Chapter 4
Four
Weary and frustrated, Lochlan pushed open the door to his keep, expecting an empty hall where he could sit quietly and brood over the events of the day.
What he found when the heavy door scraped open was about two score hostile men glaring at him as if he were the sole reason for their misery.
He groaned inwardly. “This canna be good.” Each man looked as if he was about to take a swing at Lochlan.
Lochlan paused with a frown. Never in his life had he seen a more sour-looking group. They reminded him of a gaggle of geese ready to confront the axe-bearing farmer. The only problem with the image was that Lochlan had no axe.
Nor much of anything else with which to protect himself.
And the geese were restless. They swarmed around him, their voices loud and ringing off the stone walls as they shouted at once.
Lochlan held his hands up to quiet them.
Instead, they grew louder.
Fergus stepped forward and yelled for the others to quiet down. To Lochlan’s amazement, they complied, and it was then he knew the leader of the irate geese.
Lochlan glared at him. “What the devil is the meaning of this? What are all of you doing here?”
“We’ve come for answers,” Fergus said over the murmuring voices. “I saw the way you and your brothers cozied up to the women, and now I’m thinking you and them fancy brothers of yours are wanting to be keeping our women for yourselves.”
Lochlan gaped in disbelief. “You canna be serious.”
“What else are we to think?” Davis snarled.
At a score and ten years, with a thick mop of tawny hair and a slight build, Davis was normally one of the more reliable men of the clan.
But, by the furious look on his face, Lochlan could tell Fergus had stirred up quite a bit of mischief while Lochlan had been gone.
Davis shook his head. “All of us here know that Braden MacAllister never sleeps alone, and now you’ve left him locked up in the kirk with our women.
He’s probably in a darkened corner even as we speak with someone’s wife or daughter wrapped about him.
And God help you both if it’s my wife he’s with.
” Davis raked Lochlan with a repugnant glare.
“Where was your head when you decided to leave him in there? I’m thinking it’s time we be finding ourselves a new laird! One with some common sense.”
“Aye!” the others shouted in unison.
Lochlan could feel his blood starting to boil. Granted Braden was a bit rambunctious when it came to women, but even his scandalous brother knew when to draw the line of propriety.
Most of the time, anyway.
It wasn’t Fergus’s or Davis’s place to reprimand Braden. That was for Lochlan to do.
“I left Braden in there to get the women out,” Lochlan explained.
About half the men snorted in disgust.
Treig came forward. Only half an inch shorter than Lochlan, the older man’s light gray eyes burned in anger.
“I’ve spent the better part of a decade guarding my daughters from that randy brother of yours, and now you expect me to believe he’s not in there, right now, lining the women up to choose one or more to warm his bed?
Whose notty-pated decision was it to send him in there in the first place? ”
The word “mine” faltered on Lochlan’s tongue. No need to make the matter any worse than it already was. None of his men were ready to listen to reason.
Silently, Lochlan cursed his brother’s raging hormones and good looks. Better he should have had a brother who looked like a warted troll than one who was forever being pursued by the fairer sex.
The men began shouting at him again.
Lochlan held his hands up to silence them.
Seeking to allay their fears, he explained Braden’s plan as best he could, and prayed for them to listen.
“Braden went inside the kirk to bring Maggie out. She’s the only woman he’s after, the rest are safe.”
Bitter, cruel laughter broke out.
“What kind of fools do you take us for?” Davis asked. “None of us would have Maggie on her best day. Now why would your brother be after her when he could have the best looking among them, including my wife?”
The cold-hearted statement brought a sudden echoing silence to the hall.
All eyes turned slowly to Maggie’s four brothers who had come inside with the others. Stephen, Ian, Duncan and Jamie looked as if they were ready to kill each man standing in the room.
“And just what do you be meaning by that, Davis MacDowd?” Jamie asked in a low, lethal tone.
Davis stammered as he regarded the four angry brothers united in defense of their baby sister. “I didn’t mean much. It’s just you know yourself that no man here has ever courted her.”
The words only served to make the brothers’ faces even redder, their bodies more tense as they regarded the men around them.
“And what’s wrong with my little sister?” Duncan took up the challenge.
Fergus was stupid enough to answer. “First, she’s not much to look at. And second, she’s off in the head. Look what she’s gone and done with the women! Not to mention, she attacked me in the kirk when I went to see my wife.”
