A Red Plaid Ye Dinna Care For
Alec yawned and, tossing his Montgomery plaid over a broad shoulder and lifting a long leg over the bench, sat down.
It had been a miserable night, huddled on a stone-hard bed in a dank room with water seeping through the roof and onto his forehead.
It was with outright relief that he needed to rise early, and he’d been looking forward to a hearty breakfast. but the bowl of mystery pottage cooling before him was a gray, unappetizing mess.
He poked it with a wooden spoon. Was that a turnip bobbing on top?
And what was lurking on the bottom? Fish? Pork? Or something altogether unholy?
He cocked a humorous brow at his approaching cousin and warned, “Be wary of the victuals.”
Taran eyed the bowls in disgust and, waving for the innkeeper to bring ale, sat in silence until it arrived.
Alec began tapping his fingers out of boredom. “Aye,” he said after a while. “More than one lass begged for your attention in Stirling. The fair one was bonny, to be sure.”
Taran grunted—the man’s standard response to trivial conversation.
“I’ve oft wondered if there’s a lass alive who could make ye play the fool for love, Taran,” Alec said, bemused. “I’ve faith I’ll see ye entangled in a woman’s net one day.”
“And I’ve oft wondered if there’s a lass alive who could make ye stop, Alec,” his cousin retorted with a wicked lift of his brow. “But I’ve faith I’ll see ye free of nets one fine morn.”
Alec chuckled and pushing his pottage to the side, reached for his tankard of ale instead.
He couldn’t wait to leave the dreary establishment that called itself an inn.
They’d have pressed straight on to Lainshaw the evening before if it hadn’t been for the torrents of rain flooding the west river crossing.
There was no way over the River Clyde now, other than downstream at the bridge near Glasgow—if that hadn’t washed away as well.
“Merry’s a beauty, and uncommonly skilled with a horse. She’s the kind of lass ‘twould make a man think of marriage,” Taran said, apparently still pondering nets. “And a good match for ye. The MacLeods are honorable folk.”
Alec stifled another yawn. Nets? He had little use for them. “Aye,” he answered, somewhat bored. “But marriage is a path of misery, and so a path made only for fools.” He preferred kisses with no nets attached.
He’d been outright annoyed at Robert when he’d arrived at Stirling to discover his brother’s errand had been the task of courting a wife: Merry MacLeod, a lively lass with large, dark, doe eyes and a winsome smile.
At the king’s behest, Alec had spent two days in her company, knowing full well that virtually everyone considered the match as good as done—except himself.
There was no doubt of her loveliness. To be sure, he’d found himself half-smitten at their first meeting, but half-smitten wasn’t enough.
Not at the expense of his freedom. And after witnessing Robert’s misery of a marriage to Margaret Cunningham, he’d come to cherish his freedom even more.
“I’ve no gray hair yet,” he said with a smirk. Nay, he wouldn’t be binding himself to any woman for the sake of land—at least, not yet.
“Ach, ye refused the match?” Taran asked, reading his face. “Robert ‘twill be fair angry, lad.”
Alec shrugged. The king had been furious. It only followed that Robert would be even angrier. He didn’t care to think of his mother’s reaction.
“Do ye think to live relying solely on wit and charm?” his cousin queried with a shake of his dark head.
Alec smiled. “Of a certainty, I’ve no wish to live in the Isles,” he said with conviction, taking a pull from his tankard. At least the ale was better than the pottage. Marginally.
“You’re an unprincipled wretch, Alec,” Taran criticized, imbibing a long draught of ale himself. “Wandering the Isles is as close to paradise a man can reach afore he dies. And Merry’s a fine lass to wander with, ye daft fool. And strong and healthy. She’d provide ye sturdy offspring.”
Alec threw his head back and laughed, his green eyes twinkling in mirth.
“Are ye speaking of horses now? Ach, but ye sound remarkably like Auld Bertha, Taran,” he quipped.
“What was it she said?” He slammed his tankard down with a crash and grinned as his dark-haired cousin responded with a scathing glance.
“Ah yes.” Alec ignored the stare and continued, shifting his voice to mimic the old woman’s.
“’Tis a curse ye carry, lad, for dying with the name of the wrong lass upon your lips nigh on a hundred years ago.
Now, your own wee true love is your enemy.
And an enemy that ye could lose your life for in rescuing her from the flames.
