CHAPTER 12
In a daze, Margaret touched her fingers to her lips. Good heavens, what had happened to her? She could still feel the sensation of Finn’s mouth on hers, his hands running over her body, and the unfamiliar, blinding rush of desire.
And yet she could not recall pulling up her bodice, straightening her skirts, or waking Ella, though she must have done all those things, for she was now walking down the trail with Ella and Finn, who was leading Ceò.
One glance at Finn’s clenched jaw told her he had decided to walk rather than ride to avoid touching her.
“’Tis less than a half-mile now,” he said, with his eyes fixed straight ahead.
She tried again to understand how she had come so close to disaster.
How could she nearly risk pregnancy and another miscarriage just to lie with a man she would part with before the day was over?
From the moment Finn crushed his mouth against hers, she lost her reason.
She had never felt anything like that mindless, all-consuming passion before.
Fortunately, she had come to her senses just in time. But her body still tingled with the sensations, and her arms longed to reach for him.
She could see the clearing at the end of the wood ahead of them when Finn suddenly shoved her and Ella behind him and drew his sword.
“Finn!” The shout came from the wood.
A moment later, a ginger-haired youth emerged from the trees leading a horse and wearing a wide grin. Finn embraced the lad, then put him in a headlock and rubbed his head with his knuckles before releasing him.
“You’re traveling with a woman?” The lad’s eyes went wide as he took in Margaret and Ella. “A woman and a bairn?”
“This is Alex òg Gordon,” young Alex Gordon, Finn said, turning to Margaret, “my troublesome fifteen-year-old cousin and the future Earl of Sutherland.”
Alex blushed and dipped his head.
“This is Maggie and her daughter Ella,” Finn said. “Why were ye hiding in the brush?”
“I’ve come out here the last two days and waited for ye for hours,” Alex said. “I wanted to catch ye before ye went into the castle.”
“Why?” Finn asked. “What’s happened?”
“Moray keeps asking if you’ve arrived yet.”
“That’s no surprise,” Finn said. “He’s expecting me.”
“’Tis the way he asks,” Alex said. “I think ye may be in trouble.”
Finn pulled his cousin aside, and the two spoke in low voices Margaret could not make out.
“I’ll go into the castle alone first,” Finn told her when he returned to her side. “Alex will look after ye until I come back.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked, doing her best to remain calm.
“I just want to make sure there are no surprises.” He leaned close so that Alex would not hear and added, “After all, last time I was here, I got sent off to kidnap a lass.”
His attempt to make light of whatever trouble waited in the castle did not reassure her.
“I won’t be long,” Finn said, but when he took her hand and raised it to his lips, it felt like goodbye.
As she watched Finn disappear from sight, she suppressed the urge to call out after him, Don’t leave me.
Men did what they were going to do, regardless of how it affected anyone else, and Finn had decided to leave her and her daughter alone in the middle of the Highlands with no one but a stranger who was barely more than a boy.
A burst of laughter drew her attention to her protector, who was engaged in a lively game of peekaboo with Ella.
“I finally got a smile out of her,” Alex said, grinning at Margaret.
“Ella is usually shy, but I can see you’ve won her over already.” And that went a long way toward winning over Margaret as well. She sat down on the log beside him and asked, “Are ye staying long here at Huntly Castle?”
“I left home without my father’s permission,” he said, “so I expect I’ll be sent back soon.”
“Why did ye come without his permission?”
“Because he wouldn’t give it,” Alex said. “I had to come, ye see, because there’s a lass here that…well, I’m in love with her.”
She could not help smiling at how very forthcoming Alex was. Since Finn had left her with his chatty cousin, he had no one but himself to blame if she used the opportunity to learn more about him. “You and Finn are close?”
“Aye. Finn fostered with my father, so he spent a good deal of time with us at Dunrobin Castle. That’s our home up north in Sutherland,” Alex said. “Finn is like a big brother to me—the good kind of big brother.”
“Ye seemed quite surprised to find him traveling with me and Ella,” she said.
“Finn is not one to be with a lass long enough to travel with her.” Alex paused to do another peekaboo for Ella. “And he’s never with a lass who’s looking for a husband.”
“What makes ye think I’m looking for a husband?” she asked.
“Finn says a lass with a bairn always is,” Alex said, as if Finn was the authority on all things female.
“The last thing I want is a husband,” she said.
