Page 100 of Wild Wicked Scot
“The hell if I know.”
“Why are you asking me these questions?” she snapped. “I’ve not thought of it. I’ve only thought of us here, and now—”
He grabbed the handle of the back door. “That’s the difference between you and me, aye? I think of little else.” He barged out, the door banging behind him.
She thought of the two of them, too—she thought of them all the time. But Margot was a different woman now. She was herownwoman. But she hadn’t figured everything out just yet.
Arran did not come back in until it was pitch-dark. Margot was in bed, lying on her side, her back to the door, when he loudly entered the room. She’d built the fire tonight, and he wordlessly shed his clothes before it, then climbed in beside her. He pulled her to his body, kissing her neck, his hands roaming her flesh, sliding in between her legs.
“Once,” she whispered into the hair at the top of his head as he kissed her breast, “I was a silly girl. I thought only of arranged marriages and fortunes, of what I would wear and who esteemed me and what things I might have around me. But I’m different now, Arran. I don’t even know myself any longer.”
He grunted his response, moved down her body, spread her legs apart and sank between them, as if to say he knew her. And that she was part of him.
* * *
THEDAYSBEGANto grow shorter and the nights colder. Two hares and a grouse hung in the barn. Late-blooming flowers were growing around the lodge. Margot was in the garden one afternoon, taking cuttings of the flowers, when she heard a sound that didn’t quite register. She paused, listening...and slowly understood that what she was hearing were riders.
She felt a swoon of apprehension as she slowly lifted her head and looked over her shoulder. There, down the narrow glen, cantering alongside the loch, were four riders. They were coming to the lodge.
Everything seemed to suddenly grow too bright. Margot dropped the flowers and ran around the corner of the lodge to the outbuildings, flinging open the door where Arran was working.
“Christ in his heaven, what is it?” Arran asked when she burst through the door. He caught her with one arm and held her still. “What is it, Margot?”
“Horsemen.”
Arran pushed her aside, grabbed his gun from the wooden table and strode outside. Margot looked wildly about for something to defend herself with. She spotted the little knife he often carried in his boot, grabbed it and ran after him. She caught up to him just in front of the lodge. But his gun was pointed at the ground. “Aye, that’s Jock,” he said. “There is only one man who sits a horse like that.”
He strode out to greet his cousin.
But as the riders drew closer, Margot saw someone else that made tears spring to her eyes. Knox was with him. She raced to her brother, leaping up to hug him before he’d had time to come down from his horse.
Knox laughed into her embrace. “You’ll break my fool neck, Margot. Come,” he said, wrapping his arm around her waist. “There is much to tell you and Mackenzie.”
They gathered inside the lodge, and after the party from Balhaire was assured that Margot and Arran were indeed quite well, Jock told them what had happened.
“It was quick-like,” he said. “Rory and Bruce Gordon were accused of throwing in with the Jacobites, and the crown come looking for them—English soldiers all, forty of them if there was a one. But do you know, they slipped out under a heavy mist, bound for France.”
“This doesna surprise me. I’ve never put much store by Gordon,” Arran said.
“But that wasna the whole of it, laird,” Jock said. “Gordon left behind a few things, and one of them was a letter from Tom Dunn, aye? In the letter, he insinuates that he and his partner will share the wealth of Balhaire when you are hanged for treason.”
Arran swallowed. “As we suspected,” he muttered darkly.
“But did you suspect his partner was my father?” Knox asked.
“What?” Margot said. “That can’t possibly be.”
“But it is, darling,” Knox said. “Thomas Dunn was steeped in duplicitous dealings. When the authorities came for Father, he finally confessed to me what he and Bryce had known all along—Thomas Dunn was in a great deal of debt. Moreover, he’d fallen out of favor with the queen as talk of uprisings and conspiracy to remove her from the throne kept coming from the very men he’d vowed would keep James Stuart from our shores. He was desperate, and he devised a scheme to cast the blame on someone else and profit from it at the same time. He landed on Mackenzie because of his self-made wealth and his marriage to you.”
“Aye, this we’d surmised,” Arran said impatiently.
“But how was Pappa involved?” Margot asked.
“Dunn told him that Mackenzie was a traitor. Father panicked and sent you to discover if that was true before Dunn could act. But while you were gone, Margot, Dunn apparently realized that it could all go wrong and he’d be exposed. So he offered our father a deal of sorts—if Father would agree to corroborate his accusations against your husband, he would receive a substantial stake in the Mackenzie holdings once they were forfeited. Dunn assumed the holdings would come to him for exposing the treason.”
This news was a knife to her heart. She knew her father was culpable in some way, but this was so despicable it knocked the breath from her.“No,”she whispered. “How could he?”
“It was dirty business,” Knox said quietly.
