Claimed By a Scottish Lord (Mystical Bliss #2)

Chapter 1

The Borders, Scotland

Rose Lancaster jumped back from the cobbled street barely escaping being run down by the village crier mounted on a shaggy horse.

“Hear ye, here ye! The Black Dragon has returned! Lord Roxburghe has come home!”

Despite the unusual heat of the day, the streets and narrow alleyways of Castleton were filled with people as if it were an autumn country-fair day.

The village’s younger maidens and children lined the cobbled streets nearer to the square.

They carried flowers, now wilted from the uncommon heat. Some had been here for hours.

Rose stood taller than most surrounding and jostling her. Shading her eyes with a hand, she peered in the direction from where the crier had come. Her height was God’s gift or curse, depending on the day—and the company. She glimpsed the growing wall of dust approaching the village.

Since half of the surrounding lands around Castleton lay on the Scottish side of the border, many of the town’s residents called themselves Scots.

But in a place where skirmishes had been fought over stolen sheep and women, religion and politics since before the Roman emperor Hadrian built his infamous wall to separate England from the northern hordes, a man’s loyalty oft depended upon who was visiting on any given day.

Not this day.

For as long as she remembered, she had heard grand stories about the Roxburghe heir, the Borders’ native son, a former privateer and smuggler. Now, after a thirteen-year absence and the murder of his father, Ruark Kerr, the border lord had come home to procure his place as head of the Kerr clan.

Though no one knew for certain what had driven him from Scotland those long years ago, everyone seemed to understand and appreciate what brought him back.

Shortly after his father’s death earlier this year, the king’s warden arrested and imprisoned Roxburghe’s twelve-year-old half brother.

The boy had been languishing in a prison for weeks.

Rose had listened all morning to speculation that Roxburghe’s long-awaited homecoming would bring war down upon the hated English warden, a man Rose also hated since his return to England a year ago.

But she could not think about the world’s problems as she set her sights on a way to cross the street.

Taking this main road leading through the village square had turned out to be a mistake only amplified as the crowd surged against her.

If she did not make it back to the abbey before nightfall, Friar Tucker would return and discover her gone.

She disliked deceiving him. Having raised her since she was three, he was dearer than her father.

Angry for allowing herself to be trapped in the impassable human current, she clasped a collection of books to her chest and continued to shoulder her way through the press of people, feeling like a salmon fighting an upstream current. “Pardon. I need to squeeze through. Pardon.”

A woman’s voice suddenly stopped her. “Rose, child. Whatever are you doing in Castleton? What have you there in your arms?”

Rose patiently smiled at the aged shopkeeper who was also the village postmaster.

Silver sausage ringlets peaked out from beneath the calash of a stiff white bonnet framing her face.

Rose bobbed a polite curtsey. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Graham. I am taking these books to the abbey. Mrs. Simpson found them in her husband’s collection and loaned them to me. ”

Mrs. Graham’s ample bosom rose and pressed against a red apron. “Och, child. I have never known a person what spent more time with books than you do. You need to find yerself a man and settle down. Now, me Geddes is a strappin’ lad and will inherit my shop one day.”

Geddes Graham was also a malefactor whose loyalty to any cause could be bought for a stipend.

Rose peered at the quaint little boutique over the elder’s shoulder, its bric-a-brac decorating the brightly painted shelves behind the large window recently installed.

She wondered sadly how a kind woman like Mrs. Graham could birth a weasel like Geddes.

Rose’s longing for a family was a subject she rarely broached with anyone, but she had bigger dreams than to live out her life with any man she did not love or who did not love her in return.

“Thank you, Mrs. Graham.” She kissed the woman’s cheek. “If I should wed, I could not want for a better mother-in-law than someone like you.”

The matron pressed a palm to her cheek and blushed.

“Pish-posh, child.” She giggled and pulled a folded missive from her pocket, sealed with a wafer impressed with a cross and a sword, Friar Tucker’s signet.

“This came for the abbey this morning,” she said over the low din.

“Jack has no’ been by to fetch the mail. ”

Rose shifted the books in her arms and popped the wax seal. With the abbey’s prioress nearly blind, Rose managed the daily business and correspondence for Sister Nessa. “Jack is with me.” She skimmed the page.

