Taken by Angeline Fortin (ebook reader with android os TXT) 📕

towed his young wife away leaving Scarlett alone with Laird in the empty stairwell.  Her pulse fluttered under his steady gaze.

“What is it?  Do I look okay?”

“Ye’ve covered yer ears,” he murmured, cupping his hand around the back of her neck.  His thumb swept upward beneath her hood to tickle her lobe and the air in the stairwell rose by more than a few degrees.

So Laird had an ear fetish, did he?  “Should I take it off?” she asked, suppressing a delicious shudder.

“Nay, but mayhap I can take it off ye later?”

So that they could finish what they had already started, was his unspoken implication. “Maybe.  If you’re nice.”

“I can be verra nice.  In fact, here.” His husky brogue shivered along her spine, sending a reverberation of desire and anticipation through her.  A reminder of their truncated interlude.  He held out his other hand to reveal a spill of pearls and golden topaz.  “I thought ye might like to wear these tonight.  I thought they might match yer eyes, but I suppose they will match yer gown as well,” he told her, holding it out by the ends to show her the necklace, loops of pearls meeting at a topaz as large as a robin’s egg with more pearls and smaller topaz dangling along the way.

“It’s stunning.  Thank you.”

“’Twas a gift to my mother from auld King James.  Obviously ‘tis just a loan.”

“Of course, but it is sweet of you.”  And surprising. “Do you treat all your captives this way?”

Laird looked disgruntled by her teasing and shrugged.  “No’ all my captives join the King’s table.  Nae lady should go into battle wi’out the proper armor.”

Obediently she rotated so that he could clasp it around her throat.  Her hand lifted reflexively to cover the jewels and felt her heart racing beneath her hand as his warm fingers tickled the back of her neck.  “How do I look?” she asked shakily, feeling more confident of the answer than she had been the previous morning.  Well-armed, indeed!

“Like heaven,” he whispered, his lips grazing a hairsbreadth below her covered ear.

“You didn’t even look,” she protested, turning to face him.

“Yer a bonny lass, as ye well know.”  She quivered as his finger traced a path up the side of her neck, feeling the truth in his words right down to the toes of her borrowed shoes.  Never in her life, her career had she been covered in so many layers, concealed from head to toe and yet made to feel so beautiful.

Something had shifted in his attitude in just a matter of hours.  What?  How?  She didn’t know but that change sent her heart thrumming.  She really wasn’t thinking this through.

“Cease yer dallying,” Rhys hissed, sticking his head into the stairwell.  “King James is nigh approaching!”

21

 

“That is your king?”

Amazing.

“This is nae time to be yerself, Scarlett.  Ye dinnae dare offer him insult.”

“I’m not insulting him, but I’m just saying.”  To make him happy and not ruin the good mood between them, Scarlett kept her other thoughts to herself.

James Stewart was an inconspicuous looking guy.  He might have been Laird’s blood uncle, but there was nothing about him that bespoke a genetic resemblance.  No taller than she, lanky though richly dressed, the King didn’t have any of the presence she had come to associate with royalty.  He had long dark hair cut straight at his shoulders and across his forehead.  Scarlett had seen the hairstyle in old portraits but hadn’t really thought anyone actually wore their hair like that.

King James made slow progress through the great hall, nodding here, lifting a hand there.  Everyone in the crowded room pressed forward to greet him, shake his hand or merely get a glimpse of him.  He worked the room with an ease Scarlett envied.

Here was the A-List superstar of the time.  Everyone was looking at him.  None of them were looking at her. Any curiosity the castle’s inhabitants had felt about her in the preceding days was gone and she savored the novelty of having not a single set of eyes upon her.  Scarlett didn’t begrudge him the attention in the least.

Well, perhaps one but she didn’t mind that single admiring gaze today at all.

“Are we going to meet him?” she asked Laird.

“Nay, no’ today.”  His eyes dimmed.  “Is it something ye were hoping for?”

Scarlett shrugged.  “No, not really.  Just excited.  There’s just something about getting all dressed up, you know?  I’ve always loved that part of it.”

“It?” he asked curiously but Scarlett just shook her head.

“Who are all these people?”

“Retainers of the King, his traveling companions and counsel,” Laird told her.  “My father, Sir William, is at the King’s side.”

She would have realized it the moment she had seen Sir William even if Laird hadn’t said a word. It was like a glimpse of what Laird would look like in the years to come.  Unlike Lady Ishbel who was aging poorly, Sir William for all his fifty years was still a vital, striking man.

Perhaps she could see now why he managed to have so many illegitimate children.  Women probably had a hard time keeping their hands off of him.  Except Ishbel, who managed somehow to give the impression that she was avoiding him even as she stood right by his side.  Instead, she was fawning over the King who seemed not to notice as he gave all of his attention to a gorgeous, dark-eyed woman on his other side.

“Is that the Queen?”

“The Queen remains at Linlithgow I heard,” Laird told her.

“Then who is that?”

Laird only took her arm and steered her after the throng of people who followed the King’s party into the dining hall.  More tables had been added as the crowd present for supper far exceeded that at dinner but the King and the other noble visitors paraded immediately to the high table along with the Hepburns.  The benches below began to fill.

“Come share a trencher with me, Scarlett,” Aileen invited, capturing her hand and tugging her toward seats just