Saved by the Highlander (2 page)

Then he called out to the man who seemed to be in front of the men coming down the hill upon the right side, “We surrender. We will go with you and await ransom.”

“I am sorry, then, to tell you,” said the highlander, an imposing, dark-haired figure in a dirty shirt and over it the strange folded and belted garment that Alice had only ever seen in pictures and seemed unable in her terror to remember the name of, “that you will not be ransomed.”

Alice looked at the captain, whose face had gone white. “What is this?” the officer asked.

He received no answer. Instead, the highlanders rushed toward them with their enormous swords upraised. Alice’s mare reared, she fell from its back, and knew no more.

Chapter Two

Watching from the hilltop half a mile away, Niall MacAlpin could tell immediately that the ambush he was witnessing had something about it that did not seem to fit. First of all, the men, at least to Niall’s eyes at this distance, seemed to be wearing a MacAlpin tartan, which meant that Niall should know all of them by sight—indeed he should have known exactly what they were doing there on this lowland farm, where Niall himself had come with his own MacAlpin men to steal cattle.

With hand signals Niall gathered his party, twenty doughty MacAlpin raiders who were none too happy to be called away from the hiding places they had found in which to wait for nightfall so that they might drive the cattle briskly up into the hills. By the time they had assembled, though, the clash of steel on steel had become audible from the little vale.

“Who are they, Niall?” asked his nephew Callum.

“Men who should not be here,” Niall said shortly.

“Why the swordplay? Do you think the Sassenach did not surrender?”

“I do not know, but we must go and see. Whatever clan they are of, they cannot be allowed to kidnap Sassenach this close to Argyll unless I know of it.”

The whole affair grew much grimmer, and more mysterious, when Niall and his men arrived silently atop the Western hill. They saw the bodies not only of the whole escort, but of a woman as well, very young. A few of the highlanders held the horses, a valuable prize right enough. The party’s guards, before being overwhelmed, had slain, it appeared, two of the outlaws.

Something else odd seemed to be happening, so odd that at first Niall could make neither head nor tail of it. Then he understood, with a shock, what he saw: the highlanders had another girl, a lovely blond thing, completely naked and bound into a kneeling posture on the sward just to the side of the road.

The apparent leader of the band was approaching the girl’s waiting backside, made the more vulnerable by the way they had trussed her, with her face to the grass and her wrists bound behind her knees. The outlaw—for Niall saw now that these men could be naught else but outlaws, come only for plunder, though the mystery of their presence here and of their tartan remained—loosened his belt, and called to his men in a tone that Niall could recognize though he could not make out the words: an invitation to watch him enjoy the spoils of battle, and then to have a turn. Anger and disgust, and guilty arousal, all rose in Niall at once. He saw in a flash exactly what was about to take place: first the leader and then his men taking their pleasure. Then, if the girl was lucky, a slit throat.

Niall looked to either side of him. Callum nodded. They were equal in strength to this strange outlaw band who wore MacAlpin tartan, and they had surprise and the high ground. Niall drew his claymore and, crying “
‘S rioghal mo dhream
,” the Gregor battle cry he had learned in earliest youth, charged down the hill.

In the brief moments before the battle began, as his mind registered the slowness with which the outlaws, sure of their plunder and of the pleasure to be had from the girl, not to mention tired from their battle with the party’s escort, turned to face the new threat, Niall did his best to push back the image of the bound Sassenach girl. The swelling of his cock at the sight had not been a welcome sensation, and he meant to fight with a ferocity that might drive his guilt away, as well as save the girl’s virtue.

Niall MacAlpin, widowed at thirty when the sickness swept through his little village and took his young bride and their little daughter, had been three years without lying with a woman. He had not let the time pass in chastity because he had any lack of opportunity to dally, or to take a new bride. Once he had put away his grief after his wife and daughter’s years mind, it befit a widowed village chief, who should see to making heirs, to get about that business. Though Niall considered himself a reasonably religious man, the order of the ceremony at the church door and the marriage’s consummation seemed a matter largely of indifference. Several girls, from buxom widows to those who had just come of age and dared set their caps for the chief, had presented themselves in one situation or another.

