To Love a Highlander Read Online Free

aside and then released him. He dusted his hands demonstratively. “Think well, lad, before you’re next so ambitious.” He slid a telling look at Mirabelle. “No good comes o’ those who dinnae ken their place.”
    Sorley bristled, felt heat surging into his cheeks. Even so, he couldn’t let Mirabelle see him humiliated. Not twice in one night.
    She liked him, he was sure.
    Perhaps he’d see her again before the MacLaren party left Stirling. Hoping so, he turned to her, but her expression froze the words on his tongue. All the warmth was gonefrom her eyes. Her face was as cold and stony as the woman’s, her stance rigid as the hulking giant beside her.
    She looked at him as she would a stranger, a ragged beggar in the street.
    “A good e’en,” she offered him, speaking with stiff courtesy.
    “That it was not.” The old woman sniffed. “I’ll hear the meaning of this.”
    “I wished to dance, that is all.” Mirabelle shrugged, flicked at her sleeve. “It is over and done, forgotten.”
    “And so it shall remain.” The old woman jerked her away, pulling her into the crowd, toward the dais where pipers were again strutting, blowing their vigorous tunes as if nothing had happened.
    In truth, nothing had.
    Except that everything she’d stirred in Sorley withered and died.
    He stared after her, a strange buzzing in his ears.
    Anger and resentment welled in his chest, chasing the pride and pleasure, and the magic he’d believed had spilled into the hall, casting an enchantment.
    How could he have been so foolish?
    He wouldn’t ever again.
    So he assumed his best look of defiance and strode from the dancing space, his shoulders straight, his head held high. He crossed the hall with purpose, winding his way through the crowd until he reached the stair tower. He felt a deep need to visit his special corner of the battlements, so he took the circular steps two at a time, frowning only when he pulled open the door at the top.
    A surge of cold air and a swirl of mist greeted him, the night’s fog-drenched grayness suiting his mood. He went straight to the battlements’ eastern wall, where he braced his hands on the chill, damp stone. This late in summer, the night sky should’ve gleamed like silvered glass, offeringhim sweeping views of the broad plain beneath the castle, the winding band of the river, and—he clenched his fists against the uncaring stone of the wall—the distant peaks of the Highlands.
    Instead, thick mist spoiled the view, drifting in sheets across the land, blowing in shimmering curtains past the battlements.
    Not that he cared.
    The Highlands were there, waiting for him, even if he couldn’t see them.
    They called to him more fiercely than ever.
    Because now he knew beyond doubt that he
was
a Highlander.
    Weren’t they said to never forget a grievance? Knowing it was so, he leaned against the wall, narrowing his eyes to peer through the whirling gray. He fancied he could see the faint outline of hills. He knew they marked the start of a different world, a wondrous place unlike any other, where deep glens beckoned with quiet and cold, clean air. Granite mountains so stark, lonely, and beautiful, it was a physical pain to look upon them.
    All that he’d known since he’d first glimpsed them from this, his special corner of the ramparts, a viewing place he had sought again and again, ever since he’d heard a visiting storyteller sing of his misty, heathered home in the hills.
    The bard’s song had spoken to him. Noticing his awe, the man hauled Sorley onto his broad, plaid-draped shoulders and carried him up to the battlements to see such wonders for himself, if only from afar. Sorley had been all of six, but he’d never forgotten.
    Someday he’d find the Highland chieftain who’d sired him.
    He’d claim the birthright he’d been denied.
    He’d prove his Highland blood by avenging the wrongs done him. Vengeance would be his and it’d be as cold andgray as the mist swirling around