Saved by the Highlander (10 page)

He stood and watched her all the way to the door of Fergus’s croft house. Alice walked slowly, as if lost in thought, and Niall wondered if perhaps she pondered the beauty she must have seen down at the edge of the water, looking out over the great loch with its pretty little islands. She had written something in that paper about her impressions of the highland landscape, and now Niall wished he could remember those words. Part of him longed to go to her, and simply confess that he had read what she had written, and perhaps also say something even wilder than anything she had thought wild before in him, when she wrote the words now burned into his memory:
so strong, and even wild, a man
.

What he would say he had no idea at all, but his words would certainly contain some impossible notion that when her father’s soldiers came, they would pretend that she had run away, and after that they would go to the minister and Niall could bribe him to marry them. Niall shook his head in disbelief at the lunacy of the thought, but the words Alice had written would not seem to let him go. Then he remembered what Fiona had said about wishing she could think of… something.
If only I thought,
she had said. Surely she must have meant that she wished there were some way that Niall could court Lady Alice Lourcy—some way that a union between the chief of Clan Alpin and an English earl’s daughter might be thought of.

Niall’s thoughts would never have run so very wild, either, if he had not seen that wretched paper. What did she write now, when she sat at the table, recording her thoughts in that lovely hand? Had she returned to her original purpose of describing the natural beauties of the hills? Or had she continued to meditate upon Niall and his fierceness?

To his distress, the image of Alice as Niall had found her on the road, her clothes torn away and her naked body at the service of wicked men, rose again to his eyes, now unwisely—Niall thought in hindsight—augmented by the experience of having delivered the strapping to her shapely bottom.

It had seemed so very necessary at the time, but the way he had grown instantly hard at the site of her prim, round cheeks, and the way his arousal had seemed to rob him of his senses as he continued to whip her, watching with a lustful gaze he could not seem to help, as the little roundnesses danced under the leather, and Alice shifted her knees so that he had the terribly enticing view of her sweet golden-haired cunt, made him think that he had been gravely in error to bend her over the bed that way and correct her so sternly. For now he knew he must live the rest of his life with the picture in his mind of her perfect backside, and the knowledge that Lady Alice Lourcy’s memory of Niall MacAlpin would forever contain at its head—indeed, he was sure, as its title and rubric—the severity of the thrashing he had given her for insulting his honor.

If only, he thought, he could forget the sound of her little cries, or the way the red of the strap marks had looked upon the milk-white ovals of her bottom, or above all the peeping sight of the tender cleft of her cunt. To be rid of just one of those memories might make the rest bearable. But they all ran together in his mind and, with the addition now of knowing—but never being able to speak aloud—that Alice had felt a
strange feeling
afterward, they all together made his cock rise under his kilt in the daytime and under his shirt at night.

Chapter Twelve

After the incident with the paper left on Niall’s table, Alice found it very difficult to sleep—not only that night, when truly she had got no sleep at all, but every night since it as well. The days she could occupy with reading and walking and writing descriptions of the things she saw, carefully avoiding the subject of the people she had met for fear that she might lapse again into that diarist’s style that had nearly caused such a disaster. But Fiona had assured her that Niall had not read the shameful things she had written, and so great was Alice’s wish that that be true that she refused to let herself wonder in the slightest whether it was.

But the nights—every one of them, no matter how far she walked in the day and no matter whether she begged for a share of the chores that Fiona finally and reluctantly granted her—lay out before her each evening as kind of ordeal for which nothing in her life, she thought, could have prepared her. When at last she pretended to sleep, desperate to reassure Fiona that all was well with her, most nights the ordeal became even worse. For Fergus, it seemed, had an extremely uxorious side to his character, and he would frequently whisper to Fiona around midnight, sure that Alice had fallen asleep, “I will have a little fuck now, my dearling, if you don’t mind.”