” His lips creased into an even wider grin as he ran his hands through his sun-burnished hair.
“What sense does that make, aye? The woman was mad.”
His brooding cousin curled the corner of his lip in disdain. “And what has that to do with me?”
Staring directly into the man’s unnerving gaze, Alec wriggled both brows. “Ye both are daft. Quite mad.”
Taran sent him a level stare, and the conversation withered, but only until Alec’s younger brother, Andrew, ducked inside the inn to stride their way, his plaid-draped shoulder stiff with anger.
“Ach, the lot of them are fools!” he spat, kicking an empty bench to join them. “’Tis not highwaymen lurking along the road launching attacks on the unwary. ’Tis the Cunninghams and well all know it!”
As usual, the name of Cunningham shifted Alec’s mood. “Aye, not a Cunningham exists whom I’d allow to walk upon the Earth, if I had my way,” he muttered. “Useless, the lot of them.”
“And have ye brought new tidings?” Taran asked with a note of scorn, turning upon his younger cousin. “Or is this merely an opining of the same blood grudge that’s lasted nigh on a hundred years?”
The younger Montgomery opened his mouth, but whatever he would have said was lost upon Alec as the door opened once again, this time revealing a lass at the threshold.
She arrested his attention at once.
Slim and delicate with a mane of coppery curls, she wore a homespun blue dress that accentuated her stunning blue eyes, unusual eyes that seemed to bore deep into his soul. But then she moved, and he couldn’t make up his mind if her eyes were instead gray, or mayhap green.
Unexpectedly, those eyes latched onto his and she began to stalk his way.
Tilting his head toward his brother and cousin, he queried in a low tone, “The lass coming our way—do we know her?”
“With as many lasses as ye kiss, Alec, I’d say ye do,” his cousin observed with a sardonic crook of his lip.
Alec only had time to toss him an exasperated glance before the lass arrived at the table.
She was quite delicate and a bit younger than he’d first thought.
And her eyes, aye, her eyes. Her eyes seemed to shimmer from blue to green as the light struck them.
Or mayhap it was the emotion in them that caused them to shift color.
Anger?
He cringed. Aye, she had to know him, but how could he have forgotten her?
With a proud toss of her head, the lass slapped her hand down upon the table. “Ye owe me a debt, Montgomery.”
“I do?” Alec asked, feigning an easy grin. His eyes swept her up and down in outright appraisal. “Forgive me, but I canna recall ye, lass,” he admitted truthfully. “Though I’m fair flummoxed how I ever could forget ye.”
She pushed a silver pin across the table, and the three men leaned close to inspect it. It was a kilt pin. Old. Worn. But the Montgomery crest emblazoned could still be seen. As a whole, nothing particularly special.
Alec raised a puzzled brow and then unable to resist, sent her his most seductive smile. “The pin means naught to me nor interests me, but I canna say the same about your lips, lass.”
Taran snorted.
The lass’s eyes flashed and her bosom heaved, evoking a response in Alec like one he’d never experienced before. Ach, those eyes. There was an outright challenge in them. A challenge he accepted, at once, immediately, and with his entire heart.
The lass opened her lips, but before she could utter a word, a bald man wearing a dark cloak entered the establishment.
Alec recognized him at once. The bailiff, one David Seton.
Alec had clashed with him the night before, finding him an unsavory character with greed running through his veins instead of blood.
The lass took one look and to Alec’s astonishment, dove upon his lap, pulling the corner of his plaid over her shoulders.
He grinned. He had no objection. She was frail and slight, but deliciously curved in all of the right places. Sliding a hand around her waist, he pulled her closer.
“Have any of ye seen a redheaded lass with uncanny eyes?” Seton’s voice reverberated throughout the low-ceiling room.
Several heads twisted their way, and the lass dropped her hands to grip Alec’s fingers, hard. He glanced down at her hand resting atop his, and a small gasp escaped his throat. Her fingers were delicate and warm—and so achingly, strangely, and inexplicably … familiar?
Perplexed, he looked deeply into her mysterious, ringed eyes and then asked a bit chagrined, “Ach, have I bedded ye afore?” If he hadn’t, he knew he certainly would.
She answered him with a swift kick to the shin.
“Her name is Sorcha,” the bailiff continued, his voice shaking the rafters. “She’s a witch. A Cunningham witch!”
Astonished, Alec rose to his feet, dumping the lass off his lap and onto the floor.