Author: julianawight
Sold to the Highland Rebel- Extended Epilogue
Two years later
Two years had done something entirely remarkable to the light.
Or perhaps, she considered as she watched the soft descent of the day, it was only that she noticed its behavior differently now. The specific way the late afternoon sun broke across the vibrant green meadow below the eastern ridge, falling low and long at this time of year, turning the high grass a color that didn’t possess a precise name in either the English or the Gaelic tongue.
It was an ethereal hue resting somewhere between bright gold, deep clover, and the particular, rich amber of late afternoon in a place that had finally, painstakingly learned how to be peaceful. She noticed the light now the way she never had during her structured years at Croft Estate.
Small abundances. A ledger of quiet mercies.
The baby had found a stone.
He was sitting perfectly upright in the thick grass. He was gripping this particular granite stone with both of his small, chubby hands, examining its rough surface. He turned it over meticulously. Looked at the dark underside. Turned it back to the sun. Appeared to reach a profound intellectual conclusion.
Then, with absolute efficiency, he put it directly into his mouth.
“Alasdair,” Rosalind said, her voice laced with an affectionate sigh.
The boy looked up at her, his dark eyes wide. He slowly took the stone out of his mouth, considered it in the palm of his hand, and then promptly shoved it right back in.
Bethany leaned over from the wool blanket beside him and removed the wet pebble from his mouth.
“That is distinctly not food,” Bethany told him, her voice maintaining the perfectly level, conversational tone she utilized for everything regarding the baby, as though they were two equals engaged in a highly reasonable parliamentary discussion. “We have talked about this choice several times this week, Alasdair.”
Alasdair looked at her. He looked intently at the stone now resting safely in her hand. Then, he looked straight back up at her face
“He’s incredibly sure of himself,” Lachlan noted from the grass.
“He gets that entirely from you,” Rosalind replied, looking down at her husband.
“He gets that from his maither,” Lachlan said, his voice a low rumble completely stripped of heat. “I’m never that certain about anything in this life.”
She looked at him sidelong, a smile touching her lips.
He was lying flat on his back in the deep clover with his large arm folded behind his head and his dark eyes half-closed against the low glare of the sun, entirely at rest in the way he had slowly, painfully learned to be at rest over the past two seasons.
It was a transformation that had taken longer than anything else in the valley. Longer than the structural rebuilding of the cracked granary, longer than the grueling administrative work of hunting down and dismantling what remained of Graham’s border network, longer than any of the external, military tasks. The internal things always took the longest. The rebuilding of a man’s spirit was slow mathematics.
“You’re entirely certain about most things, Lachlan Buchanan,” she said.
“I am decisive,” he corrected, opening one dark eye to look at her. “That’s a different variable entirely.”
She considered the distinction, smoothing her skirts over her knees. “Is it?”
“Aye. Decisive is when ye make a choice quickly because a situation requires movement. Certain is when ye ken fer a fact that ye’re right.” He closed his eye again, a trace of a smile tugging his jaw. “I’m often wrong, Rosalind. I just commit meself fully tae the path I’ve chosen.”
She handed him a thick piece of fresh bread from the cloth laid beside her. He took it into his large hand without even bothering to sit up from the grass.
The meadow was exceptionally quiet around them. A pair of high birds crossed the blue sky above the eastern ridge, their wings catching the amber light. Somewhere further below them, toward the dark tree line of the valley, the burn was running over the rocks. She could hear the steady murmur of the water if she stopped paying attention to everything else, the low, constant rhythm of the wild land moving over its stones.
Alasdair had accepted the tragic loss of his stone with surprising equanimity, immediately moving on to the far more accessible project of pulling at the grass. He extracted a messy handful of roots, examined the dirt clod with fascination, and then held the green offering out toward Bethany.
“Thank you,” Bethany said with complete seriousness, accepting the handful of dirt and grass into her palm.
He appeared thoroughly satisfied with the transaction and immediately began looking for more grass to conquer.
Rosalind watched the child’s profile. There was a strange thing that occurred sometimes—not often, but sometimes in the quiet spaces of the day—when she looked at him and the entire world seemed to tilt slightly on its axis with the simple, breathtaking improbability of his existence.
The mere fact of him. That he existed at all, specifically. This particular, tiny human being possessing Lachlan’s stubborn jawline, her own father’s expressive eyes, and a fierce personality that appeared to be entirely his own, emerging daily in new, small ways that neither of them could have ever predicted.