“That’s good,” Alex said. “Much to my mother’s frustration, Finn is dead set against taking a wife.”
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As Finn approached the gates of Huntly, he wondered if he would ever leave the castle again.
Hopefully, Alex was wrong about trouble awaiting him, but Finn had not survived this long among his Gordon and Sinclair relations by ignoring warnings.
He’d made Alex promise that if he did not return, Alex would arrange for Margaret and Ella to be taken safely to Edinburgh.
He hoped his young cousin was up to the task.
The change in plan had made Margaret anxious, but she did not complain. She never did. On the chance he would not see her again, he had kissed Margaret’s hand as an excuse to touch her and to look into her soft brown eyes one last time.
Evidently, Moray was as anxious to see him as Alex claimed. The guards at the gate ushered him into the castle and straight into the private room behind the hall where he’d met with Moray before.
Moray was not a man easily rattled, but when he looked up from the parchment he was reading and saw Finn, tension rolled off him in thick waves.
“Where’s Lady Margaret?” Moray asked in lieu of a greeting as soon as the guards closed the door behind Finn.
Something was seriously amiss here. Though Finn had no notion what it was, he went with his instincts and decided to lie.
“I did try to kidnap her, Your Grace,” he said, spreading his hands out. “But I couldn’t get near the lass. She was too closely watched.”
“Praise God for that!” Moray said, and drained his cup, though he was neither particularly religious nor a drinker. “The odds were against you succeeding. Still, I feared you had.”
“And I feared you’d be disappointed,” Finn said as he accepted the cup of wine Moray poured for him. “What changed your mind about wanting a Douglas kidnapped?”
“As I told you before, the council decided to rotate custody of the king’s person among four magnates to avoid giving any one faction too much power,” Moray said. “Douglas was given the first three months.”
Finn waited to hear why Moray was telling him all this again.
“Douglas’s rotation is coming to an end.” Moray folded his long, elegant fingers on the table. “He’s refusing to relinquish the king to the next custodians.”
Finn sat up straighter. “Refusing? Can he do that?”
“He has the king in his possession, and my sources tell me he keeps a close guard on him at all times,” Moray said. “Douglas claims it’s his right as the king’s stepfather to be his sole custodian and that the king wishes this as well.”
“Does the king wish it?” Finn asked.
“After his mother filled the lad’s ears with venom about Douglas for the last three years? I sincerely doubt it,” Moray said. “I’m told, however, the king’s cage is a gilded one designed to divert a young man—with feasts, gambling and, of course, women.”
“I would think that would give us all the more reason to want leverage over Douglas to force him to return young Huntly,” Finn said.
“Archibald Douglas has won the battle, and the kingdom is in his hands now, which changes the calculation considerably,” Moray said. “For however long Douglas holds the king, it’s in young Huntly’s interest to remain in Douglas’s care as well.”
“Something tells me you’re not leaving him there for the feasts and the women.”
“Huntly will be the king’s constant companion throughout his ordeal—and the king will come to view this time when his stepfather keeps him under his thumb and rules in his name as an ordeal, despite the feasts and women,” Moray said.
“No matter what Douglas does, the king will eventually become a man and rule, and the special bond between Huntly and the king will be of value to him, the Gordons, and their allies for many, many years to come.”
Finn was not surprised that such dramatic news of the king had traveled faster than he did among the nobility or that news of Margaret’s disappearance had not.
The Douglases would want to keep Margaret’s disappearance quiet while they searched for her to avoid rumors that such a valuable marriage prize had run off with a lover.
“Tell me,” Finn said, tilting his head, “what would ye have done if I had succeeded and come here with Lady Margaret?”
“What do you think I’d do?” Moray asked.
“Put the blame on me and throw me in chains,” Finn said. “You’d have Douglas in your debt for rescuing his sister from a damned rogue you would say tried to exchange her for gold.”
Moray leaned back in his chair and smiled. “My mother said you were clever.”
“Ach, not as clever as all that,” Finn said. “If I had succeeded in kidnapping the lass, I would have walked right into the trap and ended up in your dungeon.” Or dead.
“I would have sincerely regretted having to do it,” Moray said as he refilled Finn’s cup. “My mother would have been rather angry with me. But what else could I do?”
Moray’s remark reminded him of what Margaret said. Men always have choices, though they may pretend they don’t.