Wishing For a Highlander by Jessi Gage Read Free Book Online

promise before.
    She eyed him, unsure how to react. Whether it was the comforting sound of her name marching from his lips in that hearty burr or the earnest gleam in his eyes, somehow she knew that a promise made by Darcy Marek MacFirthen Keith was a promise a girl could trust. Something in her gut relaxed.
    She might not have the box, but she at least had an ally.
    She was reluctant to leave the spot where time had broken apart and abandoned her to the past, but when Darcy picked up the cart handles and walked on, she went with him.
    * * * *
     
    Darcy shook his head at himself as he pulled the cart back to Ackergill. Melanie–Malina he kept wanting to call her in the Scots way–plodded beside him, despondent but no less beautiful for the small crease between her slanted brows.
    He’d put that crease there when he’d made her believe he hadn’t found her cherished box. He could wipe it away just as easily by reaching into Archie’s healer’s supplies, lifting out her hidden possession, and placing it in her tiny, graceful hands.
    But her relief would be short-lived. If any of the men saw the thing and word got to Steafan, ’twould go badly for her. And he wasn’t sure how much of her suffering he’d be able to bear. He’d met her less than two hours ago, but he already felt protective of her. And it wasn’t just that he’d claimed responsibility for her before Aodhan.
    His need to protect her had gripped him from the moment he’d seen her, her emerald eyes wide and frightened, her hands shaking and covered in blood. His heart had cried, Mine , even though he kent better than to believe he could have a woman for his own. His foolish mouth had verified it soon after, when he’d thought Aodhan had been about to lay claim to her. And Aodhan, the cur, had accepted it without batting an eye. In fact, a twinkle in the war chieftain’s usually hard eyes suggested the man found Darcy’s claim amusing.
    As if to confirm his suspicion, Aodhan hung back to walk alongside him, opposite from Malina. “She doesna look pleased to have been claimed,” the war chieftain said in the auld tongue.
    Darcy glanced at Malina. She paid them no heed. “I dinna suspect she kens what it means.” She spoke English, but a strange version of it. And she seemed too upset about her box to care that he had declared his intention to wed her.
    “Ye do realize Steafan will likely wed ye tonight when ye present her to him. She’ll be sure to understand then.”
    He jerked his head to stare at Aodhan. “He wouldna.”
    Aodhan’s smirk confirmed what his suddenly thumping heart already kent. Steafan would.
    Of course, Aodhan had been there a fortnight past when Steafan had summoned him to his office and threatened to find a wife for him if he didn’t find one for himself by Harvest.
    “Your brother shames ye, lad,” his uncle had said. “Wed and already with a bairn and he two years your younger. Ye’re far too auld to nay have a wife, and Ackergill willna suffer a laird with no prospects for children.”
    “Make Edmund your heir, then,” he’d said. He didn’t mind yielding the honor to his brother. Edmund was a fine man, and Steafan made a good point; their family line would carry on with Edmund where it had no chance with him. But the whole argument was pointless. At a whole and hearty forty-five, Steafan wasn’t old enough to fash about who would be laird after him, and after losing his son and then his wife to grief soon after, he’d married a young lass. Ginneleah, Aodhan’s daughter. At a fresh seventeen years, she had many seasons of childbearing ahead of her. Just because she hadn’t conceived in the two years they’d been wed didn’t mean she never would. Steafan was bound to have an heir of his own blood. He wouldn’t have to settle for one of his brother’s blood. But Steafan wasn’t one to put hopeful stock in what might happen. Steafan was a pessimistic, paranoid bugger. And a bully.
    “Dinna be so quick to