Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 02] by Master of The Highland (html) Read Free Book Online Page B

Gavin’s irrefutable brawn combined.
“The choice is yours, my friend.” Gavin watched him, his usually sunny face set in solemn lines.
Slowly stretching his arms above his head, he cracked his knuckles . . . and had the poor taste to appear as at ease as if they stood in the middle of the sweetest spring meadow, and not elbow to elbow with the unwashed, unkempt, and diseased. “Go peaceably as befits your station and your purpose here, or . . .” He lifted broad-set shoulders, the simple gesture more eloquent than any further threats.
Spoken or unspoken.
Iain glowered at him, then slid a furious look at the seaman, secretly suspecting MacFie of feeding the mucker sweetmeats or mayhap wide-legged lasses just so the oversized lout would e’er do his bidding.
And do it unquestioningly.
Too vexed to concede—yet—Iain squared his wide-set shoulders and drew himself to his full height . . . an imposing tallness all but a scant hairbreadth short of Gavin’s own. “I am your laird’s brother,” he declared, trying to lay authority into the words. “Save Amicia, his closest kin.”
“You are doing penance,” Gavin returned with an all but imperceptible nod at the well-muscled giant.
The young seaman stepped closer.
Heat inching up the back of his neck, Iain ignored the implied threat and narrowed his eyes at his unsmiling companion. His gaoler. “You wouldn’t dare.”
Silence answered him.
“You would.”
Gavin cocked an impervious brow. “If you leave me no other choice, aye.”
For a long tension-filled moment, Iain pressed his lips together, frustration, hot and seething, coursing through his veins. “Then lead on,” he ground out at last, with a quick upward glance at the impossibly blue sky. “ If you can plow a way inside.”
Looking confident enough to forge a path through a wall of granite if need be, Gavin MacFie strode off for the cathedral steps, every pilgrim, pious or otherwise, springing out of his way. Like lemmings fleeing a rat catcher.
Iain stared after him, opening and closing his fists in mute objection before he grudgingly forced himself to follow. “Drones and parasites,” he muttered beneath his breath of the jostling mob. “Ply your wares elsewhere,” he snapped at a greasy-haired bawd who’d loomed up from nowhere to block his path and rub her breasts against his arm. “I’ve no interest.”
Biting back a harsher rebuttal, he jerked free of her clinging hands, readjusted the fall of the woolen pilgrim’s cloak slung loosely about his shoulders . . . and wished the almost-gone knot on his forehead hadn’t chosen that moment to start aching again.
His vexation now complete, he searched for, but caught no glimpse of Gavin MacFie’s shaggy-maned head. Iain frowned. Without doubt, the long-strided varlet was already on his knees before the shrine.
Very likely praying for new and inspiring ways to bedevil one Iain MacLean.
Eager to have done with the whole sordid business, he started forward again, but each step proved a gruel. For his ill ease mounted in alarming degrees the nearer he came to the cathedral’s great arched entrance.
’Twas the most unpleasant of sensations, and one that had naught to do with his splitting head, his wrath at MacFie, or his patent dislike of smelly places.
Something was staring at him again.
And might St. Kentigern and his host of holy cohorts preserve him, for the strange tingles were upon him, too . . . descending with a vengeance to whirl all through him, and igniting a firestorm of most unwelcome bestirrings in his vitals.
The same odd pricklings that had beset him so oft of late. Heated, and not entirely unpleasant . . . just undesired.
And whate’er unleashed them waited for him inside the hallowed depths of Glasgow Cathedral.
That he knew.
The queer tightening in his chest and the fierce pounding of his heart told him so.

For the third time since entering Glasgow Cathedral that same morning, Madeline Drummond tried her best to examine the jumble of exvotos, crutches, and other