But after five years of marriage to Megan, and after his long-ago days of carousing before he had wed, Niall knew his mind, when it came to the sort of household he wished to maintain. He had loved Megan, but he had been young, and she had been younger. He had not known how to get her to heed his wishes, and every time he had had to enforce his will with a firm hand upon her bare bottom he had felt like a tyrant, and so he had enforced it less and less, and Megan had grown distant. Who knew whether if she had heeded his warning, and not gone visiting to the houses where they had the sickness, she and Fiona might not have taken ill themselves? Niall had succeeded at last in ceasing to blame himself, but he had also chosen to keep his heart very carefully.

The more did he keep it carefully for as the years with Megan had passed, and then the three years since, Niall had begun to understand that his wish to have a well-ordered home sprang not only from his moral sense, but from the essence of his amorous nature as well. For that reason, more than any other, he tried to push the image of the English girl, trussed for the outlaws’ pleasure, away from him as he began to fight.

Into his fighting, now to save the girl as when he fought in the clan wars against the Campbells and the Drummonds, Niall put what he called, to himself, his yen to be master. His mastering skill with his claymore saw him through the battle, which like most battles became a rout almost immediately as Niall split the would-be rapist leader from shoulder to waist and three of the outlaws fled on the horses they had been holding.

The yen to master, though, returned in its more troubling form when he turned to see the girl still there upon the grass, trussed and weeping, her charms shamefully exposed. “Get a plaid from one of the dead men,” he called to Callum, “and cover her up. I must see if any of the wounded will live.”

Niall shook his head to clear it of the image of the English girl, glad at least to have saved her, even if he could not help his lustful thoughts. His MacAlpins had suffered only a few scratches, and ten outlaws lay dead alongside the Sassenach they had slain. Only one man remained alive, and his life’s blood was draining away into the dust of the road.

“Who are you?” Niall asked, looking down into the ashen face. “Even the stupidest of outlaws knows not to attack a party on this road. Even if you had made away with the plunder, we would have heard of it, and hunted you down.”

The man looked up at him with the scorn of the dying. “You would not have found us, highlander.”

Niall felt a deep crease form in his brow. The man was English; his accent was unmistakable. Even if Niall had failed to notice being called ‘highlander’ by a man in a plaid—which, Niall saw now, was belted back-to-front, so that the folds of the kilt fell wrong—the sounds of the man’s vowels would have betrayed him.

“You are Sassenach?” Niall said. “Who sent you?”

But the outlaw’s eyes stared now at nothing. There remained only one survivor from the whole bloody mess, and when he turned, he saw her looking at him, sitting on the ground with a plaid wrapped around her. She shivered, though the day was warm and the plaid must have made it even warmer.

Niall walked over to her slowly, smiling gently to try to reassure her. He squatted a few feet in front of her. Even in her clear distraction, with her face smudged by dust in which her tears had made haphazard tracks, her fair southron beauty shone forth.

“What is your name, sweetling?” Niall asked, suddenly wanting to put his arm around her shoulders to see if he could keep her from shivering. He knew, though, that until he could get her back to Kilmorin and into the care of other women, to try to touch the girl might well make her fears worse.

“Alice Lourcy,” she said in a surprisingly clear and forthright voice. She seemed to give one final shiver then, and then to stop the wayward motion through the force of her will. Niall felt his eyebrows go up in admiration. Then, at the same moment Alice began to look around, as if she had just woken up, the meaning of her name came to his mind.

“The one who’s to be wed to the laird of Lormoran?” he asked, his brow traveling even further up his forehead. “The earl’s daughter?”

“The same,” Alice said. Niall thought he could hear a steely quality in her voice that astonished him, after what she had just been through. “I thank you for saving me, and I beg you to speed me on my way. I must be in Lormoran tonight.”

“My lady, I am no friend to your bridegroom, and…” Niall intended to say that despite the long tradition of holding brides for ransom, he was an honorable man and indeed would be happy to do just as she wished, as a gesture of good will, but suddenly something seemed to fall into place in his mind—something very sinister.

