Caught By the Cruel Highlander (The Highland Marriage Pact #2)

Prologue

"Ye're nae what I expected."

Margaret had been preparing for this moment for four months. She had prepared in the way she prepared for everything that frightened her—by imagining it so many times, in such precise detail, that the reality could not surprise her.

She had imagined a man of duty, and she had prepared for duty. She had not prepared for the specific, flat quality of contempt.

She looked up at him. He was taller than she had imagined, and she had envisioned him tall.

The hall made most men appear small, with its vaulted ceiling and long shadows, but not Fergus MacKenzie.

He stood in the circle of firelight with the stillness of a man who had never needed to fill a room with noise because his presence did it without his permission. His face was unreadable.

She had spent four months picturing his face. She had not expected that look.

"Ye're nae what I expected either," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she had any right to expect. "Though I confess I kept me expectations modest."

Something shifted across his face. Not warmth, but recognition—perhaps that she had teeth.

He did not respond to it.

"This marriage..." he began. He stopped, then looked toward the far window where the wind pressed against the shutters with a low, persistent moan. He looked back. "It was decreed. I want ye to understand that. I didnae choose this."

"I'm aware," Margaret said. "Neither did I."

"Aye." He clasped his hands behind his back. "Then we understand each other."

"I'm nae certain we do," she said carefully. "Ye've said what this marriage isnae. I'd find it useful to hear what ye think it is."

He studied her. She maintained eye contact without looking away. She had learned from her mother that the first person to look away in these exchanges had already lost something, and she was not yet ready to start losing things.

"It's a contract," he said. "Bindin'. Necessary.

Signed under pressure from men who've never set foot on MacKenzie land and have nay understandin' of what I'm tryin' to build there.

" He exhaled, sharp and controlled. "I have a clan newly settled.

Men who daenae trust me yet because I came to the title late and by a road they'd have preferred to travel themselves.

I have borders that are nae yet secure and stores that will barely last the winter if we're nae careful.

I have a hundred problems that require every hour I have.

" He looked at her with eyes that were, she realized, not cold so much as exhausted. "I daenae have room for a wife."

The word landed exactly as he had intended. She felt it in her chest, a small, hard impact.

She thought of her mother's voice, low and practical, the morning before she'd left. ‘Ye cannae control what a man offers ye, Margaret. Ye can only control what ye decide to do with it.' She had rolled her eyes at the time. She understood it now.

"I see," she said.

"I daenae say it to wound ye."

"Ye say it to be clear."

"Aye."

"Then I'll be equally clear." She took one step forward.

Not enough to crowd him, but enough to make it plain that she was not retreating.

"I didnae ask for this either, Fergus MacKenzie.

I left me home and me family and every person I've kent since I was a child, and I came north to a castle full of strangers to marry a man I'd never met because the elders decreed it and me father believed in the peace it would help secure.

I did that without complaint. I prepared for a man I might nae love. "

She kept her voice even. She was proud of how even it stayed. "What I didnae prepare for was bein' told, before the vows are cold, that I am a distraction."

He had the grace not to speak immediately. Around them, the great hall moved on without them. A low tide of voices, the scrape of benches, the smell of food and tallow smoke hanging in the raftered air. No one was watching. Or if they were, they had the sense not to show it.

The fire settled in the grate with a soft collapse of ash, and the silence between Margaret and Fergus stretched.

"Yer safety is nae in question," he said finally. "Ye'll have everythin' ye need here. Isobel is yer friend, and this castle is her home. Ye'll be well cared for."

"I am nae askin' to be cared for," Margaret said. "I am askin' to be a wife."

"I cannae."

"I ken what ye cannae. I'm askin' what ye will."

He stopped. She watched him look at her again, and this time something in his eyes was different. She was not sure if that was better or worse.

"I'll return north," he said. "To the clan. When things are more settled, when the land is secure, and the men have learned to trust the title, I'll send for ye. Ye'll come north then and we'll..." He stopped again. "We'll make what we can of it."