Friar Tucker had gone to Redesdale some days ago to attend the funeral of an uncle. Now something of utmost importance took him to Carlisle. He would return by the end of the month. A postscript read that they were not to worry.

Why would he say that? The very dictate caused apprehension. Why would he go to Carlisle? “Thank you, Mrs. Graham.”

She started to turn when a shout from farther up the road brought the crowd to life.

As if it were one beast, the throng seemed to awaken and move, dragging Rose forward.

Until now, she had kept her fiery hair hidden beneath its purple-and-green plaid wrap that even though it did not complement her simple yellow dress she cherished all the same.

It was all she had left of a mother she remembered only in vignettes.

Clutching the books in her arms, she struggled to pull her scarf tighter around her shoulders, afraid it would be torn from her and crushed beneath careless feet.

The ground beneath Rose began to rumble. An overpowering curiosity captured her and caused her to remain and watch the procession through town.

“Roxburghe always was a wild one,” Mrs. Graham said, clearly relishing the delicious horror of it all, while craning her short neck to see over the crowd.

“We were surprised ’e didn’t end up at the bottom of the sea or hanged from the gallows, him leaving the way he did those years ago.

Now they say he’s here to exact revenge on the warden for holding Roxburghe’s brother for ransom.

Hereford will start a war over that lad.

Roxburghe is no’ a man to sit back and do anyone’s bidding.

” Mrs Graham leaned nearer. “Lord love us, Rose,” she shouted above the growing din. “Do ye see him yet?”

Rose’s gaze riveted to the summit as two dozen horsemen poured into the crowded marketplace at a full gallop. Briefly silhouetted against a turbulent afternoon sky, neither men nor horses showed any sign of slowing for the eager crowd that suddenly silenced and parted like the great Red Sea.

“There he be!” a man yelled from the rooftop behind her.

The earl of Roxburghe, distinguishable by his dark blue jacket, sat atop a red Irish hunter, riding at the head of his men.

Even as she found herself holding her breath, watching as he drew nearer, Rose did not know if she should admire the Black Dragon or fear him.

But for the first time in her life, her heartbeat quickened at the sight of a man.

And unlike the dragons of old made up of only myth and legend, this one was real.

He was tall with strong shoulders. Unlike most men of his rank, he wore no wig.

His hair was nearly black and queued at his nape.

A wide leather belt with two ivory-handled pistols tucked inside cinched his jacket but did not hide the patterned crimson-and-hunter-green waistcoat beneath.

Unshaven and hatless, his leather trews and spurred boots dulled by dust, he looked like the freebooter some claimed him to be, the same man who’d made his name and fortune as an infamous privateer—a quintessential predator.

People living on the borderlands did not readily give their loyalty. But she knew most of Castleton and the surrounding farms would not have survived last winter if not for the extra goods Friar Tucker had got his hands on because of Roxburghe’s efforts.

The thunder of horses’ hooves grew deafening.

Then the Roxburghe laird was rumbling past her, followed closely by his armed retainers, the draft of their passing catching her hair and skirts in a whirlwind of dust and debris.

Beside Rose, a young woman pressed her palms to her ears against the din and laughed aloud, her voice carried upward like a bright red pennant in the wind.

The pandemonium seemed to go on forever, until amid the fading metallic clang of bridles and spurs and the ringing in her ears, someone behind her shouted, “Godspeed, Ruark.” A round of “ayes” followed the pronouncement.

Lord Roxburghe had not so much as slowed.

If Rose hadn’t been so sure she’d have been trampled to dust, she would have leapt into the street and forced him to stop just so he would at least acknowledge the little girls who carried the flowers for him.

But the riders were already passing through the square and moving away from the village before she could catch her breath and still the strange fluttering in the pit of her stomach.

A hush crawled through the crowd, broken only by an occasional cough as dust settled over them.

“Must be in a hurry,” the bearded blacksmith behind Rose said.

“Would no’ you be?” another shouted from across the street. “Hereford will pay for taking the laird’s brother to be sure.”