The Groom Says Yes Read Online Free

now knew the answer. Yes.
    Her own culpability filled her with anger. Furious in a way she’d never experienced before, resentment came roiling up inside her like a pot boiling over.
    Ignoring the offered hand, Sabrina turned and began walking away from the inn. Her cart and pony were hitched with the others. Dumpling, a shaggy Highland beast with a flaxen mane and tail, had one back foot cocked as he slept standing in the afternoon sunlight.
    But Sabrina didn’t walk in that direction. Instead, without the hat or the gloves she’d left behind in the inn, she chose the road leading toward the moors.
    “ Miss Davidson, ” Mrs. Bossley called, an impertinent note in her tone as if she expected Sabrina to immediately come marching back.
    Sabrina wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
    What she needed to do was to have a moment alone so that she could release this terrible anger building inside her. She had to clear her head to think. Her whole life was about to change, and it was all her father’s fault.
    He’d been courting the Widow Bossley and hadn’t said a word to her? She couldn’t believe he wanted to remarry. It was completely out of his character.
    Her father had always been a cautious man, a reserved one . . . although since her mother’s death, there had been times Sabrina had concerns for him, something she hadn’t realized until this moment. He did not always act quite himself. However, she had never imagined he’d be open to clandestine meetings with the Widow Bossley. And asking her to marry him made Sabrina wonder if he was ready for Bedlam!
    The worst was having the widow behave in such a condescending manner. She’d called Sabrina “innocent.” Another way of saying naïve. Or unimportant.
    However, she did speak one truth. If her father remarried, Sabrina would be subject to the widow’s whims. Men were that way. They could be led.
    Hot tears spilled from her eyes. She swiped at them, angry with herself for being hurt, for being afraid.
    How soon men forget their grief. How quickly they move on. Bitterness threatened to consume her. She couldn’t return home, not yet. She’d do and say things she would regret.
    As she moved to higher ground, she left behind the trees and the silver waters of Loch Tay. She left behind civilization. Here, where the sky touched the wild moors, she had space to breathe, to cry, and to scream her anger.
    Not far from the road was an abandoned bothy. When her mother had been so frighteningly ill, there had been many a time Sabrina had needed escape. She’d discovered the bothy and realized here was a place she could go to release the horror of watching her mother slowly die.
    In the bothy, she could break down, rage at God even, then dry her tears, dust herself off, and travel home with no one’s being the wiser. Because of the bothy, she had smiles for her mother and soothing words for her father.
    And right now, Sabrina needed its haven.
    The bothy was nestled in the crook of the moor’s rolling land. She picked up her step. Without hesitation, she ducked under the open doorway, strode right through the first room past the door into the second, windowless one. She stopped, facing a corner. Her face was flushed and her breathing labored from exertion and anger.
    Doubling her fists, she gave vent to her outrage, speaking to the air as if to her father.
    “You can’t marry that woman. You mustn’t. And if you think I shall live under the same roof with her or sit at the same table—you are wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I shall not disgrace my mother’s memory by recognizing her. Do you hear me? I won’t. ”
    That last felt good. And so, she repeated it.
    “I. Won’t. Not ever. You may cut me off, send me to the poorhouse, whip me with chains, but I will not sit at a table with the Widow Bossley. And she will never be a mother to me. Or anything else.”
    She could have jumped up and down she was so angry. She’d never speak these words to her father. Mrs. Bossley was