She remembered thinking, months before he was born, that she would be profoundly frightened by motherhood. She had worried that the sheer scope of caring about something so remarkably small and so utterly undefended would feel exactly like the carriage ambush. Like raw exposure, like a terrifying vulnerability with no available castle protection. She had braced her soul for that familiar anxiety.
But it hadn’t felt like that at all.
It had felt, instead, like standing on solid bedrock. Like ground that went all the way down to the center of the earth.
“He’s going to walk soon,” Bethany noted quietly.
She was watching Alasdair pull at the roots. “He’s been looking at the ground differently these past three days.”
“How does a baby look at the ground differently?” Rosalind asked, amused.
“Like it’s a structural problem he’s currently working out in his head.” Bethany glanced up at her, her eyes bright. “He also gets that look entirely from Lachlan.”
Lachlan, who had appeared to be nearly asleep beneath the sun, murmured, “I heard that, Bethany,” without moving a single muscle.
Bethany simply smiled up at the clear sky, unbothered.
The picnic food was simple, rustic fare. Fresh, crusty bread, soft white cheese, dried winter fruit, and something the castle kitchens had sent up wrapped carefully in linen cloth that turned out to be small, sweet oat cakes baked with wild honey.
Lachlan had already consumed most of them before anyone else had even a single chance at the basket, claiming absolutely no knowledge of the theft when asked directly about the empty cloth.
Alasdair was given a small, broken piece of the oat cake, which he received into his hands. He managed the consumption with impressive focus, utilizing both hands and smearing a great deal of the honey directly onto his cheeks and chin.
Rosalind patiently cleaned his face with the corner of a damp cloth.
Later, when Alasdair had entirely exhausted his investigation of the immediate patch of meadow grass and had been shifted gently into Bethany’s lap, he became engaged in the grueling process of falling asleep. Rosalind lay back down on the wool blanket, her shoulder resting securely against Lachlan’s side.
The sky above them was that brilliant, particular blue that only appeared in the late afternoon at this time of the autumn season. Deep, clear, and infinitely far away. A lonely white cloud moved lazily across the upper edge of the eastern ridge, appearing to change its mind about its direction, and drifted slowly back toward the peaks.
“Kenina wrote to me,” Rosalind said softly, her eyes on the cloud.
“I ken. Tristan brought the runner’s letter up tae the keep this morning.”
“She and Peadar are coming north fer Michaelmas.”
“Aye,” Lachlan murmured, his hand resting in the grass. “Alpin and Mhairi are traveling with them too, and so are Hamish and Isobel, according tae Tristan.”
“All of them taegether again,” Rosalind said, a wave of warmth washing over her. “The Great Hall will be incredibly loud.”
She could feel the physical shift of his smile beside her without even having to turn her head to see it. She had learned that about him too. The small physical facts of his presence, the slight, comfortable shift in the air beside her whenever something landed correctly in his heart.
The distant burn moved steadily below them in the valley. The birds had gone wherever birds retreated to in the early Scottish evening. The high meadow grass bent in a sudden, cool breath of wind and then gracefully straightened itself against the light.
“My father would have loved this place,” she said quietly.
Lachlan went quiet for a long moment, the silence respectful. “The meadow?”
“All of it. The hills, the peace.” She looked up at the vast blue expanse. “He would have liked you, Lachlan. He had a particular way of knowing immediately which people were truly worth knowing in this world.”
She paused, a soft laugh escaping her. “He would have made you talk significantly more than you wanted to, and he would have been entirely unapologetic about the intrusion.”
“Most people make me talk more than I want tae,” Lachlan noted dryly.
“He would have been exceptionally good at it.”
She felt Lachlan’s large, rough hand find her fingers in the grass between them. It wasn’t a grand gesture, just a placement, a solid fact of her life, his long fingers aligning perfectly alongside hers.
“I ken,” he said simply.
And in those two short words she heard, as she had thoroughly learned to hear over their years together, the full and specific understanding of exactly what she meant. It was a language that contained not only the words she spoke, but the profound shape beneath them. The grief of her past, the absolute fact that the loss was bearable now, and the beautiful, undeniable truth that it was bearable here, in his arms.
A small, soft sound came from Bethany’s direction. Rosalind lifted her head slightly from the blanket to look.
Alasdair had finally lost his long battle with sleep. He was nestled securely in Bethany’s arms, his round cheek pressed flat against her grey wool sleeve, both of his small hands curled loosely into fists against his chest. His face was entirely smooth, all the solemn investigation and stubborn defiance of the afternoon gone somewhere deep behind his closed eyes.
Bethany met her eyes across the child’s head.