Then Alice would always try to keep her eyes tightly closed as she heard the giggles, then the muffled soft, wet sounds, and then the sighs and the little moans and whimpers of Fiona, as her wedded husband took his pleasure. Then Alice could never seem to hold to her resolve not to look, and she would open her eyes a tiny bit and see them moving in the near darkness, Fergus above and Fiona below.

Mostly they would do the strange deed face to face, but once Alice opened her eyes to find that Fergus had turned Fiona upon her belly, the same way Lord Roderick had had the scullery maid—and the same way the outlaw had nearly had Alice herself. Then, without knowing how she might possibly push away the terrible, lovely vision, she imagined Niall after her strapping, when her cunny had to suddenly become so warm, doing the same thing to her… fucking her the way she now understood husbands fucked their wives, outlaws fucked their victims, and loathsome noblemen fucked scullery maids.

At last, after Fergus and Fiona had finished their lovemaking and drifted off into a peaceful sleep that Alice envied more than she could possibly have expressed, the worst part of all began: the thinking about the outlaw, Lord Roderick, and above all about the chief of Clan Alpin. The longing for things that Alice knew could never be, and were, besides, wicked and wanton and lustful. It had been so few days since the time when she had been able to dismiss entirely what she had seen Lord Roderick doing with the scullery maid in the park. Beyond proving that he was unworthy of her, that incident had left her mind almost unruffled.

Now, however, after what had happened on the road, and after the spanking and the strapping, and after knowing Niall MacAlpin for a true gentleman, to lie awake alone seemed positive torture. Only a week before she had never thought she might yearn to lie beside a man, and now if she found sleep at all it seemed filled with shameful visions of what the man who made her lie beside him demanded of her, in her cunny and even in her bottom.

Thus, when she decided to walk far into the hills, ten days after her arrival in the village, she could never afterward say whether she intended Niall to catch her. She told Fiona that she would walk to the sheepfolds, and although she did walk in that direction, she knew that even when she had told the kindly woman where she would go, she had already intended to go further. She told herself that she wanted to see what lay beyond the hills to the north. She knew that one thing situated in that direction happened to be Lormoran, and so one of the falsehoods she told herself was that she merely wished to see whether she might catch a glimpse of the place where she was to have been wed.
Sure,
her self-deceiving mind said,
those hills are part of the village, and I shall not go too far, if I climb to their top.

Alice was standing atop one of the crags to the north of the village when she heard Niall’s voice behind her. “My lady,” he said, and Alice knew instantly that her backside had come into grave danger, from the grimness of his tone. She whirled about to see his handsome, though wrathful face, and felt herself go weak in the knees, but she stood her ground as he climbed the last few feet to stand with her at the top of the hill. He said nothing more for a long moment, perhaps trying to catch both his breath and his composure. The look of anger in his face made her heart beat very fast, but still she glared up at him, for what else could she do? Certainly she could not say what she knew with complete certainty in that instant: that she had come up there in order that she might give Niall a reason to punish her.

“My lady,” he finally said. “You have disobeyed me in coming here.”

“N-no… I…”

“You told Fiona that you would walk to the sheepfolds. Even if I supposed that perhaps you were daft enough to think that this crag, which marches on the demesnes of the man who tried to kill you, were part of my village, your failure to abide by your word to her proves you reckless and disobedient.” His breath caught; he seemed magnificent in his severity with her, which, as if now that he had found her the heat of his anger was receding, seemed to Alice to show a care for her that she had not taken of herself.

She started to cry. “I am sorry, sir.”

“I am very glad to hear it, my lady, but I am sure you can guess that it is not sufficient. Fiona will strap you when we return.”

“Fiona?!” How could he? When she had felt such certainty that he could not resist doing it himself, baring her bottom himself?

“Yes, my lady. I think Fiona is better suited to correcting your behavior than I, as matters stand.”

“As matters stand, sir?”

To this, Niall’s only reply was to nod. Then, “Come, let us go,” he said.

“But…”

Niall had turned to walk back down the crag; now he turned again, back to her.

“Yes, my lady?”

