The Runaway Highlander (The Highland Renegades Book 2) (9 page)

“Very good, my lady.”

“Mr. Donne, I have a proposition for you.” Milene de Cheyne straightened her back and stretched to her full height, which was only an inch or two shorter than himself. This also unnerved him.

“I am happy to hear this proposition.”

“You have been absent these two days, so you likely will not have heard what happened yesterday.”

“I have not.” At least his senses hadn’t been off. He knew something was different.

“One of these renegades you’ve been capturing managed to make it into the castle and capture my daughter yesterday. He then used her future position in this household to negotiate his way into the dungeon.” She stopped speaking as a pair of soldiers passed them. Her eyes, which drew immediately to their presence, showed the tiniest signs of fear.

“Not content with merely escaping,” she continued, “they also took her with them when they left the city.”

Aedan fought to keep breathing normally, for the sake of appearances, but he nearly couldn’t force the air in and out. Pictures of Anne being roughly used by these captives had all of his attention.

With a very measured pretense of calm in his voice, Aedan said, “What would you wish of me, my lady?”

When, of course, every part of him wanted to remount his horse and run after her, post haste. Aedan was amazed at this response.

“The Sheriff is only interested in the captives being killed or punished. But I have my daughter to consider.”

“Of course.”

“The soldiers say you are the best tracker in ten counties, and faster on your horse than any among them.” Milene de Cheyne pulled a purse from beneath the folds of her dress and offered it to him. “One hundred pounds reward. I’m told this is the going rate for a man of your… talents.”

“That is very generous, my lady.” Aedan sighed. More generous than he could have expected.

“I want you to understand something.” The Countess leaned in and grasped his shoulder. Her fingers dug in to the
fabric of his tunic. “I chose you for two reasons. First, your reputation. I need someone who is quicker and better than the Sheriff’s soldiers, for I fear that if they are the first upon these men, they will simply kill everything that moves.”

“And second?”

She released him and reached up to move the hair away from the left side of his face. A tiny spark of revulsion crossed her face but was soon replaced by the cool, calculating smile she’d shown earlier. “I need someone who will leave my daughter intact, for I cannot afford to pay two men such a fee to chase her down.”

“I certainly will not do anything to harm or defile your daughter, my lady.”

Milene de Cheyne smirked and released the curtain of hair to re-cover his scarred face. “Many men might say such, Mr. Donne. But my daughter is very beautiful, and even one night in the company of an eligible man might be too tempting.”

Aedan swallowed. Her point was clear. He couldn’t disagree with the fact that Anne was beautiful, or that she would be a temptation. But she would not be tempted.

“One look at your true face and I’ll be lucky if she doesn’t run from you as well.”

Without losing his smile, Aedan sucked in a breath and sat with her comment fermenting inside. He wondered if Anne had a tongue like that.

“You’re right, of course, Countess de Cheyne. She would never be tempted to give me her virtue. You can rest assured that I will return her to you with the utmost quickness.”

She held out the purse again. “As an incentive,
I will give you half now and half when you return my daughter to me.”

Aedan didn’t move to take the purse.
The beginnings of a smile began to overtake his features, even as he fought to maintain his distance from thoughts of what this could do for his family. This could be his opportunity to do right by his sister. And return an intriguing woman to her mother.

What could be easier?

Chapter Eight

Anne awoke to a thumping headache and the noise of traveling. She was stretched out in the back of some smelly, rickety cart that seemed, by the empty spots at her back, to have some of its slats missing.

Where was she?

The nearly-black night hung around her like a blanket and she kept shaking herself, trying to wake up. But the black of her dreams was almost mirrored in the dark of the sky.

She tried to sit up, but something held her down. Grasping at it, she realized they’d nearly swaddled her in a wool blanket. Her light
silk dress seemed to be in one piece, though at this hour, she couldn’t tell the color and she couldn’t remember what she’d put on in the room she shared with her sister.

Oh, God. Elena. She’d
left Elena. Something flew over her head, but a glance upward brought only more darkness. A deep terror started to climb through her. In her haste, she’d forgotten her sister. She couldn’t leave Elena to be the sacrifice in her place.

Anne yanked her arms out of the tightly-wrapped blanked and was immediately sorry she’d done so. The night air bit at her exposed
hands. She touched her face and found the skin to be numb. Even the warmth of her fingers hurt.

She maneuvered the blanket so she could at least sit up, but allowed
her hands to remain covered. There was a tiny bit of light from the thin sliver of moon, but it did almost nothing to illuminate the landscape.

Dark shapes moved around her and the clomp of horses hooves on grass was the only recognizable sound, other than the creaking of the wooden cart. The air was cold and crisp, and at last, she could smell the clean, fresh scent of the countryside.

