The Ghost, Greyson, Maeve [funny books to read TXT] 📗

run off from here, I’d stay to the coast for food. Gull’s eggs. Fish washed up and such. I’d keep movin’ ’til I found folk who didna know ’bout me or ’bout what had happened. I’d go east ’cause towns are there that might have a kind soul who might help a woman breedin’. ’Specially if she lied and told them she was widowed. I’d bet the finest ale we got that’s what her planned to do when she left here. East along the coast for certain, ye ken?” Her panicked gaze kept flitting to the chubby little man Magnus held aloft. “I swear it.” She crossed herself, then clasped her hands and shook them. “Please dinna kill or curse us. We did her no harm. Surely, ye know we couldna give her shelter. If the Nithdane had found out, he wouldha run us out, too. We wouldha lost everything. Came close to losing it when Laird Red Caunich came through here.” She crossed herself again. “Only God Almighty saved us.”

Magnus released the pub keeper and stepped back as the man hit the floor. What the woman said made sense, and Lady Bree would have been canny enough to do just that. In fact, she had often told him of combing the beaches and cliff sides in search of nature’s treasures, as she had called them. The memory made his heart hurt. Such a sweet lass. What had she endured because he had taken another mercenary campaign rather than wintered at Nithdane? The thought weighed heavy on him as he strode to the door, tossed aside the ridiculous bar, and exited. He despised those who would stand idly by and watch while an innocent woman was stripped of her kith and kin’s protection. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Evander skittering back to their mounts. The nosy lad had been eavesdropping at the window.

“I thought I told ye to tend the horses?” Magnus said, gruff with the lad, but his heart wasn’t in it. He settled into the saddle, struggling with the responsibility of all he had discovered. How had he managed to hurt so many with one foolish choice?

“I could see them from where I stood,” Evander defended. “I canna believe ye didna kill that arse worm.”

“I only kill when I must.” He nudged his beast with his knee and headed east.

“So, we ride the coast ’til we come across someone who knew her?” Evander edged his pale gray horse up beside Magnus’s black beast. “Reckon they traveled on foot?”

“I’m sure they did.” The thought rankled him, stirring the rage simmering in his gut. He wondered if they had escaped with anything more than the clothes on their backs—if that. Bree’s father had been an arrogant bastard, acting as though he ruled over the largest clan in all of Scotland rather than a wee cluster of folks he claimed were descended from Somerled himself.

Magnus had no doubt the man had made the banishing of his daughters into quite the spectacle. The fool had always lamented how his wife had failed the clan by not giving him sons.

Evander nudged his horse to a faster pace, keeping it abreast of Magnus’s. “Would a chief really treat his daughter so harshly?”

The worry in the boy’s tone warned Magnus this conversation had more to do with than just Clan Nithdane. “No good chief would treat his daughter so harshly. Most would just send them away. To a nunnery most likely.”

“What about a lass whose father isna so high in the clan?” Evander waved away the words as though they were midges. “Say…like the smithy’s daughter even.”

“Did ye bed Ellen? Is that why yer mother was fit to be tied and sent ye on this trip?” Gretna’s harsh lecture made sense now. While Evander might have the wants and needs of a man, he didn’t have the ways or the means to take care of any consequences should they arise. “Is the lass with child?”

“Nay!” Evander stared at him as though he had just said they would eat their horses for dinner. “At least…I dinna think she is.” He squirmed in the saddle. “I didna even get my willy all the way in her the first time we did it. When she pulled on it whilst I sucked on her teats, I couldna keep from spilling my seed.” His horrified look plainly said how he felt about that. “It felt so good, I thought I had died.” After a slow shake of his head, he added, “And the second time we done it, her da walked in on us. I thought I was dead then, for sure. That man’s big as an ox.”

Magnus bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing out loud.

“I went to chapel twice to thank God above that all the man did was drag my arse back to Mama.” The boy made a face. “’Course, then I thought I was dead, too. She might not be big as the smithy, but God help ye if ye give her a case of the red arse.” He gave Magnus an earnest look. “Ye think I’m gonna be a da? Will the chieftain make me wed Ellen? We only did it the two times, and the first shouldna even count.”

“Do ye love Ellen?” Magnus decided to attack this delicate issue from that angle.

“Nay—leastways not enough to wed her.” Evander frowned. “Did ye love yer Lady Bree?”

“That was a different situation.”

“Different how?” The lad’s eyes narrowed as though he smelled a lie.

“I was fond of her,” Magnus lamely replied, wondering how the hell their talk had taken this turn. “When she asked for my help, I couldna refuse.”

“Yer help with what?”

“The ridding of her maidenhead.”

“Her what?” Evander stared at him in disbelief.

“Has neither Gretna nor Ian talked to ye about these things?” Magnus wasn’t about to explain the joining of a man and a woman to the boy. It wasn’t his place.

Evander grinned. “I was just funning with ye.