Chapter 4 #2
“As I said,” he replied tersely, “I dinnae need anything from ye. Nae your wee potions, and nae your gratitude, either.”
She pressed her lips together.
“May I ask why it is that ye seem to bear me a grudge?” Her politeness was razor-thin. “Have I done something to offend ye— you?”
She blurted out the correction as a force of habit, but she could see at once that it was the wrong thing to have done. Something hardened behind his eyes.
“That is precisely what ye have done to offend me, Lady Makenna Ashbourne,” he said, his acid tone turning her title into a mockery.
“Ye have let yourself be erased so that ye may become the pretty wee English puppet that your husband desires. And now ye come here, dragged upon his strings, so that ye can—what? Make us think that an alliance with the English actually benefits Scotland? As though it ever has? Nay. Ye are no true Highlander, but ye are worse than any Sassenach that wandered into these parts. Ye are a traitor. All ye represent, all that ye are… Ye disgust me.”
He delivered the whole speech with spitting fury, and Kenna just stood there and… took it. How could she not, when he was absolutely right? How was she supposed to retort when he was only saying the things she said to herself, in the privacy of her own mind, when she was at her very lowest?
God, it was merely a blessing that she didn’t start weeping right then and there.
“I… I see,” she choked out. She could feel the tears stinging her eyes but she refused to let them fall in front of him. “I will leave ye, then.”
She took four calm steps, just until she was out of sight of his doorway. And then she fled back to her chambers, Anna close at her heels.
Arran was a complete scunner. He was a complete shite. He was an arse.
He’d been… a bit harsh on Lady Makenna.
Aye, he hadn’t been wrong. He’d been completely correct about everything he’d said.
But the way he’d said it… Aye, that had been a bit harsh.
Though he supposed that part bothered him less than the fact that he hated her for an entirely different reason than the one he’d professed.
She had given herself over rather wholly to Englishness, aside from the quick bits of accent that slipped through, but he’d seen Ashbourne.
He’d heard Ashbourne talk. The man was brazen and hideously rude, not to mention old.
He could imagine a lass doing what she could to fit herself into the mold her circumstances demanded of her.
He didn’t like it, but he could understand it. Mostly.
The real reason he hated her, though, was that she was a MacBrae. And her people had profited while his had died. And her marriage had been the price of that profit.
She had been the reason her father had been able to steal from Arran himself.
But he couldn’t admit that. Not to her, not to anyone.
He let out a frustrated growl, running his hand over the back of his neck in a way that made the cut on his arm tug painfully. He should have taken her offer of salve. Who knew what kind of fancy stuff a laced-up lady like her possessed?
The sound of a quiet throat clearing drew Arran’s attention back to the doorway, but this time, it wasn’t Lady Makenna.
It was Laird Callahan.
Arran’s relationship with the Laird was good enough.
Arran enjoyed being one of the Laird’s preferred guards, assisted by Declan’s friendship, which generally offered him some of the less irritating tasks.
He hadn’t ever, for example, been sent to spend a winter in a barely standing hut on the edge of the Callahan lands just to confirm that nobody was trying to mount an attack while everyone else was cozying up inside by the fire.
But that good relationship did not necessarily translate to closeness. It couldn’t be, not when Arran was hiding such a significant part of himself. Nor did he think disclosing his origins would make Callahan suddenly warm to him. It just wasn’t the Laird’s way.
Suffice to say, he had never before appeared in Arran’s doorway.
“Your lairdship,” Arran muttered hastily, trying to hide any trace of emotion on his face. “What can I do for ye?”
Callahan paused to consider his words, but then again, he always did. He glanced down the corridor for a moment, then turned back to Arran.
“I heard ye speaking with Makenna MacBrae,” he said, scant inflection in his voice.
It didn’t escape Arran’s notice, however, that he used the woman’s birth name, not her married one.
“Aye,” he said carefully.
Callahan nodded, just once. “Dinnae punish a woman who is already carrying burdens that ye refuse to see, lad.”