The words set off total chaos in the hall as the four brothers growled in rage, then attacked their clansmen.
Lochlan joined the fray, trying to bring peace to his men. Curses and shouts rang through the hall, along with the sounds of fists striking flesh, and breaking furniture.
Never in his life had he seen such a melee.
The urge to cross the room and remove his sword from the mantel was strong, but he didn’t truly want to hurt any of them. He did, however, want them to exercise a little restraint.
As Lochlan struggled to pull the brothers from the fray, five men set upon him at once. Before Lochlan could extract himself from their beefy hands, they seized him and set him down hard in a chair before the hearth.
“What are you doing?” Lochlan asked as three of the men held him in place while two others grabbed ropes.
The answer was plain. They were tying him up and there was nothing he could do to stop them.
After a few more minutes, Maggie’s four brothers were seated next to him, with the five of them trussed up like birds for the slaughter.
Cursing them all, Lochlan struggled against the ropes which bound him to the chair. If he ever got out of this, they would pay dearly for their actions.
Fergus and the others looked down upon them with evil smiles. “Now it’s time we find us a laird who can actually handle the-”
”What in the name of Satan’s hairy toes is this?”
Fergus’s face paled at the sound of the deep bellow.
Settling down, Lochlan breathed a sigh of relief at Braden’s appearance.
But his relief was short lived.
The mob turned on Braden with a vengeance. Their angry voices again reached a deafening tone.
Until a loud whistle sounded.
The men settled down, and they drifted back, making a path from Braden to Lochlan and Maggie’s brothers.
His face a mask of fury, Braden stepped forward and eyed the crowd. “Would someone care to explain to me why my brother, your laird, is tied to a chair?”
A wave of sheepishness washed through the men. Except for Fergus. He moved forward to confront Braden. “We want this matter with the women settled.”
“And you think tying Lochlan to a chair is the best way to accomplish this?”
Lochlan smiled. With Braden here, he allowed himself to see the ridiculousness of the situation.
Fergus looked shamed.
Shaking his head, Braden started for Lochlan. But a big, burly Enos stepped out of the crowd to block him. “Your brother isn’t going anywhere until my wife is back inside my home, tending our children, warming my bed and cooking me some food worth eating.”
“Aye,” Fergus shouted. “I say we kill the laird and take our women back!”
The men quickly took up Fergus’s shout of “kill the laird, kill the laird.”
Lochlan held his breath, afraid of what the obsessed mob might do. Damn, but he should have grabbed his sword when he had the chance.
“Whoa!” Braden shouted over them, until he shushed them once more. “Have you lost all your wits? That’s your laird you’re speaking of. The man all of you have sworn to follow and protect with your lives.”
“He stands between us and our women!”
Which was always a bad place to be.
Braden took a deep breath as he regarded the sea of angry men. This was quickly getting out of hand. And if he didn’t stop it soon, there was no telling what they might do.
Sweet Mother Mary, what had Maggie started?
Braden took a long, slow breath for patience. “Now let’s be reasonable for just a moment, men. Killing Lochlan won’t get your women back. They’ve sworn an oath to each other and that oath has nothing to do with his life.”
“Fine then.” Fergus stepped forward. “We’ll kill him, send Ewan to the MacDouglas, and have our women home by week’s end.”
“Aye!”
“Aye, hell!” Braden roared. “You kill my brothers and you’ll have me to deal with.”
Fergus snorted as he raked a cold look over Braden’s body. “Is that a threat? You’re but one man against all of us.”
Braden returned the cold glare with one of his own.
“One man with a full garrison of troops sitting rather nicely entrenched on my English lands. Trained knights and soldiers ready to march at my command. You touch one hair on Lochlan’s head and I can promise you, I’ll see every one of you in your grave. ”
Now that gave them pause. At last, Braden had found the one thing to reach through their stubbornness.
Davis was the first to come to his senses. “You know, Fergus, he does have those lands that tie MacAllister loyalty to England, and the English king might not take it kindly if we attack him, especially now that the MacAllister is on peaceful terms with King Henry.”
“Then, what do you want?” Fergus asked him and the others. “We let the laird go and then just wait? I’m sick of waiting. Me bairns are screaming for their mother.”
“He’s right about that,” Enos said. “I’ve heard his brood crying myself.”
Braden hoped he was getting through to them. “Look, I was trying to work out a truce with Maggie.”