Page 71 of Highlanders for the Holidays
“Och! Someonewillnotice I am gone,” she warned the man, remembering another time she’d made such threats in vain. And yet, this time, Page knew beyond a shadow of doubt that her husband and clan valued her. Someonewouldcome searching the instant they realized she was gone. These were now her people, and they would never sit idly by, allowing this man to take her life. “They’ll come after you, theywillfind you and theywillhang you from the gallows.”
“Nay,” the man said confidently, once again jerking her arm. There was a smile in his voice. “They will find your father’s camp. They’ll blame Hugh. And when they kill him, I’ll be gone.”
A spark of hope flared—inconceivably, not because this man meant to murder her, but because her father might not be the one behind this atrocity after all. Still she wanted to know, “Why is my father here?”
“Because that bag of wind believes he can buy his way to heaven by rebuilding a few huts.”
Page’s heart thumped against her ribs.
Her father was the one who rebuilt the huts?
Her brow furrowed, and then suddenly she realized … those odors back in the stable… they were scents from her past—lavender, cinnamon and cloves. The cloves she could still smell over-strongly on the man dragging her along—a tincture exactly like the one the kitchen maid had used to use to mask her body’s scent. She had a son, a bit older than Page, that she liked to claim was a servant of God. Page had often wondered if his father was a fish because his mother smelled so foul. She said the boy had a noble sire, and then one day he was gone...
Page swallowed, hard. “I know who you are.”
The man jerked her arm once again and said, “Shut up.”
Peering over her shoulder, Page searched for moving shadows. She spied nothing.Nothing at all.Judging by the growing silence, her husband never reemerged from the stables, and her heart squeezed with fear.
And neither did anyone else seem to realize what was happening here, and her father—wherever he might be—was in as much danger as she was: If Iain happened to find him first, and she hadn’t had the chance to explain—or if Malcom or Cameron discovered Hugh before Iain did, they would kill him without question.
“What makes you think you’ll get away with this?” Page asked furiously.
“Shut up,” the man said again, and Page grit her teeth.
They slipped into the woods, and peering over her shoulder once more, gauging the bonfire’s distance, she decided she had far more to lose by keeping silent. Be damned if any man but her husband would ever tell her what to do again. She spun around, screaming her father’s name at the top of her lungs.
