

Dedication

To you, for finding me in the ocean of incredible stories out there and deciding to give me a read. I hope you fall in love at least a little.

Chapter One

He was shadow. He was night. He was death and blood and screams.

Grey leached out of his vision as the Berserker rage passed. He melded with the darkness and watched the flames consume what he’d destroyed. The simple homes held together by straw, earth, and pitch caught easily.

Other shadowy figures crept from the flames carrying their plunder. They showed him deference as they melted into the night as though they’d never been.

They would pay him tribute when they returned to the war camp. For a Berserker did not stop his killing to collect his due.

He collected other shadows. Those created by the flames of civilization, but forced to lurk outside of its warmth. Highwaymen, street orphans, discarded soldiers, criminals, the mad and the lost. He organized them. Fed them. Strengthened them. Taught them to take what they could never have had. Showed them the substance of brotherhood was more efficient and profitable than working alone.

The Gods only favored power. If you were not strong enough to keep what you had, you didn’t deserve it.

The wails of those left alive, the women and the children, was a familiar and comforting melody that mingled with the roar of the approaching flames. He snarled at the blaze and its illuminating heat, drawing deeper into the night. He did better in the cold. It reminded him that warmth was an illusion and trust was a misconception.

A score of years ago, he’d been abandoned on foreign soil by the weak and deceitful men he’d once called brothers. Though he kept his army, he relied on none. He trusted their fear of him. Had faith in their greed and their anger. But never their hearts. Never their words.

The Highland blackguard named Murdock of Clan Munroe galloped toward him, pulling a dark, riderless stallion.

“It is time, Laird, let us leave this place before the dawn finds it nothing but ashes.” Murdock tossed him the reins and tried to still a dancing horse made nervous by the building inferno.

He mounted and galloped after Murdock.

His men called him ‘
Laird.
’ The first time he’d heard the word, he hadn’t known what it meant. He’d not known their strange language. But now, he understood. They needed someone to follow. Someone to fear. Someone to blame. Structure to their day and consequence to their insolence.

They called him ‘Laird’ because he had no name. Not anymore.

He
was shadow.

Chapter Two

“His name is Soren and he has to die.”

Kamdyn MacKay had yet to speak a word. She had yet to close her mouth.

Finn MacLauchlan had addressed her queen in his short, faded Nordic accent. He had to be the largest, most fearsome looking man she’d ever seen, besides the two dark, gigantic brothers flanking him.

All this time, Kamdyn had thought her brothers-in-law, Laird Rory and the Druid, Daroch, to be in contest for the biggest and most intimidating men she’d ever met. It wasn’t that the three Berserkers dwarfed them, per se, it was that the large and ancient warriors consumed the space in which they stood, dominated it even, with a dangerous and predatory energy.

“The three of you are long-mated Berserkers.” The Banshee Queen reached over and gently pressed on Kamdyn’s chin, forcing her slack jaw shut. “And I hear you are now four as Laird Connor’s eldest son has reached manhood and has been blessed by Freya. How is it that four Berserker warriors, three of them approaching a century of life, cannot hunt and kill one unmated rogue?”

A century old
? Kamdyn’s mouth dropped open again as she studied the Berserkers. Not one of them looked a day older than her brothers-in-law. The five men stood in the great hall of MacKay Castle, each appearing as though they teased the middle years of forty, though Kamdyn was certain that Laird Rory had seen his fiftieth birthday. Silver threaded through Connor and Roderick’s dark hair and even toyed at the temples of Finn’s golden locks. Lines of wisdom sprouted from the corners of their eyes and bracketed hard mouths, yet did little to belie the incomparable strength the years still afforded each man on the unofficial council standing before her and the queen.

“We have tried,” Laird Connor interjected. “But he is disturbingly elusive.” He rubbed a hand over his close-cropped hair. “The people of the Highlands are starting to call him ‘
The Laird of Shadows
.’ It is said he has an ancient Fae relic that protects him from scrying magic.”

Kamdyn felt her attention drifting. Each man in this room was
disturbingly
handsome. The MacLauchlan brothers all dressed in their blue, red, and green tartans that accentuated their burnished skin and matching green eyes. Laird Rory MacKay and the Druid Daroch, who’d taken the name of MacKay after marrying her sister, Kylah, each folded heavy, tattooed arms over their blue, green and gold tartans, their intense eyes watching the exchange between Berserker and Banshee with measured interest.

