The Groom Wore Plaid: Highland Weddings (6 page)

“I’m simply watching,” she said, taking a step away from the door.

“Ye could get hurt lingerin’ here,” he said. He came to a stop and eyed her suspiciously. “I’ve not seen ye before.”

“I’m Maggie McCallum,” she said, using her surname deliberately. She wasn’t going to hide who she was.

His brows lowered. “McCallum. Ye’re to marry Himself.”

He brazenly looked down her body with skepticism.

“Ye’re being very rude,” she said.

“And ye’re a McCallum.”

As if the two things equated.

“My sister told me about ye,” he continued.

“Your—” She broke off, suddenly seeing the resemblance to another in his short stature and red hair. “Ah, your sister Kathleen,” she said with surprise. Kathleen had been so polite and sunny, as opposite her brother as possible. “Ye must be Gregor. Ye’re practically as new here as I am.”

He took a step toward her, fists on his hips, and spoke with angry defensiveness. “My family’s blood is in this very soil. I was born here.”

“Ye’re right, of course,” she said. Starting her own mini-feud wasn’t going to help. “I didn’t mean to offend.”

“Ye’ve offended just by bein’ here,” he grumbled.

“Then I won’t bother ye again.”

She turned away and began to walk, feeling his angry stare as if it were a dirk piercing the middle of her back. And suddenly, she couldn’t stay in the courtyard, where escaping the dozens of censorious looks would prove impossible. How could one marriage possibly undo centuries’ worth of hatred?

She passed a training yard where men fought with swords. She’d seen no firearms and she knew why—the British government had passed a Disarming Act after the uprising, and continued to pass more, attempting to remove all firearms from the Highlands. But many clans had imported rusty old weapons from the Continent and turned those in for the money, while hiding their own in case they had to defend their land against the British. Certainly they weren’t going to display their weapons in front of a McCallum.

And with that thought, she headed through the gatehouse under the watchful, skeptical eyes of the guards, wrapped in their Duff plaid and their Duff righteousness. She felt like she could breathe again away from the high walls of the courtyard that had seemed to trap the air. The water near the arched bridge was still, covered in large oval leaves that floated around white
lilies, as befitted a moat that seemed more like a pond. The sky was overcast, but didn’t threaten rain as she left the bridge for the dirt-packed road.

She started across a grassy field that sloped up the side of a mountain in the distance. Heather grew in abundance, scattered between boulders and through the fields, and in just a few more weeks it would decorate these meadows in purple blossoms. Maggie felt some of the tension ease away as she took one deep breath after another.

But she couldn’t avoid thinking about her problems for long. As if she’d conjured the scene, she could suddenly see herself screaming, her beautiful gown spattered with blood, and Owen lying on the floor, barely breathing, his face waxen, his eyelids fluttering.

Her breath came in pants and she collapsed onto a boulder, light-headed. She forced her mind to stay in the scene, examining it, looking for evidence of what happened next. She tried to push herself forward in the dream until her head ached, but nothing else happened beyond Owen lying wounded, near death.

For the first time in years, she let herself go back farther, to other dreams she’d had, the last being when Owen’s first betrothed, Emily, had appeared to her, solemn and dripping wet, foretelling her drowning. There was nothing in that dream that she could have warned the woman about except to stay away from water, but even a bathing tub could have caused
her death. Regardless, Maggie had been guilt-ridden that she hadn’t found Emily herself and warned her, though she would have looked a fool doing it.

The guilt had never quite gone away, even though she’d had to move on with her life. Owen had never contacted her after she’d warned him. Seeing him again, she realized that the sting of his disbelief and disappointment in her had never truly dissipated. She’d always thought holding a grudge was pointless, but it seemed she couldn’t take her own advice. His abandonment of her had been a sign that she was better off without him, that they never would have suited. All that seemed to be left was anger and disappointment and a physical awareness that was awkward and uncomfortable and yet . . . arousing.

