The Laird’s Reckless Claim (Preview)

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Chapter One

1596, on a carriage to the Northern Highlands

“‘Tis nae a road, Maggie, ‘tis a personal insult tae me spine,” Sìle said, bracing her palm flat against the velvet-lined door.

The carriage lurched, a violent jolt that sent a shuddering ache through her ribs.

Her maid, Maggie, clutched her rosary beads until her knuckles were white as bone. “Och, me lady, dinnae say such things. The Highlands are a wild place, and the Earth has a memory of its own.”

“I have a memory of every loose stone that’s currently bruising me back,” Sìle shot back.

She looked down at her lap.

Her charcoal stick had snapped in two, leaving a jagged black smear across the gray peak she’d been sketching. She stared at the ruined drawing, the sharp lines blurred into a mess of soot, then set it aside. Her fingers felt cold, the air inside the cabin thickening with the damp of the moors.

Her father had paid a king’s ransom for this carriage. He’d boasted of the Lowland steel springs, promised her a journey befitting a merchant’s daughter of her standing.

But the north didn’t care for Lowland gold. The mountains had their own opinion on her father’s vanity.

“This is fer the best, me lady,” Maggie whispered, her eyes fixed on the suffocating mist pressing against the glass. “A MacLeod. A title. Ye’ll be a Lady, a real Highland Lady.”

“A Lady of what, Maggie?” Sìle turned back to the window.

Out there, the hills didn’t roll; they jagged upward like broken bone. The peaks were bruised purples and unforgiving grays. They looked like teeth. “I am travelin’ tae marry a man I have never laid eyes upon. A stranger in every sense of the word.”

“Most lasses would give their left arm fer a laird,” Maggie countered.

“And I would give me right arm tae be a wife tae a man of me own choosin’.” Sìle picked up the longer half of the charcoal.

Her hand moved with a frantic, rhythmic energy, shading the underside of a crag. It was the only way to quiet the thrumming anxiety in her chest.

“I wanted a heart that beats fer me, Maggie. A slow courtship. The kind where a look across a crowded room causes a fire in the blood, and where fallin’ in love is a voluntary plunge and nae a hard shove intae the dark.”

“Och, me lady. I ken it’s difficult.”

“What is real,” Sìle interrupted, her voice dropping to a low, tight whisper, “is that I am travelin’ toward a man I have never met, tae live in a castle at the edge of the world, and I am tae smile and be grateful fer the privilege.”

She pressed the charcoal too hard. Clack. The tip snapped again. She stared at the black smudge on the parchment, her pulse hammering in her throat. “I thought, perhaps, Faither might give me the chance tae find me own happiness.”

“Ye have a romantic heart, dinnae ye?” Maggie said gently. “I ken it well. Ye draw those bonnie pictures too.”

“I draw what feels real,” Sìle said, her jaw setting in a firm line.

She brushed the charcoal dust from her palm, her skin stained gray. She wouldn’t cry. Merchant’s daughters were raised to understand value, and she knew exactly what she was worth. She was a trade, a piece of coin passed from one hand to another.

The carriage fell into a heavy silence. Sìle watched the landscape, her eyes tracing the way the pale light died against the granite peaks.

“‘Tis a jagged sort of beauty, isnae it?” she murmured.

“‘Tis somewhat fearsome, me lady,” Maggie replied.

Sìle didn’t answer. The fear was a cold weight in her stomach, but she forced it down.

The world suddenly inverted.

The carriage shuddered as if a giant had reached up and seized the wheels.

Sìle’s charcoal skittered across the page once more. A long, ugly black line splitting the mountain she’d been crafting clean in two. Outside, the rhythmic clop of the escort’s horses broke into a frantic, splashing scramble of hooves in the muck.

“Captain!” Sìle called out.

She reached for the leather curtain, but before her fingers could touch the hide, a whistle sliced through the mist.

It was a high, jagged sound, human and sharp as a whetted blade.

The carriage lurched violently, throwing Sìle against the velvet padding. The air filled with the frantic neighing of horses and the wet, metallic sound of steel leaving leather scabbards.

“Stay down!” Sìle shouted. She lunged across the swaying cabin, shoving Maggie toward the floorboards. “Get under the seat, Maggie! Dae it now!”