“Oh, call me Alice!” She did not know from where those words had arisen, in such contravention of everything her governesses had ever told her. Chief of a clan this man might be, but he was still a commoner, and commoners must call Alice
my lady
. But she wanted to hear him address her as an equal, at least, because she felt now that she should like to call him
my lord
.

Niall’s brow creased and he shook his head. “I do not think that a good idea, my lady.”

“Why not?” She felt the tears rise up again.

“I cannot tell you that,” he replied, and his face once again seemed to turn grim.

Desperate to delay their descent to where Fiona’s strap awaited her, and feeling that if perhaps she could say the right thing, he would call her
Alice
and everything would change, she said, “Sir, would you at least show me where Lormoran lies?”

Niall’s face softened, as if he suddenly felt sorry for her—as if he thought that she must be grieving for the loss of her prospect of marrying a lord. How could Alice tell him that nothing could be further from the truth?

He leaned past her, in the narrow space atop the crag. The day was brilliant, though quite windy. To their left, upon the west, the whole of Loch Lomond lay out before them, sparkling in the sun. To the right and the east, the highland crags marched down to the lowlands. Niall reached out his hand, standing behind Alice and slightly to her left, so that his strong arm, in the linen shirt that smelled not of lordly perfume but of work and sweat, stretched over her shoulder.

“Down there,” he said, and Alice saw a castle nearly hidden in a fold of the lowland hills.

“And he is really terribly wicked?” she asked softly. “The castle looks so fair.”

She spoke because she wanted to hear Niall tell her that he had saved her from a vile, shameful fate, but he seemed to take her words as having the opposite sense.

“I am sorry, my lady. But, yes, you would not have been happy. Do not fret; your father will find you another bridegroom, a much better one, and you will forget you ever came to this barbarian land.”

“What…” Now Alice was desperate to show that she had meant something completely different. “What does he… do… with the maids?”

“He whips them very harshly, my lady,” Niall said in the gentle voice of one breaking bad news, “and he violates them.”

Alice felt so faint she thought she might swoon. Why did the news of what the loathsome Lord Roderick did with his maids affect her so? “All of them?”

“Many,” Niall confirmed.

“And you…” What was she saying? What strange, shameful thing was about to pour out of her breast? “You would never…”

“Come, my lady,” Niall said, and turned to go. “Fiona will be worried, and you have a whipping coming yourself, of a very different sort.”

Niall walked ahead of Alice all the way down from the crag, both of them utterly silent. She watched his strong back, and the way his legs seemed to move so freely in the kilt that she had thought so strange only ten days ago. What had she meant to ask? Could she really have been asking whether he would
whip her harshly
and
violate
her?

She swallowed hard. Yes. Oh, heavens, yes. Because that would make her belong to him, would it not?

He had turned away. Because she disgusted him. How could it be otherwise? He had heard the yearning in her voice, and he had said it was time to take Alice back down to the village so that his
aunt
could strap her.

They had reached his croft house. Fergus and Fiona’s lay just beyond.

“Mr. MacAlpin,” Alice called desperately as he made to go right by his own door, upon the track that served as the high street of Kilmorin. He turned about and looked at her, his eyes rather wild, as if he, too were thinking thoughts that he would rather put away from him. She took a step toward him, so that they stood only a foot apart. “Will you not… will you not… whip… me… yourself?” Her face blazed hotter than fire.

“Do you wish me to whip you, Alice?” he asked angrily. Alice felt her eyes widen at the sound of her Christian name. “Or would you rather the lord of Lormoran did it?”

Alice gasped, and then took breaths so sharp they made her feel even fainter for a few moments, until she could finally whisper, “You, sir. You.”

His eyes narrowed, and a little color seemed to come into the cheeks of the chief of Clan Alpin. “I read your paper,” he said softly. “I am sorry.”

Alice felt her face crumple into a sob. Niall’s expression became infinitely tender then, to her astonishment, and suddenly he had his arms around her, holding her very tightly.