With determination, she returned to her dreams, going farther back, past Emily. They rose up in her mind as if coming out of water, surfacing intact, practically bobbing, ready for her to pick from them. She saw the little boy shivering under the cliff, the girl who’d killed herself after Maggie’s father had abused her, then back farther still, to her childhood, when she hadn’t understood that her dreams were something that might come true.

With a gasp, she remembered the little boy who’d come to her occasionally in those dreams, her secret friend, she used to call him. It was as if she’d looked through a window into his life, saw when he scraped a
knee, when he’d hidden from his father’s wrath, when he escaped the castle to—

And suddenly she turned her head and stared hard at Castle Kinlochard—the same castle as in her dreams. The little boy had lighter hair then Owen’s sandy color, but many children’s hair darkened through the years.

Was it possible she’d been connected to Owen throughout her life?

Guards paced along the battlements, and horse-drawn carts rattled over the bridge. Clouds scudded across the sky, giving the building a forbidding yet vibrant backdrop, as if framed in reality as it was framed in her mind.

What was she supposed to make of this new twist? When she’d been hiding from her drunken father, thoughts of her dream friend had consoled her. When she’d watched her brother take a beating in her place, memories of her dreams were what she’d retreated to.

As she’d grown, so had the little boy, and she’d seen him less and less. Her dreams had become scarcer, and only truly powerful ones appeared to her, like the girl who’d killed herself. She’d told herself that she’d simply outgrown the need for a make-believe friend in her dreams, but there’d always been a part of her who’d missed him.

And as if her thoughts had conjured him, she saw the Duff chief himself striding through the heather, his blue and green plaid swaying above his bare knees.
And in that moment, she remembered what it was like to be with him when she was a young woman, the excitement building as he came toward her, the breathless wonder of being in his company, basking in his humor, admiring his dedication to learning, something she knew was forbidden to her. It was still so thrilling to be the focus of his intense gaze, to feel a clenching deep in the pit of her stomach that made her feel weak, betrayed by her own body.

As she sat upon the rock, his eyes swept over her as if he could see beneath her skirts. She kept her legs tightly together, though she wanted to lean back, languid with longing, brazen enough to display herself for him.

“I wondered where you’d disappeared to,” he said.

“Ye didn’t confine me to the castle, now did ye?” To her relief, she sounded almost normal.

“I would not do that. This is your home now.”

Home.
Just the thought shocked her back to her life, but instead of the truth she knew she had to say, she mused, “I’ve never been sure where home was.”

She quickly looked away from him, back to the beautiful picture of the double arches of stone over the calm moat waters, the castle rising up behind like a solitary mountain. She shouldn’t be talking to him about this, but the words had just . . . spilled out.

“Because your father had so many estates?”

She shook her head. “Larig Castle was the home
of my childhood, and although it means much to my clan, it has sad, frightening memories for me.”

He came to stand beside the rock she sat upon, gazing where she did, at the castle. It was a relief that he wasn’t intently studying her.

“I think I was too shy to tell ye the details when we were younger, but my mother took Hugh and me away to Edinburgh to live with her family,” Maggie said slowly. Since she was about to tell him of her dream, she wanted him to know something about her, to understand what formed her.

“I remember you telling me your father was a drunkard.”

“Aye, and that was the main reason. But she also wanted to take Hugh away from the friends he’d gotten into trouble with. Edinburgh was a good place for us. Ye remember our tenement—there were so many people to meet. But . . . was it home? Nay, it never seemed like it, though I’ve mostly lived there these last ten years.” She sighed. “Part of me longed for the mountains that cradled Loch Voil and seemed to rim my world.”

“You’re back in the Highlands now,” Owen said. “Soon you will feel at home here.”

She stiffened, knowing he’d given her the perfect opening. She stood up, speaking with cool determination. “I won’t ever be at home here, Owen. I cannot marry ye.”

She faced him head on, but he was still looking at the castle. For a long minute neither of them said a thing. Then at last he turned and squared off against her, folding his arms across his chest and regarding her with narrowed brown eyes.

“You’ve changed your mind already? You give fickle women a bad name, Maggie.”