A heavy weight slammed into the side of the carriage, rocking the frame on its hinges. Then came the sound that turned her blood to ice. A single, choked-off cry that ended in a sickening, bubbling gasp.

Trembling fingers pulled the leather curtain back just an inch. Through the sliver of the window, Sìle saw them. Men in dark, weathered plaids and rough linen masks emerged from the heather like ghosts made of wool and steel.

Her father’s guards, men who looked imposing on the paved streets of the south, were being cut down like wheat.

A body slammed against the exterior paneling with a dull thud. She heard the firm thwack of a blade finding home, followed by the heavy slide of a man falling into the mud.

She held Maggie down, her own heart battering against her ribs. “Nay matter what ye hear, remain under the seat until I tell ye otherwise!”

Terror raced down her spine, but beneath it, a cold, sharp clarity took hold. They weren’t after the gold. The chest in the boot was a pittance. The real value was the woman holding the MacLeod marriage contract.

She reached into the hidden pocket of her dress, her fingers trembling as they wrapped around the cool filigree hilt of her small, silver-handled fruit knife. It was a pathetic thing, meant for peeling pears, not parrying Highland claymores. But it was sharp.

The carriage door was suddenly wrenched open. The hinges screamed. Cold Highland air rushed in, smelling of wet earth, iron, and the pungent scent of unwashed skin.

“Out with ye, lass!”

The man wore a mask of rough linen, his eyes bloodshot and hungry. He reached into the dim cabin, his hand a blackened iron vice as he clamped onto Sìle’s wrist and pulled with a brutal, bone-jarring jerk.

“Let me go, ye coward!” Sìle didn’t scream for help. She knew there was none. As he dragged her out, she swung the knife. Not for his chest, which was protected by metal studs, but for the flesh of his thigh, where his kilt shifted.

The small blade sank deep.

The man roared. A sound of pure, animal shock. He recoiled, releasing her wrist to clutch his leg. Blood, dark and hot, bloomed against his tartan.

“Ye little bitch! I’ll have yer tongue fer that!”

His grip returned, iron fingers crushing her wrist hard enough to grind the small bones together.

Sìle twisted, drove her elbow into his ribs, feeling the grunt of air leave him. She used the half-second of his surprise to wrench sideways. He caught the back of her bodice instead, the heavy silk pulling taut and straining against her throat.

“Maggie!” Sìle’s voice cracked. “Run, go!”

She saw the flash of Maggie’s skirts as the woman ducked low and threw herself toward the far door. The man behind Sìle cursed and lunged after the maid.

That was his mistake.

Sìle scrambled out the opposite door, her boots hitting the slick mud with a splash that soaked her hem.

The air was thick with the clank of steel. She didn’t look back. She ran toward the treeline, the heavy silks of her skirts snagging on the gorse, tearing with a sound like a dying scream.

“Stop the lass! Dinnae let her reach the brae, she’s the one we came fer!” a voice bellowed.

Sìle sprinted into the woods, ferns slapping at her face, stinging her skin. Her breath came in ragged, burning gulps.

The Lowlands were flat and kind. This land was a predator, full of hidden dips and treacherous rises. She could hear the crashing of boots behind her, the heavy, rhythmic breath of men who hunted these woods for sport.

She pushed through a thicket of rowan, her lungs screaming for air.

Just a little further. Find a crevice. A hollow. Anything.

A hidden root, slick with moss, caught the toe of her boot.

She went down hard. The world tilted into a chaotic blur of green and brown. A sickening crack echoed in the silence of the woods. Then, a white-hot flash of agony exploded in her ankle, turning her vision to sparks.

Sìle tried to rise, but her leg buckled, a scream catching in her throat. She collapsed back into the dirt, the scent of crushed pine needles and damp earth filling her senses as she gasped.

“Cannae run now, can ye, bonnie lass?”

She rolled onto her back.

The man was a mountain of a human. His chest broad under a tattered plaid, his face twisted in a cruel, jagged grin. He held a dirk that looked a foot long, the steel notched and stained. He looked at her ruined emerald dress, then at her useless ankle, then at her face.

“A bonnie prize,” he sneered, stepping over a fallen log with slow, deliberate malice. “But dead weight is easier tae carry than a fighter.” He raised the dirk, the blade catching a sliver of gray light. “I’d prefer tae take a souvenir. Ye and whatever gold ye carry would be worth me while.”