She tried not to wriggle and fidget. Talk of death and retribution bored her. Lord knew in the twenty years she’d spent as the handmaiden to the Banshee Queen she’d heard her fill, but the abundant amount of muscled male flesh in front of her was enough to wrest her attentions away from the conversation.

For some reason, she’d become very
aware
of her virginity. She felt as though she wanted to evoke fantasies about the men present, but in her innocence, she couldn’t really do them justice.

Contrary to myth, Faeries were very private regarding sexual matters and, though Kamdyn had been invited to partake in what transpired behind their closed doors, she’d never had the courage to do so. Nor the desire. Faerie men, though beautiful, tended to be somewhat androgynous and held little appeal to her at all. They were nothing like the feast of rampant masculinity before her. For the first time in years, her body stirred and her interest snagged where it was absolutely inappropriate to do so. Mouths. Shoulders. Thighs. The flex of a forearm or the length of strong fingers. These mythic warriors of Freya were certainly a different, arresting breed of man, and they piqued her curiosity.

“My mate, Evelyn, is a seer,” the one called Roderick said in his thick brogue. He had long, black hair and a cruel brow over very kind green eyes. “She told us that if one of us were to hunt this
Laird of Shadows
, a Berserker would die before his time.”

Finn nodded, rolling his muscled shoulders and allowing his hand to rest on the hilt of his broadsword. “Not one of us is willing to leave our women widows, or our children without fathers. But we cannot allow this Berserker to go on terrorizing the Highlands.”

“I thought those blessed by the Gods couldna be killed by Banshees,” Laird MacKay interjected.

“No’ the Celtic Gods,” Roderick explained. “But there’s no such rule about the Gods of the North.”

“Years ago, a similar delegation was charged between the MacLauchlans and the MacKay.” Laird Connor turned and tossed a bag full of coin to Laird Rory, who caught it with a swift hand. Their eyes locked and held. “We knew yer Clan had the ear of the Banshee Queen, and this time, it is
us
who require the taking of a life.”

Kamdyn’s ears pricked to the meaning in their words. Every person in this room had their fates altered by the other. Even her. She and her sisters had been brutally burned alive by Laird Rory’s violent brother, Angus. Roderick MacLauchlan had defeated Rory and Angus’s traitor father at the battle of Harlaw. Rory had hired the Berserker Laird, Connor, to kill Angus, who had become betrothed to Connor’s mate. Kamdyn and her sisters had been turned Banshees to reap their own vengeance upon Angus, but Connor’s blade was too swift. Though denied their revenge by the Berserkers, the two eldest Banshee sisters, Katriona and Kylah, were able to find their loves and reclaim their mortality through Rory and Daroch. Daroch had exacted his own revenge by killing the previous cruel Banshee Queen, thereby installing her handmaiden, Tah Liah, as the new sovereign.

In order to keep and maintain the happiness of her sisters, their mates, and her beloved Clan, Kamdyn had pledged her immortal soul to the Banshee Queen as sacrifice so Kylah could live with the Druid she loved.

It was all a kind of strange, interwoven knot of destiny. Kamdyn had a distinct impression that the knot was completing itself to form something eternal.

“Keep yer coin.” Rory tossed it back. “This Soren, Laird of Shadows, is indiscriminate in his plunder and destruction. He’s raided the MacKays and MacLauchlans alike, along with the McLeods, Keiths, Ross, Munroe, even as far south as Clan MacKenzie. He’s created twice the problem for me, because every time he raids a Sutherland, I get blamed for it.”

Rory was currently embroiled in the flare of a centuries-long dispute with the neighboring Sutherland clan. It seemed every time conditions with the English improved, the Sutherlands turned their war-like ways back toward the MacKay, lusting after their fertile lands and bounteous ocean.

“It is our fault Soren was unleashed upon the Highlands,” Finn insisted. “In fact, the fault mostly lies with me.”

“How so?” Daroch’s hazel eyes sharpened with interest.

“To shorten a long story, I came here from the Berserker temple of Freya in the Northlands to join my brothers,” Finn explained. “The others believed that the blessing of the Berserker should not abide in Scotland, and so they sailed here to slaughter us and our mates, ensuring that they’d eliminate our line.”

Kylah gasped. Kill the women, too? Just for loving one of these extraordinary men?

“We defeated those who would not submit to us, and have had the Berserker temple under our control all this time. Though during the battle on the long boat, Soren was knocked into the sea, and somehow he survived.”