She took a deep, steadying breath and resisted the urge to insult him back. “I thought I could marry ye. Though I was angry about everything that had happened between us, and having to fix everyone else’s mistakes, I accepted my role in all of this. But last night changed everything.”

“Last night,” he echoed with sarcasm.

“Owen, I dreamed a terrible dream.”

He simply blinked at her as if confused.

“Don’t tell me ye don’t remember.” As anger rose up inside her, hot enough to make her ears burn, she pushed at his chest and he barely moved. “Ye don’t
want
to remember. I have dreams, Owen, vivid haunting dreams that come true. I’ve never known them
not
to come true. I had dreams of ye when ye were just a laddie. You were the secret friend of my childhood.”

She was spilling it all and he was just regarding her as if she were a new species of plant life. And that made her even more furious.

“I’ve spent my life hiding what I am from people,” she continued, words flowing fast, “knowing I could be accused of being a witch. It kept me from deep
friendships, from being myself. And then after everything that happened with ye ten years ago, I pushed it all down inside me, learning how to force myself not to dream, even learning to wake myself up if I felt it happening. Getting a decent night’s sleep took a long time to achieve. I thought I was over this curse—until ye told me ye’d have me to wife. And then I dreamed.” She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself, and the dream unfolded in her mind as if it had been waiting to spring up and terrorize her. “When I screamed, ye woke me from the dream of our wedding day.” Her voice became rough. “I’m in my wedding clothes, and ye’re covered in blood, lying on the floor, white with impending death. I fall on ye and my gown becomes spattered with your blood . . .” She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think, might never feel warm again. The terror of it was so real, overwhelming, incapacitating.

And then she came back to herself to find him shaking her.

“Maggie.” He looked exasperated and angry. “This is why you won’t marry me? You’re allowing a foolish nightmare to upset you?”

Her head jerked away from him as if he’d slapped her, and he let her go.

“And
now
ye see why I hesitated to tell ye,” she said. “Ten years ago ye reacted even worse. Ye don’t have to take my word for it. Ye can ask my brother, my mother—oh, silly me, they’re not here to confirm my story, don’t ye ken.” His disbelief had haunted her
all these years, and it was there again. “Aye,
you
try to tell the mother whose child is thought drowned that I don’t have dreams that come true. I was the only one who never gave up; I saw where he was, led them right there. Do ye ken how often my dreams saved Hugh and me from terrible beatings?” All the emotion pouring out of her left her drained, and she regarded him with an exhaustion that seemed older than time. “Ye haven’t changed one bit, Owen Duff. Ye still think ye ken all there is in the world. But ye didn’t ken enough to save Lady Emily when I warned ye to.”

“I cannot believe you’re bringing up that tragedy,” he scoffed.

“At least ye didn’t remind me what a jealous liar I am.”

He shot her a look. “I did not—”

“Ye did. And when my dream came true, and the poor lassie died, ye never acknowledged it, did ye.”

“I don’t acknowledge coincidences.”

“Is that what ye told yourself? How ye slept at night? I never got over the guilt that I trusted
you
to do something to help her, when I should have gone to her myself.”

He clenched his jaw. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“That ye’ll help me find a way to salvage this marriage contract between our clans.”

He stared down at her. She well remembered when they’d been together in their youth, when they’d hunched
over a snake for an hour, and she’d thought Owen would take notes, he was so intent. She felt that way now, except
she
was his science experiment.

“You will mention this foolishness to no one,” he commanded.

She was disappointed by his attitude, but for once they were in agreement. “Aye, ye think I want to be called a witch? But what are we going to
do
, Owen?”

“Do? We’re going to marry, of course.”

She groaned. “Do ye
want
to die?”

“I won’t die, and I’m disappointed you think such a foolish thing will dissuade me. Do you doubt my intelligence?”

“How can I doubt what ye never let anyone forget?” she shot back.

A corner of his mouth turned up, as if he found her amusing.

“Don’t make light of me, Owen, or this curse I’ve had to live with my whole life. I’m trying to help ye.”