Sìle’s fingers clawed at the knife still at her hands. She gripped it hard until her knuckles turned white. She watched his eyes, calculating the distance to his throat.

Tremors betrayed her entire body, but she would not die as a merchant’s mistake.

She raised the knife. He smiled. The idle, mocking smile of a predator, and stepped closer, his shadow falling over her like a shroud.

His hand shot out, seizing her wrist and slamming it into the dirt. The knife dropped. He twisted her arm, forcing her flat onto her back, and pressed the cold, biting edge of the dirk against the sensitive skin of her throat.

“There’s a good lass,” he breathed, his hot, foul breath ghosting over her face.

Sìle stared up at the pale strip of Highland sky, her chest heaving, her ankle screaming in a rhythmic throb of pain. She felt the cold, specific weight of having nothing left to fight with.

All was quiet except the wind in the pines and the slow, satisfied sound of her captor’s breathing.

It was over.

Chapter Two

She felt him before she saw him.

A low vibration in the earth beneath her. A rhythmic, heavy drumming that traveled through the damp soil and vibrated upward into her very bones.

It was disciplined. The kind of thunder that belonged to warhorses that knew exactly what they were running toward.

Above her, her captor’s head snapped toward the ridge. The malice in his eyes flickered, replaced by a sudden, sharp spike of alarm.

That half-second of distraction was all Sìle needed.

She drove her knee upward with every ounce of strength left in her lungs, catching him square in the gut. He let out a strangled grunt, the air whistling out of him as his grip on her wrist loosened just enough.

She wrenched sideways, her skin burning where his fingers had clamped, and clawed at the mud and her knife with her free hand. She dragged herself back, ignoring the white-hot agony that screamed through her ankle in protest.

Then, a blur of dark wool and gleaming steel erupted from the mist on the ridge above them. A rider on a horse as black as a peat-stained loch descended like a thunderbolt.

Sìle had one clear, staggering impression. Broad shoulders, a heavy cloak snapping behind him like a raven’s wing in the wind, and the silver arc of a claymore catching the pale, dying light, before the blade swept down with terrifying speed and bone-crushing force.

There was a sickening, heavy thud.

Her captor was lifted clean off his feet by the momentum, thrown back against the trunk of a gnarled oak. He hit the bark with a sound like a felled tree and slumped forward into the moss. The dirk slipped from his lifeless fingers, clattering uselessly against a stone. He did not move again.

Sìle lay in the dirt, her chest heaving in ragged, burning gulps, her fruit knife still gripped in her fist.

Riders thundered past her on both sides.

Four, five, six of them.

Wearing muted tartans of forest green and charcoal. They moved with predatory efficiency that made her father’s guards look like children playing with sticks. They drove the remaining attackers back up into the jagged crags without hesitation, the sounds of clashing steel and guttural shouting fading fast into the swallowing mist.

The man on the black horse pulled back on the reins. The animal reared slightly, its hooves churning the muck, before he brought it to a halt mere feet from where she lay.

He looked down at the dead man by the tree first, his gaze cold and assessing. Then slowly, he turned toward her.

Sìle had imagined many things on the long, grueling road north. She had sketched faces in the margins of her parchment during the quiet hours. The kind of soft, noble face she might have chosen for herself, given the choice.

She had not imagined this.

He didn’t look like a hero from one of her sketches.

He looked like the Highlands themselves come to life. Grim, jagged, and beautiful in the terrifying way that wild, dangerous things are beautiful. His hair was the color of a winter hearth, dark with deep copper where the pale light caught the strands. His jaw was set hard, an uncompromising line of granite, and his eyes were a piercing, unsettling blue. They were eyes that assessed rather than simply looked, taking in the knife in her hand, the ruin of her emerald silk, and the mud smeared across her face with the same cool, deadly efficiency.

He swung a leg over the saddle and dismounted in one fluid, practiced motion that spoke of a life spent in leather and steel.

“Ye can put that away, lass,” he said. His voice was a low, resonant burr that seemed to vibrate somewhere deep behind her sternum. “Unless ye intend tae use it on me.”

Up close, he was even more disquieting.

The cut of his features was sharp and severe, the kind of face that had been weathered by wind and war. There was no warmth in it, not exactly. And yet he had ridden out of the mist and cut down a man about to drive a dirk into her throat without a heartbeat of hesitation.