Rosalind looked back at her loyal friend for a long, silent moment. Two years ago, during the terror of the siege, she had held a single, fraying thread of Bethany in the dark of Graham’s tower. She thought sometimes about how thin that thread had been. She thought sometimes about how miraculously it had held against the weight of the world.
Bethany gave her a small, simple nod through the amber light.
I know, Rosalind.
Rosalind laid her head back down against the soft grass, her fingers laced tightly with Lachlan’s.
The ancient meadow held them securely. All four of them, bathed in the long, beautiful amber light of the setting sun, the stone castle visible on the ridge above them and the wild burn moving endlessly below. The sky above was enormous, calm, and going slowly, slowly golden at its edges as the afternoon completed its work and the evening began its patient, unhurried arrival.
She closed her eyes against the sun.
If you haven't already, feel free to leave an honest review here!
Best selling books of Juliana
Sold to the Highland Rebel (Preview)
Chapter One
1656, Croft Estate
“You’ve not even looked back once.”
Rosalind kept her eyes anchored to the mud-slicked road ahead, her spine rigid against the rhythmic swaying of the carriage.
A sharp jolt racked the frame as the wheels dropped into a deep, water-logged rut. She pressed her palm flat against the cold leather seat to steady herself, her fingers cramping with the effort to remain still.
“I looked back,” she stated, her voice sounding thin and brittle in the cramped space.
“You didn’t.”
“I did. Before you climbed in.”
Bethany made a soft, clicking sound with her tongue, a noise that was not quite agreement.
She was watching Rosalind with that quiet, pervasive intensity she always possessed. Her gaze not a stare, but a constant presence, like a single candle flame in a drafty room. She was close enough to notice the slight tremor in Rosalind’s jaw, the way her knuckles had turned as white as the frost on the windows.
Rosalind had made herself a jagged promise before the carriage door had finally latched shut. She had stood in the hollow entrance hall of Croft Estate one last time, wrapped in a silence that had lived there since the fever took her parents three weeks ago, and she had been very clear with herself.
Don’t look back. There is nothing left to look at.
It was a promise that felt easier to keep when she knew Bethany was weighing her every flinch.
“You could have taken longer,” Bethany said quietly, her voice softening with a sympathy that Rosalind wasn’t sure she could bear. “No one would have said a word, my lady.”
“The solicitor said the estate passes to my uncle’s management by the end of the month.”
Rosalind focused on a tiny, imaginary crease in the wool of her skirt, smoothing it over and over until her fingertips felt raw. “Staying longer would only have meant watching it stop being mine in person. I’d rather the road than the slow rot of waiting.”
Bethany said nothing.
That was one of the things Rosalind had always valued most about the woman. She knew when words were the wrong tool.
Outside, the grey morning smeared past the small window in jagged pieces. Low stone walls, bare fields, and trees stripped to their skeletal bones by the season, their black branches cutting up against a sky the heavy color of old pewter.
Father had loved this time of year.
He’d called it honest.
The land shows you what it truly is in winter, Rosie. No prettiness. No hiding.
The memory of his voice brought a sudden, hot prickle to the back of her eyes. She pressed her thumbnail deep into the meat of her palm, the sharp sting grounding her, and forced herself to stop thinking about him.
“How long until we reach the border?” she asked, her voice tight.
“Thomas said four days if the roads hold.” Bethany adjusted the heavy woolen blanket across her lap, her movements restless. “Five if they don’t.”
“They won’t.”
Bethany smiled faintly, a ghost of an expression that didn’t reach her worried eyes. “No. They won’t.”
The roads didn’t hold.
By the second day, the carriage wheels were grinding and screaming through mud thick enough to slow them to a walking pace, and the sky had dropped so low it seemed to rest heavily on the treeline.
The landscape had curdled around them without Rosalind quite noticing when the gentle southern rolls replaced by something older, darker, and less forgiving. Great hills began to crowd the road on both sides like slumbering giants, and the ancient forest pressed closer with every grueling mile.
She watched the light shift through the glass, turning flatter and greener, stripped of all warmth, and felt the first real coil of unease settle into the pit of her stomach.
It wasn’t grief. Grief, she knew. It was a heavy, familiar cloak.
This was different. Quieter. It was the primal feeling of being watched by something that hadn’t quite decided what to do with her yet.
Thomas brought his horse alongside the window on the afternoon of the third day. He was a careful man. Careful with his words, careful with his silences.
She could read the tension in his shoulders well enough to know that whatever he was about to say, he had been turning it over in his mind for miles.
“My lady.” His eyes moved restlessly across the thick treeline before they settled on her face. “We’re nearing the border territory.”
