Unraveled By The Rebel by Michelle Willingham Read Free Book Online

believed them? Strathland canna be trusted.” Cain swore and tossed back his own cup. “Where is MacKinloch now?”
    “I told him no’ to show his face here again. Punishing him willna bring back the house. The bloody fool.”
    Cain sobered, falling silent in agreement. He crossed his arms and stared out at the water. “Speaking of fools, were you daft enough to bother
her
again, Fraser?”
    Paul didn’t have to ask who Sinclair was talking about. Everyone knew he wanted to wed Juliette. He’d overheard the wagers on how long it would take her to say yes.
    “I’ll ask her as many times as I have to.”
    “And still, she’ll say no.” Sinclair drained his own cup and let it hang from his fingertips. “A man should ken when he hasn’t a prayer of winning the woman he wants.”
    “Why should I give up?” He drank the ale, but though it quenched his thirst, it did nothing to allay the bitterness. “She just needs convincing, that’s all.” He shrugged, as if it were naught to worry over. But Sinclair came closer, his face serious in the moonlight.
    “I shouldna be sayin’ this to you. But you’ve been a friend, ye ken? There’s a reason why she says no.” He let out a slow breath, as if choosing his words carefully. Glancing down at his empty cup, he cursed and then muttered that he was wanting another drink.
    Paul waited, but the longer time passed, the more Sinclair hesitated. “There’s not someone else, is there?” He didn’t want to think that Juliette had given her heart to another. It seemed impossible, given the way she’d accepted his casual touches in the past day. But she
had
avoided him, especially after he’d returned from Edinburgh.
    He stared hard at Sinclair, not wanting to hear the reasons. And yet, he needed to understand her reluctance.
    “It’s no’ someone else. It’s because she was hurt, Fraser.”
    Hurt? Every tendon within him tightened with a fear he could not name. A coldness descended over him, for he suspected he would not want to hear any of this.
    And yet, he needed to know. “What do you mean,
hurt
?”
    The man said nothing for a time, staring out over the water. “It was over a year ago, in autumn. You were still in Edinburgh.” He kept his words neutral, but with every pause, Paul’s uneasiness grew. “I came out looking for my brother Jonah, who’d been fishing. When I found him, Jonah told me he’d heard a woman crying.” Sinclair stared hard at him. “I followed him to the grove of trees over the rise of hills toward Ben Nevis. It’s on the earl’s land, north of Eiloch Hill.”
    The pieces of Sinclair’s story started to form together, and Paul made no move to interrupt.
    “When I found Miss Andrews, I thought she’d been lost or twisted an ankle,” Sinclair said. “She was sitting on the ground, sobbing. Her hair was undone, and her bodice all torn up. When she saw me, she begged me no’ to tell.” The man’s face turned violently angry, as if remembering what he’d seen.
    Ice froze up the rivers of blood within him, and in his mind, Paul saw a vision of Juliette, frightened and alone. Her hair fallen around her shoulders, a wrenching terror on her face.
    Her words came back to haunt him:
If it’s a wife and children you want, you should look elsewhere.
    He replayed the sadness on her face when he’d spoken to her hours earlier. She’d claimed that she couldn’t give him the life he wanted… that she didn’t want to marry any man. His mind tried to put together another reason, anything else that could have happened.
    But he knew. In his gut, he knew that Juliette would never have gone off on her own. Someone had taken her to an isolatedplace. Someone she’d trusted… or perhaps she’d been forced there against her will.
    And that someone had hurt her.
    The force of his rage, that someone would dare to harm the woman he loved, reverberated within him like a violent storm. “Who did this?” he demanded. If the man wasn’t