Alice was giving him a puzzled look, clearly wondering why he had left his sentence unfinished. Niall said, “My lady, I think that may not be the wisest course of action.”

“What?” To Niall’s surprise, she began to rise, struggling with the voluminous plaid. Niall offered her a hand to help her get to her feet, which she first glared at and then took. She adjusted the woolen fabric around her awkwardly, obviously finding the garment very strange.

Niall called to Callum, who was supervising the gathering of the corpses into a pile next to the road. “Cal, see if you can find my lady a shift, from the pack horse.”

“Thank you,” Alice said with a curt nod. “May I ask for a gown, as well?”

Niall frowned. “No, my lady. We will show you how to make an arisaid with that plaid, which is much better for walking.”

“Walking? I shall ride to Lormoran.”

“My lady,” Niall said, beginning to feel a little impatient despite his admiration of Alice’s extraordinary pluck, considering what she had just been through, “your whole party is dead, and you have probably just barely escaped that fate yourself.”

“Yes,” Alice said. “I thank you. Is it not clear that I must get to safety with my betrothed bridegroom, in his castle?”

“No, my lady,” Niall replied. “It is not. At least one of these outlaws was not what he seemed.”

“What do you mean?” Alice’s brow creased. Niall could tell from that expression how very intelligent a girl she was; her face told of a life in which she could grasp the truth of things faster than those around her. Thus she had formed her firm intention to go straight to Lormoran, and did not take kindly to being told that intention might not have taken into account all the pertinent facts.

“He was English, my lady.”

“That cannot possibly be the case, sir,” said the girl, who seemed to be recovering her wits and her composure more with each second she spent arguing with Niall. “Englishmen never wear these barbaric garments.”

Niall actually drew back at those words, torn between laughter and wrath. “Barbaric, my lady?”

Alice’s face grew a little pink at that, even under the dust. “I suppose that is rather harsh,” she admitted. “Outlandish, certainly?” In her face Niall could see that though she struggled to remain civil, her prejudice ran deep.

“Outlandish to you, perhaps,” Niall said, feeling his own face grow a little hot.

“In any case,” she said, “that is far beside the point. Civilized folk do not wear them.” The air of finality in her voice seemed, strangely, not to convey arrogance, but rather simple conviction that she knew everything there might be to know. Niall shook his head, and tried to suppress his mounting anger. He had a sudden urge to have her bound at hand and foot and carried to Kilmorin.

“I tell you, my lady, the man was English. I do not know what they were about, attacking your party, but I have a suspicion. If my suspicion be correct, you should not go to Lormoran.”

Chapter Three

Alice looked into the face of the highlander who had rescued her, and she thought she saw that he did not intend to deceive her. Nevertheless, his presumption in questioning her right to decide where she should go from this horrid scene astonished and offended her. She was trying to be civil, seeing that he had rescued her, but he
knew
what she had just been through, and yet he contradicted her desire to get to safety.

She realized then that she did not know his name, though she had told him hers. Doubtless that was why the barbarian had decided he could take the liberty of questioning her decision. Why had she told him, without first asking for his and thus verifying, as her governess would have told her to verify, whether he were worthy even of requesting the name of the daughter of an earl?

She looked back at the highlander to see that he was looking closely at her. He must have seen something amiss, for just as she realized she was about to faint, his left arm was already around her waist, guiding her back down onto the grass.

“I am Niall MacAlpin,” he said. “I live in Kilmorin, and am the chief there.” Alice could tell that he had decided to try to make ordinary conversation as a way of taking her mind off what she had undergone over the past hour. Part of her felt that she must resist, not allow him to distract her that way. At the same time, though, gratitude and a spirit of yielding rose in her heart as well. Her mind felt only too grateful to let itself be led away toward mundane things, rather than to see the few images that still flashed in her vision from the outlaws’ ambush: crawling in the dust, the feeling of strong hands around her waist, the feeling of having no clothes on, and the sound of men’s laughter. The rest of the time simply failed to be there, somehow, as if it had never happened, but had somehow left a trace nonetheless.