“I know where we are, Thomas.”
“Yes.” A long, heavy pause followed. “There’ve been incidents along this stretch. Over the past two years. Travelers. Carriages.”
Rosalind looked at him steadily, her heart beginning to drum a frantic rhythm against her ribs. “What kind of incidents?”
His jaw shifted, the bone prominent beneath his weathered skin. “The kind that don’t end well, my lady. I’d ask you to stay inside and keep the curtain drawn until I say otherwise.”
Bethany’s hand found Rosalind’s wrist beneath the blanket. Just her cold fingers, pressing once with a strength that spoke volumes.
Don’t ask him anything else.
Rosalind looked back at the trees through the gap in the curtain. They stood unnervingly still. No wind. No birdsong. Just the heavy, wet thud of hooves in the muck.
“All right,” she said.
She kept the curtain drawn, but it was a mistake. She was forced to watch Bethany’s face instead, which proved to be a worse torment.
Bethany had been frightened since yesterday and was doing a poor job of hiding the cracks in her composure now that Rosalind was looking closely.
The way she held herself too still, her breath hitching in her chest. The way she kept glancing at the window despite the heavy fabric, as though she could see through it if she only tried hard enough.
I should have noticed sooner.
The guilt moved through Rosalind’s chest, hot and sharp, before she could stop it. She had been so occupied with her own mourning, her own careful management of her shattered life, that she had not truly thought to look at the woman sitting three feet away from her.
She was still spinning in those thoughts when Thomas let out a sudden, jagged shout.
The carriage lurched to a violent stop so suddenly that Rosalind was thrown forward, her hand catching the wooden frame with a painful crack. Bethany’s arm caught her other side, anchoring her.
Outside, the horses were erupting in a high-pitched, panicked scream that set her teeth on edge.
She was out of the carriage door before any of the guards could tell her to stay inside.
Twenty yards ahead, a carriage sat skewed across the narrow forest track like something thrown there by a giant, careless hand.
One wheel had been sheared clean off and lay spinning in the mud. The door hung open at a broken angle, the wood splintered outward as though something had hit it with terrifying force from the inside. The contents had been brutally scattered across the road. A trunk hacked open, fine clothing beaten into the filth, and a single woman’s shoe lying on its side thirty feet from anything it should have been near.
Recently.
Her breath caught in her throat. The mud around the wreckage was still weeping water, the tracks fresh.
This happened recently.
“My lady.” Thomas was suddenly at her shoulder, his hand white-knuckled on his sword hilt. His voice was very controlled, too controlled. “Get back in the carriage.”
“We can’t go around it.” She could already see the truth of it. The forest pressed the road on both sides with no gap, no room for a wheel to pass. “And we can’t move it.”
Half the heavy frame had collapsed inward. She turned to him, her grey eyes sharp with a sudden, desperate focus. “We go on horseback.”
He didn’t argue. She could see him calculating the same grim reality. He had likely been calculating it from the moment the wreckage came into view.
“Release the horses,” he told his men, his voice snapping like a whip. “Me lady and the maid ride. We move now.”
The men worked with a frantic, silent speed. Rosalind turned back for her satchel. Bethany was already there, pressing the leather strap into her hands, her face arranged very carefully into a mask that wasn’t quite fear.
“Bethany.”
“We’ll be fine.” Her maid said it like a command, a decision rather than a reassurance, and Rosalind felt a rush of something sharp and tender at once.
She pressed Bethany’s hand once, a silent promise, and said nothing because there was nothing useful to say. She went to the horse Thomas had brought around, her boots sinking deep into the mire.
She was halfway into the saddle, her muscles straining, when the trees moved.
It wasn’t the wind. It wasn’t the flight of an animal. It was a branch displaced with heavy purpose. A shadow detached itself from other shadows with the slow, deliberate patience of a predator that had been waiting a long time for its meal.
Oh.
She thought, with a clarity that surprised her even as her heart stopped.
This is how it happens.
Then the shouting started, and the road came apart in a chorus of steel and screams.
They came from both sides. A dozen men at least, breaking from the treeline with rusted blades already drawn and hungry.
Thomas’s guards turned to meet them, and for one suspended, horrific second, Rosalind watched it from the back of the shying horse with the detachment of someone who could already see the end.
Too many. Too practiced.
Her men were good, but they hadn’t expected this ambush, hadn’t had the time to form a line, and the men pouring out of the trees moved like they’d done this a hundred times before.
Her horse screamed and shied sideways, nearly unseating her. She held on, her fingers clawing into the mane.
“Ride!” Thomas bellowed, his voice straining against the clash of metal. “My lady, ride.”
