Page 38 of Highlander's Sinless Nymph
Charlotte let out a breath. “You will think my answer a cold one,” she said.
Edward grinned inwardly. After what he had been through as of late, a rough word or two would not hurt him.
“I’m willin’ to risk me feelin’s if it will help ye speak yer mind,” he said.
“Yes, you strike me as a man that arrows would bounce off, let alone words,” Charlotte said. “And that, if I’m being honest, is why I am sitting here with you now.”
Edward said nothing. Let a silence stretch long enough and someone will fill it eventually. His father, the Laird, had taught him that.
“Opportunity,” Charlotte said. “That is what you afforded me, that day you came across me in the beech wood, though I did not know it at the time. Opportunity.”
“Opportunity fer what?” Edward prompted her.
“For escape,” Charlotte said simply. “If I had returned to camp and my father had beaten me just as he did––but I hadnotmet you––then I do not doubt for a moment that I would still be there now.”
“I’ve been called a lot worse than ‘an opportunity’, Sassenach,” Edward said to her. “If that is the extent of yer cold words then I thank ye.”
Charlotte gave him a shy smile, but did not break his gaze, as she would have only a day or two before.
She is beginning to trust me.
“Yes, you were an opportunity––or, maybe more accurately, a catalyst for change,” the young woman said to him. “You are strong and brave and steadfast. I know we have not known each other long, but I feel that I can trust you. I cannot help but think that it was Fate that brought us together at just such a time as this.”
This time it was Edward’s turn to break eye contact with Charlotte. He felt a squirming in his innards, and realized that it was hot guilt that was writhing in there. The fact that he had contrived to be in that wood with the sole purpose of watching her father, that chance had brought Charlotte to him and that he had then made it his mission––one way or another––to get her to come with him, sat in his mind uneasily.
“Aye…Fate…maybe,” he said, gruffly.
It did not help matters at all that he was coming to regard her with more and more respect and warmth. It was becoming harder and harder to remind himself that she was the daughter of his most loathed enemy and that, should it be required, he would have to make a hostage of her.
He cleared his throat and said, “Has he always been as he is now? Yer faither, I mean.”
Charlotte took a deep breath, wrapped the blanket tighter around her shoulders, as if to protect herself from a cold wind, and stared into the fire for a moment.
“My father has always been a…focused man,” she said. “Single-minded, dedicated and––”
“Ruthless in achievin’ his goals?” Edward interjected, before he could stop himself.
Charlotte nodded. “Ruthless would probably be a good word,” she said. “He came from nothing, you see. His story might be an admirable one, if it were not so wreathed in dubious dealings and shadowy events.”
“How do ye mean?” Edward asked. He was genuinely intrigued to hear about his nemesis’s past. Knowing where the man had come from, how he had gotten to where he was, might help him understand what they might expect him to do next.
Charlotte shook her head. “I don’t want to bore––or, more likely, disgust––you by going through his questionable past. I only know of snatches of it anyway. Rumors that I have heard told around the campfire and the like. Just know that he was a commoner once, an orphan. He joined the army as a boy and climbed the ranks from there.”
Edward was surprised. The level of vindictive cruelty that had become synonymous with Captain Bolton’s campaigning techniques were the sort that Edward had only ever heard employed by those who had been born and raised as thinking themselves better than other men. Those––in a nutshell––who were of aristocratic or noble birth.
“So, in spite o’ the way that he presumably had to claw his way to his captaincy, he still turned out a ruthless and unsympathetic cutthroat?” he asked Charlotte.
“I think that, where some men may have learned empathy on that road, he only learned that the strong, disciplined, and merciless take what they want,” Charlotte replied sadly.
She picked up a stick, poked at the fire and piled a few more logs onto it. Edward had noticed that she made sure to do little jobs like this when they were camped. He supposed that it was to make herself useful in any small way that she could. His heart shrank slightly at this show of goodness, and made him feel even more uncomfortable at having brought her along under questionable pretenses.
“So, he’s always treated ye this way?” he said, keen to keep the conversation moving along so that he might dwell less on his own dishonesty.
“He always kept me at a distance, even when I was a little girl,” Charlotte said. She was still poking gently at the fire with the stick, moving the glowing embers and sending amber sparks floating happily up into the night sky. “But, it was not until my mother passed away that he started to lay hands on me.”
The crackle of the burning wood was the only sound as Charlotte’s voice died. Edward watched her intently. Wondering what the next revelation would be. Wondering if anything that he heard about this man would surprise him.
When Charlotte next spoke, it was in a rush; the words tumbling out of her mouth as if she was afraid that if she did not speak them quickly enough they would stay trapped inside her forever.