"And when will that be?" she asked.

He said nothing.

"A season? A year? Two years? I'd like to ken how long I'm to sit in someone else's castle bein' cared for before I'm permitted to begin me own life."

"I daenae ken," he said. And she believed him. That was the worst part of it. She could have done something with a lie. With the truth, she had nothing.

She looked at him standing there in the firelight with his jaw set, his hands still, and his eyes doing that complicated, exhausted thing they did.

She thought about the girl she had been eight months ago, who had received the elders' decree, wept in private, then dried her face and begun preparing herself.

That girl believed, deep down, that the man at the end of the road would see her, find her useful, capable, and maybe, eventually, worth choosing.

She was done with that girl now. She could feel it, the exact moment of it, standing in this hall with the peat smoke in her throat and the cold coming off the stone.

"Then go," she said.

"Go north. Secure yer land. Win yer men.

Do what a laird must do." She lifted her chin.

"I willnae beg ye to stay. I willnae write letters askin' when ye're comin' back.

I willnae sit in Isobel's castle countin' the weeks and waitin' to be sent for like a piece of furniture that's been put in storage. "

She met his gaze and held it. "But when ye do send for me, when yer land is settled, and yer men trust their Laird, and ye decide ye're ready to have a wife, ye'll find that I've also been busy.

And the woman who comes north to yer castle will nae be the woman standin' in front of ye now, so I'd advise ye nae to expect her. "

The silence that followed was long enough that she heard the wind change pitch outside.

"Aye," he said. His voice had changed. She couldn't name how.

He turned and walked to the door. When he reached it, he stopped, his hand on the wood, his back still facing her. She waited. She had nothing to say to his back, and she would not fill the silence for him.

He did not turn around.

He walked out.

The sound of his boots on the stone passage gradually faded, then disappeared, leaving only the fire, the wind, and the quiet that follows a door closing.

Around her, the hall moved on, voices, scraping chairs, the ordinary noise of a celebration that did not know or care what had just ended beside the hearth.

Margaret stood still for a moment. She looked at the fire and allowed herself to fully feel the weight of it, the loneliness, the anger, and the sharp sting of being told plainly that she was not wanted.

She felt it completely, without an audience, because she would not pretend to be composed when she had no reason to be.

Then she unclenched her hands.

"Margaret."

Isobel appeared at her side, she had been there for some time, hovering at the edge of the hearthlight, close enough to reach her but far enough to give her room. Her eyes were soft with something that was not pity. Margaret was grateful for that. She could not have borne pity.

"I'm all right," Margaret said.

"I ken ye are," Isobel said. "That's nae what I was goin' to say."

"What were ye goin' to say?"

Isobel looked at her for a moment. "I was goin' to say that I'm sorry. Nae because of what he said. Because ye deserved better than this night. Ye came here in good faith, and ye were met with..." She stopped. "Ye deserved better."

Margaret looked at her friend. She felt the back of her throat tighten and breathed through it, slow and deliberate.

"He's nae wrong," she said quietly. "About the clan. About what he's building up there. I understand the difficulty of it." She paused. "I simply daenae think it excuses him."

"It doesnae," Isobel agreed.

"Good." Margaret smoothed the fabric of her gown. Her hands were steady. She was proud of her hands. "Then we're agreed."

She looked at the door he had walked through. She stared at it long enough to say goodbye to the version of this night she had hoped for and allowed herself to mourn it briefly, as you mourn something that was never real, which is its own kind of grief.

"Tell me about the castle," she said to Isobel. "Tell me what needs doin'. I'll need somethin' to occupy meself until spring."

Isobel blinked. "Tonight?"

"Tonight," Margaret said. "There's nay point in sittin' with it. I'd rather be useful."

She pulled a chair toward the hearth and sat down, and if her eyes were slightly too bright in the firelight, neither of them mentioned it.

Isobel sat across from her, and they talked until the fire burned low, and the hall grew warm with their voices, while the empty space where Fergus MacKenzie had stood slowly began to belong to her instead.