The Groom Wore Plaid: Highland Weddings by Gayle Callen Read Free Book Online Page B

headed through the gatehouse under the watchful, skeptical eyes of the guards, wrapped in their Duff plaid and their Duff righteousness. She felt like she could breathe again away from the high walls of the courtyard that had seemed to trap the air. The water near the arched bridge was still, covered in large oval leaves that floated around whitelilies, as befitted a moat that seemed more like a pond. The sky was overcast, but didn’t threaten rain as she left the bridge for the dirt-packed road.
    She started across a grassy field that sloped up the side of a mountain in the distance. Heather grew in abundance, scattered between boulders and through the fields, and in just a few more weeks it would decorate these meadows in purple blossoms. Maggie felt some of the tension ease away as she took one deep breath after another.
    But she couldn’t avoid thinking about her problems for long. As if she’d conjured the scene, she could suddenly see herself screaming, her beautiful gown spattered with blood, and Owen lying on the floor, barely breathing, his face waxen, his eyelids fluttering.
    Her breath came in pants and she collapsed onto a boulder, light-headed. She forced her mind to stay in the scene, examining it, looking for evidence of what happened next. She tried to push herself forward in the dream until her head ached, but nothing else happened beyond Owen lying wounded, near death.
    For the first time in years, she let herself go back farther, to other dreams she’d had, the last being when Owen’s first betrothed, Emily, had appeared to her, solemn and dripping wet, foretelling her drowning. There was nothing in that dream that she could have warned the woman about except to stay away from water, but even a bathing tub could have causedher death. Regardless, Maggie had been guilt-ridden that she hadn’t found Emily herself and warned her, though she would have looked a fool doing it.
    The guilt had never quite gone away, even though she’d had to move on with her life. Owen had never contacted her after she’d warned him. Seeing him again, she realized that the sting of his disbelief and disappointment in her had never truly dissipated. She’d always thought holding a grudge was pointless, but it seemed she couldn’t take her own advice. His abandonment of her had been a sign that she was better off without him, that they never would have suited. All that seemed to be left was anger and disappointment and a physical awareness that was awkward and uncomfortable and yet . . . arousing.
    With determination, she returned to her dreams, going farther back, past Emily. They rose up in her mind as if coming out of water, surfacing intact, practically bobbing, ready for her to pick from them. She saw the little boy shivering under the cliff, the girl who’d killed herself after Maggie’s father had abused her, then back farther still, to her childhood, when she hadn’t understood that her dreams were something that might come true.
    With a gasp, she remembered the little boy who’d come to her occasionally in those dreams, her secret friend, she used to call him. It was as if she’d looked through a window into his life, saw when he scraped aknee, when he’d hidden from his father’s wrath, when he escaped the castle to—
    And suddenly she turned her head and stared hard at Castle Kinlochard—the same castle as in her dreams. The little boy had lighter hair then Owen’s sandy color, but many children’s hair darkened through the years.
    Was it possible she’d been connected to Owen throughout her life?
    Guards paced along the battlements, and horse-drawn carts rattled over the bridge. Clouds scudded across the sky, giving the building a forbidding yet vibrant backdrop, as if framed in reality as it was framed in her mind.
    What was she supposed to make of this new twist? When she’d been hiding from her drunken father, thoughts of her dream friend had consoled her. When she’d watched her brother take a