Sìle did not lower the knife. The silver hilt felt small and ridiculous in her hand, but she held it steady.

“Who are ye?”

***

He didn’t answer.

He crouched beside her with deliberate, unhurried movements. She was wound tight, clearly ready to startle at the wrong move, and he kept himself slow and steady because of it. He turned the same unsentimental focus on her ankle that he’d turned on the dead man a moment ago.

“Dinnae touch me,” she snapped, her voice tight.

“Ye’ve a tongue on ye, lass,” he replied, without looking up. “Hold still now. Let me see the damage ye’ve done tae yersel’.”

She held still. It was not from obedience—he could see that plain enough. It was calculation. She’d looked at her situation, weighed it, and made a decision in about two seconds flat.

He moved his hands with precision, tracing the anatomy of the joint, pressing carefully. He kept his eyes on her foot as he worked, but that did not stop him from looking at her face from beneath his lashes, gauging her reaction.

And it was, he had to admit, not an unpleasant thing to watch.

She was young. Younger than he’d expected his betrothed to be. But he was not disappointed with what he saw.

Her hair was the color of autumn bracken, deep ginger darkened by the rain, and it had come half-loose from whatever arrangement it had started the morning in, long strands of it clinging to her jaw and throat. Her eyes were dark—almost startling against all that copper—and they hadn’t left his face since he’d crouched beside her. Watchful. Measuring. Not the eyes of a woman who frightened easily, whatever the rest of her was feeling.

She was slender, her neck long and pale where the rain had pulled loose strands of ginger hair away from it. The wet had done nothing kind to her dress, and he was aware, with the awareness of a man trying very hard to be dispassionate, of the soft swell of her figure beneath the ruined fabric.

He moved his gaze back to her ankle with more deliberateness than the action required.

She kept her expression neutral. Each press of his thumbs against the swollen joint drew not a sound or wince from her, though the heat beneath his fingers told him the damage was bad enough. She would not give him the satisfaction. He could read it in the hard set of her jaw.

“Yer fingers move as though ye ken what ye’re daeing,” she said, her breath hitching despite herself as his thumb pressed against the heat of the swelling. “Are ye nae only a warrior but a medic too?”

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth. Involuntary. He let it pass.

“In the Highlands, lass, a man has tae ken how tae kill and also how tae mend if he wants tae see the mornin’.”

He pulled a strip of clean linen from the pouch at his belt and began binding her ankle with the same quiet competence. He wrapped the joint firmly, his movements certain and unhurried.

He was aware of her gaze dropping to his hands. He didn’t look up. He simply worked—wrapping, pressing, keeping each pass deliberate. His hands were large, scarred across the knuckles from years of exactly the kind of morning he’d just described. They were not the hands of a gentle man. But they knew how to be careful when careful was what was needed.

“Me maid,” she said suddenly. “Maggie, she ran from the carriage when the attack began. Where is she?”

He paused his binding for only a moment. “Me men will have found her. She’ll be at the road.” He tied the linen off with a firm, neat knot. “She’s safe, lass.”

She exhaled a long, shaky breath. The sound told him she’d been holding it since the maid had fled.

He finished the binding and looked up.

In the rain-soaked quiet of the forest, with the scent of horses, wet earth, and pine needles thick around them, his eyes met hers. He held the look a beat longer than was strictly necessary. Her dark eyes were direct and unguarded in a way the rest of her carefully wasn’t, and he found, against his better judgement, that he wanted to see what she would do with the silence.

She was the one to look away first.

“Me name is Sìle, nae lass. I am tae be married,” she said, as if the quiet had become a weight she needed to lift off her chest. “Tae Laird MacLeod. He will nae appreciate a stranger’s hands upon me.”

Torin would have laughed, if he hadn’t been so angry that someone had the audacity to attempt to kidnap his bride-to-be, and in his own territory no less.

Sìle. Daughter of Tamhas Fairfield.

He’d been given the name weeks ago, in a letter he’d read once and set aside with the same detached efficiency he applied to livestock tallies and border disputes. A merchant’s daughter, his councilors had told him. Young. Well-bred enough for the arrangement.

Her father wanted the MacLeod name above his door and the MacLeod reach behind his trade routes. Torin had wanted the Fairfield gold and the political quiet that came with it. A clean exchange. Uncomplicated.

