Saved by the Highlander Read Online Free

barbaric highlander and thus no gentleman, she began to think he must be a gentlemanly man all the same. “I do not think you are safe here, and I think you will be in even more danger if we take you to Lormoran. I do not wish to say why, for though he is no friend to the MacAlpins, I would not speak ill of your intended unless I must. I insist that you come with us to Kilmorin.”
    On one side of the road, it seemed to Alice—the other side, somehow—lay her own insistence on continuing on to meet Lord Roderick at his castle. There also lay, though, the scraps of memories from the attack: the cries of fear and pain, and the feelings of shame and helplessness. On this side of the road, with Niall MacAlpin, lay acquiescence, and allowing this man to take care and even, for the moment, to take charge of her.
    Alice knew she should cross that mental road to the place where the bodies lay, and take charge the way Mademoiselle Théodora had taught her to take charge of the servants. She knew it. She stood up again, drawing the strength from some place in her that she had never known she had.
    “I thank you,” she said to MacAlpin. “But I must get to Lormoran.” She began to cross the real road in front of her to take charge of the burial. Her head felt a little light, but Alice knew her duty.
    “My lady,” came MacAlpin’s voice behind her, so authoritative that Alice stopped in her tracks upon the dirt of the road. “I do not wish to use force, but I will if I must. As I said, I insist that you come to Kilmorin with me.”
    Alice turned, feeling just the slightest bit unsteady on her feet, but mustering the look of superiority she had practiced in the looking glass at home in her chamber in the maiden tower of Mowton Castle. “A highlander,” she said, “must not insist to the daughter of an earl.”
    Alice watched his brow darken, and suddenly realized that the division of her mind into those two sides of the road had probably caused her to forget important facts about her situation. Suddenly she remembered things she had heard about the highlanders—things that she recalled had fascinated her, truly: that they scorned the very idea of nobility, as the rest of Europe conceived it. That they had chiefs, but that every highlander was a nobleman, and even a king, in his own eyes.
    “My lady,” said Niall MacAlpin, “you have had a terrible shock, I know, and I would not lay my hands upon you unless I had to do it, but I do insist, for at this moment I know better than you do where your safety lies, though you be an earl’s daughter and I a highland barbarian.”
    Alice felt her cheeks grow hot. Something about the tone of his voice suggested that he would lay his hands upon her, should she resist him further. Across the road from them, MacAlpin’s highlanders had finished laying out the dead. The man he had called Callum approached then, holding one of her silk chemises.
    MacAlpin turned to him and said, “Give that here, Callum, and go search the bodies.” Callum handed him the chemise, and Alice noted with a strange interest that MacAlpin seemed a little startled at the touch of the fine fabric upon his big, rough hands.
    That sight—the sight of the highlander holding Alice’s most intimate garment, though it occurred to her that he held it very differently than the outlaw would have… than he had, when he ripped her only other chemise off her trembling limbs before they had tied her…
    “No,” she said. “No, you do not.”
    “My lady,” MacAlpin said once again, his frustration now breaking out more fully, “if I must, I shall enforce your acquiescence. We cannot waste time; these men may well be expected somewhere, to report on the attack.”
    “How, sir? How enforce my acquiescence?”
    “With a spanking, my lady, if I must.”
    “A spanking?” Alice felt her brows crease. “You are jesting, sir.”
    “No, my lady. I would not jest about such matters.”
    “A spanking? Such as a little