Secrets to Seducing a Scot

TWO

He had him.

Silently, the hunter crept up on his unsuspecting prey. Malcolm squeezed the grip of his bow, all his senses leaping into heightened awareness. His heart hammered, his breathing quickened, his balls tightened. Though a chill night breeze wafted through the trees, he began to perspire. Time seemed to slow, an eternity fitting into a single heartbeat.

Sheltered within the womb of a small clearing, his prey was huddling over a meager fire. Malcolm watched as the man tossed a handful of twigs on the weak flames. The man shivered, tightening the McInnes plaid around his shoulders. Though darkness had finally fallen over the northern hills, Malcolm could see the pistol wedged into the waist of the man’s kilt.

Slowly, he positioned the arrow across his bow. The distance was against him but the breeze now stilled. He shut one green eye, taking careful aim. This was the moment he had been working toward for nearly a fortnight, and the thrill of the capture began to flood his veins. He leaned forward, clearing the arrowhead out from behind a branch … when a twig snapped underfoot.

McInnes perked, gun brandished in Malcolm’s direction. The man’s vantage point rendered him practically blind to where Malcolm was hiding. Even so, Malcolm knew there was nothing more dangerous than a frightened man with a loaded gun.

“Who’s there?” McInnes called out. Panic, mingled with guilt, covered him like a sheen of sweat. “Show yourself!”

In the dappled moonlight, Malcolm watched McInnes advance cautiously toward him. Perhaps his prey was not so blind after all. Five courses of action with varying degrees of danger streamed through Malcolm’s mind.

He untensed his bow, rendering himself defenseless. Slowly, he picked up a rock from the ground. Cocking back his arm, he threw it as hard as he could toward the clearing.

The next moments happened in a blur. McInnes spun around, a panicked response to the distracting sound. Malcolm drew back the string on his bow and let the arrow fly. McInnes fell to the ground, his scream tearing through the forest.

Malcolm bolted from his hiding place, bounding effortlessly over a fallen birch. McInnes was writhing on the ground, helplessly trying to pull the bloody arrow from the back of his thigh.

McInnes rolled onto his side, his shaky hand aiming the pistol at Malcolm. There was nowhere for Malcolm to turn, nowhere to hide—the only thing that counted was speed. He pounced full-body on the man in a desperate attempt to wrest the weapon from him.

Teeth bared, the men struggled with each other. Though Malcolm towered over McInnes, McInnes was strong and outweighed his hunter by a full two stone.

Risking his life, Malcolm released one hand from McInnes’s gun and pushed the arrow deeper into the man’s thigh. McInnes screamed, reaching for Malcolm’s arm. Then Malcolm swung a beefy fist into McInnes’s abdomen. Incapacitated, McInnes released the weapon, and his opponent wrenched it from his fist.

Panting for breath, McInnes cursed. “Go on with ye, ye mangy cur. Shoot an unarmed man like the coward ye are.”

Malcolm shoved the pistol into the waist of his black kilt. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to have at a thieving murderer. But luck is on yer side tonight, McInnes. The law demands her claim on ye first.”

“Law? Ye’re daft. ’Twas none but the English I killed … aye, them what was driving me off my own land.”

“The Crown owns yer land now. Ye forfeited it when ye poisoned the stream that killed all of Lord Rutledge’s cattle … and his infant son.”

“What’s this talk of the Crown?” he asked incredulously as Malcolm bound his wrists behind him. “Ye’re a bloody Scotsman! Have ye no pride, man? Why do ye not support the rebellion?”

Malcolm was silent, making quick work of tying knots around the man’s wrists.

“What clan are ye?”

Still Malcolm did not speak. It was a question he could not answer without a degree of shame.

Malcolm spun the man around and, holding him fast by his shirtfront, removed the sgian dubh from the man’s hose.

McInnes glanced at Malcolm’s hand. “I have ye now! Ye’re a good-for-nothing slaighteur! Rejected by the clans. Ye’re treacherous against yer own people!” McInnes spat at his feet.

Malcolm almost struck him for the insult. But McInnes was right. The scar on the back of his hand pronounced it. He was an orphan among Scots, living without the protection or the honor of belonging to a clan. It made him worse than nothing. But he would have it no other way.

Malcolm’s emerald eyes bore into the man’s face. “I owe m’loyalty to no clan. Scotland, England … it matters not who pays me to bring ye in. Personally, I’d do it just for the pleasure of seeing ye hanged.”

“Slaighteur!” yelled McInnes as Malcolm jerked him forward by the arm. And though he was nearly bent over double as he dragged his wounded leg behind him, his voice carried above the treetops and reverberated in the forest. “Slaighteur!”

It was a name that Malcolm Slayter was forced to make his own.