He had not anticipated her looks.

He had not anticipated any of this.

The irony of it landed sharp, quiet, and entirely unwelcome. He hadn’t ridden out this morning to collect a bride. He’d ridden out because his scouts had flagged an ambush on the eastern road and he’d wanted to know who was bold enough to move armed men through his territory without his leave. That the woman at the center of it turned out to be the one already promised to him was the kind of thing that would have made a lesser man believe in fate.

When he finally looked up, he’d schooled his expression back to something even, though he could feel the trace of it still sitting at the corner of his mouth, refusing to leave entirely.

“Is that so?” He kept his tone carefully level. “I am certain yer future husband wouldnae mind. Any reasonable man would appreciate a wound well-tended.”

He said it and let it sit there, and did not elaborate.

Before she could press him, and she would have because he could see it forming in those dark eyes, he slid one arm beneath her knees and the other behind her back and lifted her in one clean, efficient motion. She grabbed his shoulder on instinct, her fingers pressing into the rough, damp wool of his plaid. Light, he noted. Slender as she looked. But she held herself with a stillness in his arms that was deliberate rather than passive. She would not cling, and she would not squirm, and she fixed her gaze on the tree line as though he were simply a vehicle she’d decided to make use of.

He carried her with the unhurried ease the road required and said nothing either.

The tree line broke and the road opened before them.

He took in the scene in a single sweep. Most of her father’s guards were wounded and shaken, but standing. Two were not, lying still in the mud where they’d fallen. He noted the carriage, the rear wheel splintered but holding. It would make the distance.

He carried her past without comment.

Beside the broken wheel, small and round and wailing loudly into her apron, was the maid.

The moment she saw her mistress, she launched herself forward with a sound that startled two of the horses and sent several of his riders’ hands instinctively toward their hilts.

Something moved in his chest. He kept it from reaching his face, but it was a near thing.

“Me lady! Me lady, ye’re alive! Holy Maither, I thought those cursed devils had taken ye fer good!”

He set her carefully back beside the carriage. She balanced herself on one good foot and steadied herself against the doorframe. The maid threw her arms around her before she’d fully straightened, and she let her, pressing one hand briefly to the back of the older woman’s lace cap. A small, quiet gesture.

“Maggie.” Her voice came out steady. “Maggie, look at me. Are ye hurt?”

The maid pulled back, hiccupping, and turned herself over for inspection. “Nay, nay, I’m whole, me lady, I hid as ye told me. But yer dress, yer ankle.”

“I’m alive.” She cut through the panic gently, cleanly. “We’re both alive. That is enough fer now.” She squeezed the older woman’s hands once, firmly. “And ye’ll be home soon enough, back tae yer family, safe and sound. I promise ye that.”

The maid’s eyes filled again, but she nodded and pressed her lips together and held.

He had been watching longer than he’d intended to.

She looked up and caught him at it. He didn’t look away. He held her gaze with the same directness she turned on him, because she was the kind of woman who would notice if he didn’t, and he wasn’t in the habit of flinching.

She had steady eyes. Steadier than most men he’d ridden with.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“We ride.” He kept his voice even. “Me men will guard the party. Ye’ll be safe the rest of the road.”

She climbed carefully into the carriage, holding her maid’s hand for support. When she was seated, she turned to him, nodding politely.

“I’ll see ye are rewarded fer yer time and effort. Especially fer savin’ me life. I will make sure me husband sees tae it.”

“Indeed.”

“And the men who attacked us? Who sent them? Why did they come fer me specifically?”

“Questions are fer the hearth, lass. Movement is fer the road.” He reached for the heavy door. “We are nae safe here.”

“I am nae a woman who accepts that as an answer.”

He closed the door and clicked the latch.

He heard the pause on the other side of it, before she leaned through the window frame.

“At the very least,” she called after him, “tell me yer name. Ye ken mine well enough.”

He had his hand on the saddle. He turned his head just enough to look at her over his shoulder.

She was watching him with those dark, direct eyes, her ginger hair still half-loose and rain-damp against her jaw, waiting for an answer he had no intention of giving her.

Nae yet.

He mounted in a single clean motion.

“Ride,” he said to his men.

The carriage jolted forward, and he did not look back.