With a gasp, Mared suddenly rose up in her bed, her hands at her throat, and the bed linens twisted around her body. Her forehead was wet with perspiration.
She caught her breath, took several deep breaths more, then slowly untangled herself from the bed linens. Unsteadily, she stood, walked to the hearth to stoke it as she willed her heart to stop pounding.
The dream had shaken her badly. It always did.
Payton Douglas would not hold her here. She would not be held captive in a land where she was despised. She would escape the lochs for Edinburgh and nothing would stop her.
Two
N ow that the betrothal date had been set, Payton thought it prudent to help Mared along to the inevitable end by making her feel less bartered and more admired. So he endeavored to court her…just as hard as she endeavored not to be courted.
He’d sent dozens of Scottish roses to her, along with notes of his admiration. He’d also sent along two of the first bottles of barley-bree to be distilled on his land to her brothers and father. And he had dutifully and respectfully answered each and every one of her letters, of which there was quite a small pile mounting on the corner of his desk.
His cousin, Miss Sarah Douglas, educated in France and now residing in Edinburgh, had come to Eilean Ros to help him find a replacement for his longtime housekeeper, Mrs. Craig, who had died recently after years of faithful service. Since arriving, Sarah had witnessed, with much exasperation, his considerable efforts to woo Mared. Even now, she was pouting atop her little sorrel, riding next to him as they had a look about the estate. “I don’t know why ye must go through with this,” she complained to Payton, who rode his big bay hunter.
“Why? I’m no’ a young man, Sarah. I am two and thirty. If I am to leave an heir to the Douglas fortune, I best be about it.”
“Yes, but with someone else, please. Perhaps it would be wiser to consider this one for the position of housekeeper. At the very least, she’d be an improvement over the half-wits and simpletons we’ve spoken to thus far.”
Payton gave his cousin a sharp look. “That is the future Lady Douglas ye speak of, so be kind, Sarah. She’s no’ had an easy life here in the lochs, and she may no’ be as tender as ye are, but she’s deserving of yer esteem nonetheless.”
Sarah shrugged. “Perhaps she deserves my esteem, but I can’t think why she should deserve such respect from ye, then. Really, Payton—marry her? She’s a Lockhart!”
Payton suppressed a smile at that—Mared Lockhart may not have earned his esteem, but she had earned his respect years ago. “The time has come to put aside those old feuds. They’ve no bearing on the present or the future.”
And besides, there was something about Mared Lockhart that had attracted him long ago, when they were children. He could remember, as a young lad, wanting the sweetmeat she had held, taking it from her little hand. Mared did not cry, nor did she run to her governess. No, Mared had felled him, a boy who was a full four years older than she, by pushing him into the thistle, then falling upon him and pummeling him until her brother Liam pulled her off.
And when he began to become more aware of the fairer sex, it had been Mared’s blossoming and the small buds of her breasts that had afflicted his young dreams. He’d longed even then to touch her.
But it wasn’t until years later, when he was a young man and Mared had grown into a beautiful yet untouchable woman—thanks to a bloody curse that seemed to have developed a life of its own—that he had fallen in love with her. It had been her indomitable spirit that had done it.
By then, he’d begun to notice how the suspicious crofters closed their doors when she walked by, had heard them warn their children to steer clear of her. He knew that most of the villagers of Aberfoyle whispered behind her back and avoided her at social functions. Though most people around the lochs treated her as a pariah, he’d come to respect her dignity in the face of such ignorance.
He’d first realized he loved her one evening almost seven years past, on the occasion of her first and twentieth birthday, when he had kissed her for the first time. It had been an impetuous act, one of sheer madness…but in that moment, he had felt her firm body respond to his, had felt her rise up to meet him….
And then she’d bitten his lip.
Aye, on that momentous occasion, Payton had come to desire her.
Mared Lockhart was, to him at least, the only spot of color in a gray world, the only shimmering sign of life in a bucolic existence. The insistent flame sparked in him that sultry summer night seven years past had not died, but had kept burning bright for the one woman in all of Scotland who did not esteem him, Laird Payton Douglas of Eilean Ros.
Just the thought of it made him chuckle again.
“Why do you laugh?” Sarah demanded.