Page 98 of Wild Wicked Scot
“Do you know what I’ve discovered? That I am nothing more than a pawn in this world. To be bartered and traded and cast aside when I am no longer useful.”
She sounded bitter, but Arran couldn’t disagree with her. That’s what daughters were to many families—bargaining power. Very few had managed to forge their own paths and do as they pleased. Griselda had, only because Uncle Ivor adored her so. He’d allowed her to refuse suitors and live freely, without a husband.
“I will never be a pawn in someone’s scheme again,” Margot murmured. “I should sooner live in poverty, all alone, than live with others in opulence for no better reason than my name and the connections I can bring to them.”
“You are no’ only a name to me,” he said.
Margot didn’t seem to have heard him—she was suddenly looking around her. “I don’t know how to live like this,” she said plaintively. “I am so useless to you that I can’t as much as bake a loaf of bread.”
“It doesna matter—”
“Itdoesmatter, Arran! I’ve lived like a privileged blind woman. I despise myself for it—but I will never make that mistake again,” she said. She sighed. “I’m tired. Can we go to bed?”
They found one room with a bed large enough for the two of them. They both fell into it, exhausted beyond measure. Margot rolled into his side, nesting there. “I don’t know how to exist like this,” she said again.
Then there were two of them, because neither did Arran. He could hunt and fish and keep them alive, but he didn’t know how to exist like this. Without a clan. Without his family. Alone, with a wife who, in spite of the events the last several days, he still didn’t know if he could fully trust.
He fell into a deep sleep, the first real sleep he’d had in weeks. So deep, in fact, that he never heard Margot leave him early the next morning. But when he awoke, she was gone. Arran panicked; he pulled on his buckskins and went in search of her, looking in every room until he’d made his way to the kitchen, fearing she’d taken the horse and tried to leave like a madwoman.
But Margot hadn’t left him. She was in the kitchen, her back to him, dressed in the old skirt he’d found. It was far too big for her and dragged the floor. She had tied the lawn shirt in a knot at her waist and had tied her hair into a knot at her nape. She was working at something on the counter that he couldn’t see.
He walked deeper into the kitchen. She looked up with surprise, and her face lit with pleasure. “Look!” she said excitedly. “I found a potato!” She held it up to him. “There were turnips, too. And leeks, I think.”
Arran was, he realized, bowled over on a wave of relief. He’d had that awful thought that she’d left him again. Improbable, impossible, and yet that was the fear that had crept in around his heart when she wasn’t in bed this morning.
As she bubbled on about the garden she’d found, and how she did once accompany her grandmother to pick brambles from the bramble bush and could certainly do that again, Arran knew he would have lost his mind if she’d gone.
Her words filled the space around them, swelling up and surrounding him while a river of love for the woman burned through him.
It burned bright.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
ITHADALLseemed like a dream to Margot. From the moment Knox had ridden away from her, and every moment that passed as they moved farther north, she had grown more and more uncertain about her choice. The thought that she would never see England again, or Norwood Park, or Knox and Lynetta, began to weigh heavily in her heart.
And then to arrive at this deserted lodge at the end of a deeply remote loch to fend for her life? It was all too much to bear. She was unprepared for this. She didn’t have the slightest idea what to do in a kitchen, had scarcely been in them at all, save those few times she went in search of an apple or orange. And that was only the beginning of her ineptitude.
As a result, she and Arran stumbled through the first few days at the lodge. Of course he was more adept at making do than she was, but he was no more accustomed to keeping a house than she was, really. They had quite a row when he proudly presented her with a duck to pluck.
“Pluck?”she echoed, looking at the bird in horror.
“Aye, the feathers.” He held it out to her.
“But...how?”
Arran looked at her strangely. “You remove them.Pluck.” He jerked a feather free of the bird.
Margot recoiled.
He frowned. “Do it, Margot. I canna do everything.”
“I am aware!” she snapped. She took the bird and, wincing, began to pluck. It was a horrible, wretched mess. She fought tears for the damn bird—such indignity in his death! Or was she fighting tears for the loss of her dignity? But she plucked it clean, and when she presented the battered carcass to Arran, he was not impressed by her effort. “Aye, I see. And now you must clean it.”
“I will not!” she cried, and fled the kitchen when Arran seemed determined to force her.
Later, after Arran had cleaned it and cooked it, Margot had to admit the duck made for an excellent meal.
When Arran gave her a duck a few days later, Margot could pluck it well enough and without complaint.