One of the shadows moved next to her and she could see the outline of a weapon sticking up over what looked like a head and shoulders. Likely a sword.

It reached for her and her throat tightened.

“Anne, are you awake?” Broc’s familiar voice made her body ease, but she couldn’t make out his facial features well enough to feel truly relaxed.

“Broc, is that you?”

“You can’t see me?”

She squinted.
She could just make out the apple of his cheek where the light struck it. “I can’t.”

“I apologize for frightening you. Your eyes will soon adjust and I hope it will give you more comfort.”

Anne rubbed her eyes and eased back against whatever hard-packed bump she’d been sleeping on. “Where are we?”

“Nearly to our camp. We’ll be arriving within the hour.”

“And where is your camp?”

Broc paused. She could hear, along the line, someone’s horse take off into a gallop.

“What was that?”

“We send out scouts every so often, just to make sure the way ahead is clear.”

“We’re not on the road, though.”

“No. We couldn’t do that.”

A tiny bit more light seemed to be illuminating them and Anne could just make out Broc’s face, the rough, bedraggled beard, and the cut of a stolen soldier’s uniform. What she’d previously thought a sword turned out to be a thick spear, which appeared to be strapped to his horse somehow.

“What happened back in Berwick?”

“I found you with the Sheriff and yo—” He stopped. Anne shook herself, trying to remember. Everything seemed a black blur in her mind.

“The Sheriff?” She tried to restimulate the storytelling, but Broc remained silent.

“What happened, Broc? You can’t keep it from me.”

Silence. Black.

She remembered that black, coming over her. Stealing over her, and her fear for her sister. Then she remembered hands around her neck. She remembered thinking she would die.

“I see I don’t need to remind you.”

“Where did you find me?”

“I came up from the store rooms with the soldiers’ uniforms and the man had you by the neck.” A tight, quick breath passed from his lips. “I would have killed him if I’d had a sword.”

Anne freed a hand and held it up. She didn’t want to hear any more. Simon Alcock was behind her, at last. The relief was almost blinding and brought a wash of tears to her eyes.

“I thought for sure he would be part of the fighting.”

“The escape hadn’t been discovered yet.” Broc handed her a flask and she drank greedily. The water was warm, but clean, and her throat was on fire. “We didn’t encounter our first resistance until well out of the city, before the rendezvous point.”

Anne stopped drinking. “The fight?”

“We lost a lot of men. Some were criminals from the dungeons, but all fought bravely for their lives.”

“How many men?”

Broc’s breathing was audible over the noise of the caravan. If he had been one of the architects of the escape, he appeared to be very downtrodden by the results.

“We lost seven in the initial skirmish with
a small retinue of soldiers on the king’s road who recognized us for interlopers. They must have sent word ahead to Lowich and as we had to nearly fight our way through a garrison, we lost another nine.”

Anne gasped. It didn’t seem there’d been many more than that in the dungeons in the first place.
She handed the flask back to Broccin and he took a swig.

“William was one of the fallen.” Broc’s voice hitched. “He was a good man. Stabbed in the back by one of the coward
English.”

While she hadn’t known William more than as a co-conspirator, she felt somewhat responsible for his second capture. A tear slid into the corner of her eye and she uncovered
a hand to wipe it away.

“I’m so sorry.” She sniffed away more tears. Loss couldn’t be helped in an escape. Still, to lose someone she’d known by name
... It was a first for her. “I didn’t know him well, but he did his best to help me when I needed it. For that, I will remember him.”

“They’ve no doubt sent word back to Berwick by now, but after trudging up river in the shallows, we hope to have lost any trackers the Sheriff might send after us. No one knows where this camp is, so we will be safe here.”

They rode in silence for a beat while Broc fished in his saddle bags for something. He produced a piece of dried salt pork and she ate, hungrily. Anne couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten.

“How long have we been on the road?”

“All day and now into the night.”

Anne swallowed a bite of the tangy, stringy meat and hoped it would calm her stomach.

“Thank you for saving me, Broc.”

His horse wickered, undoubtedly at the slow pace. He had a tight grip on the reins and the muscles in his forearms glinted in the moonlight as they rippled in use.

“It was mostly William. I knocked out the Sheriff and William kept me from beating him to a bloody pulp.” He straightened his shoulders and looked off to his left. “William is who you should really thank.”

Oh, Broc, if you only knew. You might wish you’d killed him after all
. “I wish I could thank him. He was a good man, I’m sure.”

“He’s been with us nearly since the beginning.” Broc cleared his throat. “But we all knew what we signed up for when we joined
with Andrew in the beginning. It perhaps means something different now that we have something to lose.”

Anne tilted her head. “Something to lose?”