There was disappointment in the Laird’s words, but an iron note of firmness was the strongest presence. Arran wanted to argue—he hadn’t been wrong about any of the things he’d said about Makenna, no matter what surname one used for her, not any of them.
“I dinnae ken what you’re talking about,” Arran muttered, knowing that the excuse sounded weak.
The Laird looked at him steadily. “I ken that,” he said. “But ye are clever, lad, even when ye are not using the brains that God gave ye. If ye look, if ye really decided to look and let yourself see it, ye will come to understand.”
This was frustratingly cryptic, and Arran was tempted to demand answers, to demand that the man speak plainly.
But he was not Arran Lennox. Not here. He was Arran Burns, a guard who had been elevated beyond what a no-name lad like him could have possibly hoped.
He had no grounds to insist upon those answers from his Laird.
Besides, there was something in the Laird’s words, or maybe the fact that he was uttering them at all, that made him pause.
Seamus Callahan never spoke lightly. Arran knew that he could not, therefore, dismiss the man lightly.
As Arran met the Laird’s eyes, he found himself suddenly awash in shame. If it was true–whatever the Laird was implying–then Arran had spoken with unfair harshness to someone who could not properly defend herself.
He lowered his head, nodding his acquiescence.
“Verra well,” he said, feeling a harsh sting at the Laird’s censure that he hadn’t anticipated. After Callahan left, he could only come up with one reason for why the comment had landed so heavily.
There had to be some kind of truth to it. There had to be something more to Makenna.
Or maybe he was just searching for a reason why he couldn’t stop himself from always looking at her.
Well, fine, he told himself. He would just leave her be. It shouldnae be that hard.
That resolution lasted him scarcely more than an hour.
“Hell,” he muttered to himself after he had polished the same spot on his sword for the twentieth time or more, too lost in thought to do the thing properly. “Fine.”
He would apologize. Then he would just leave her be.
He made his way to the section of the Keep where the English arrivals were being housed. He heard the gentle lilt of feminine voices and followed the sound.
Her door was just about closed. It was more that the latch hadn’t fastened correctly than that someone had left it open. A gentleman would have knocked. She clearly didn’t plan on being seen.
And though Arran might have been born a laird’s son, but he’d had any gentleness kicked out of him long ago.
He pushed the door open without making a sound, then froze when he saw what was on the other side.
“…for the best that the guard didn’t take your salve, my lady. You need it yourself.”
The maid, Anna, stepped aside after rubbing the salve in question across her lady’s back, removing any doubt as to what Arran was seeing.
Bruises, great angry swaths of them, across Makenna’s back.
They couldn’t be from the fall; she’d fallen on her front and atop him, and not even he had bruises as bad as those.
Besides, these varied in color. Some were the angry red-purple of new marks, others the fading yellows and greens of injuries more than halfway to healing. Layers of them, one atop the other.
“I can make do without the salve,” Makenna said, hardly even sounding bothered. Somehow, that made the sick feeling in Arran’s stomach even worse. “It’s nae as bad as all that, really.”
Anna made a disgruntled, doubtful sort of sound.
“Well,” she said finally, “since you do have it, we shall apply it. Let’s go into the bathing chamber, shall we, my lady? It settles in better if you soak in the warm water first. No fussing; you know it makes a difference.”
“Oh, very well,” Makenna said with a sigh.
Arran backed away from the door before they could turn. He stayed close to the wall when he heard the maid gasp. She frantically approached the door, but when she saw no one she simply said, “I must not have latched it well. Let’s go, my lady.”
And thus the door was closed fully.
He knew this was… not something he was meant to have seen. He couldn’t make himself regret snooping, but he knew she would not thank him for having observed her in such a vulnerable state. And he did regret having lashed out at her earlier.
Arran went back to his room, rage settled like burning ash in his stomach.
It turned out that Lord Edmund Ashbourne had far more sins to account for than Arran had originally suspected. Arran would take any opportunity that was presented to him to ensure that the man’s debts were paid in full.