“William was new-married. Less than a year, in fact. It reminds us that our lives are not our own.”

“I’m so sorry. I wish I could have been of more help.”

“Anne, you were instrumental. We could not have escaped in the first place without you.”

She clasped her hands under the blanket. Was that really true? Had she been that helpful? “I’m not sure I was much help, but I’m glad to do what I can.”

They continued in silence for several minutes. Broc kept his pace at her side and Anne laid against the hard lump behind her, trying to decide if she should sleep or rise.

“
Even though you decry, I am grateful that you found me.”

He didn’t
respond at first and she wished she could have seen his face. It had been so many years since they’d had a conversation of any consequence. While he seemed still the same man she’d known, only grown up a bit, she couldn’t be certain of how he would really respond to her, or what he would be thinking.

“
No matter what power he has, no man deserves to treat a woman as such. He is a disgrace to mankind.”

Anne’s heart began to race.
Broc, the poor fool, believed he’d saved her from something horrific. The truth was, the horror had already happened. This was just dessert.

And yet a tiny part of her, when she
had seen the Sheriff’s face over her and felt his hands choking her life away, had still hoped for someone to save her. She had to admit, she’d wished for Aedan. Perhaps his brute strength or his hardened demeanor wouldn’t have left the Sheriff living, and as much as she was glad for her own safety, she couldn’t stop picturing the faceless woman pitching from a castle tower in the black of the night.

She would never be that woman again.

There was most certainly part of her that wished Broc had been Aedan, and that Aedan had kept beating the Sheriff’s head against the stone walls until the pig was dead.

“Well, I thank you for intervening,” she said.

“I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d let him keep hurting you.”

The silence returned. The latent emotion in his voice brought hope to her heart
. If he felt that strongly about her protection, perhaps he would honor their old agreement and marry her. That way, he could save her not only from the Sheriff, but from her mother’s machinations as well.

She would wait until they reached camp to ask him. Not only did she want that conversation to be a private one, but she also needed the time to plan out exactly how she would say it, and how she could then convince him to ride right back into Berwick, and the den of that monster he’d just escaped, in order to save Elena as well. Knowing Broc, it wouldn’t take much. He was loyal to a fault and fearless, as far as she could remember.

The only trick would be deceiving her own heart into thinking this was anything more than a marriage of convenience to a friend and a good man. And forgetting her growing fascination with a certain imperfect face.

That might be the best trick of all.

*****

Anne woke up when the cart jolted to a halt.
Either the clouds had moved away or light came from another source, because she could now see her surroundings with more clarity.

The cart itself was larger than she had expected. Wide enough across and deep enough that she hadn’t felt the presence of the three other bodies. At least two of them showed signs of life, although that didn’t stop her shuddering at the thought of sleeping next to dead men.

She took a calming breath and sat up. The sides of the cart were low, perhaps only a foot or two in height, and easy to look over once she was upright. With a glance behind her, she noticed that whatever she’d been leaning on was also moving.

In the span of a moment, Anne was on her feet. Behind her lay two more men
, side by side. She appeared to have been laying on another blanket that was stuffed against one of the men. She almost recognized the man. He was older, nearer her father’s age, likely, and had braided dark hair and a thick beard.

This was the man Broccin had been carrying and so carefully protecting in the dungeon. Thankfully, he appeared to be alive and awake. Paler than the man at his side, but living.

The man next to him either had not woken or had expired, because he lay completely still. She reached down to help the man who had served as her pillow.

“Thank you, lass,” he said in heavily accented Gaelic. She relished the familiarity of the language. He leaned on her for support. “I hope you slept well on the journey.”

“Let me find someone to help you.” Anne looked around, searching through the milling men on the ground. But before she found a familiar face, the pressure of the man’s arm released and she looked up to see that Broc had somehow climbed into the cart and taken the man’s weight on himself.

“Lachlan,” Broc said. “You seem to be healing some.”

The man laughed until a cough stopped him. “You treat me like an injured soldier.” He looked down at Anne with a wink. “I bear only the wounds of the dungeon, and it would likely do me better to walk around instead of be carried.”

Broc assisted him to the end of the cart as they stepped
over the other occupants. “Wait there, my lady,” he called back to Anne.

“Lachlan would carry a sword if I let him.” Broccin jumped down then offered his shoulder to the man as he did likewise, but with a loud groan upon landing.

“I would do my duty, like any Scot.” Lachlan straightened as Broc moved around the cart and stood in front of Anne. He took her hand and escorted her to the end, as well.

She stood for a moment, looking out across the unfamiliar land in front of her. “Where are we?”

Lachlan took her other hand and the two men held her as she floated for the briefest of moments before her feet touched the ground.