But the road was blocked in both directions. She saw it in the same instant he did, because his voice cut off mid-command as a second wall of men appeared ahead of them, and the word died in his throat.
She hit the first man who reached her horse across the face with her heavy satchel. He barely flinched, his eyes cold and empty.
She tried to wheel the horse away, but there was nowhere to go, and then rough, calloused hands were on her arm and her waist, hauling her down with brutal force.
She fought them without stopping, without making it easy, kicking and clawing at any skin she could reach. But there were too many hands, and they were too practiced, and her arms were pinned behind her back before she’d managed anything useful.
“Bethany!”
The shout tore out of her, raw and desperate.
Across the chaos, she caught one fleeting glimpse. Bethany struggling between two massive men, her mouth open, fighting with a ferocity Rosalind had never seen.
Then something rough, dark, and foul-smelling was yanking over Rosalind’s head, and the world disappeared into black.
Old, abrasive cloth against her face. The suffocating smell of soil, stale ale, and horse sweat. Someone’s iron grip on her arms steered her forward, off the road and onto what felt like steep, uneven ground.
She called for Bethany twice more. The third time, her voice broke in a way that frightened her more than the blindfold did, and she forced herself to stop.
She counted her footsteps instead, because it was the only thing she had left in the dark. She counted, and she kept her breathing even against the panic, and she held onto the one thought that felt like a foothold.
Stay calm. It is the only weapon you have.
By the time she lost count, the road was far behind her, and the hungry silence of the forest had swallowed every sound she’d made.
Chapter Two
1656. Dungeon/ Main Auction Hall.
“Dinnae look at them,” the girl beside her whispered, her voice a dry raspy thread in the gloom. “If ye look at them, it might provoke them.”
Rosalind looked anyway. Her heart hammered a frantic, uneven rhythm against her ribs, but she refused to let her gaze falter.
Bethany pressed her back against the door instead, as though the few inches of wood and iron between her and the corridor might matter, and slid down until she was sitting.
The dark was absolute.
“What do you think they want?” she asked. Her voice came out steadier than she felt.
“I think,” Bethany said carefully, “we should not speculate on that yet.”
Yet. The word sat between them, thorned and unspoken.
“All right,” Rosalind said.
Silence. The drip of the water. The far-off sound of boots on stone, two floors up at least, that came and went and came again.
“Bethany.”
“My lady.”
“Are you frightened?”
A pause that lasted exactly long enough to be honest.
“Yes,” Bethany said. “Very.”
Rosalind exhaled, something loosening in her chest at the plain admission. She had been more afraid of the performance of calm than of her own fear, she realized. Of having to manage the maid’s terror while quietly drowning in her own.
“Good,” she said. “So am I.”
She heard Bethany shift. Then the warmth of her shoulder found Rosalind’s in the dark, pressed close, and stayed there.
***
They marked time by the meals.
Watery broth, shoved through a low hatch in the door twice a day—or what Rosalind estimated was twice a day, once in what felt like morning, once in what felt like late afternoon. She counted each one. She scratched marks into the damp mortar with her thumbnail where the wall met the floor.
One. Two. Three.
She and Bethany talked, because silence was worse. They talked about small things. Bethany’s sister in Derbyshire, who kept chickens and wrote letters Bethany claimed were boring but always read twice. The estate cook’s recipe for gingerbread that Rosalind had been trying to extract for two years. Bethany’s very strong opinions about the inferior quality of northern wool.
They talked about her parents once, briefly, and then by mutual and unspoken agreement did not again.
At night, Bethany slept pressed against Rosalind’s back, her solid warmth the only real thing in a dark that had no edges. The faint smell of rosewater still clung to her hair. She put it in every morning, every single morning, and she had done it the morning they’d set out from the estate and Rosalind had not thought to notice until now, trapped in a cell that smelled of rot and stone, when it felt like the most important detail in the world.
Don’t lose this, she thought. Pay attention. Notice her.
She fell asleep telling herself that.
***
On the third morning, she woke to silence.
Not the ordinary silence of sleep. The too-large silence of an absence.
She lay still for a moment, waiting for the sound of Bethany’s breathing, the small shift of her weight, anything. She told herself she had simply woken first. That Bethany was there, just quiet.
Then she turned over.
Her hand found the floor. The stone held a faint, fading warmth in the shape of a person.
She was already at the door before she had decided to move, her palms flat against the wood, the iron cold against her face.
“Bethany.” Her voice cracked immediately, and she pressed harder against the door as though force might carry the name further. “Bethany!”
Nothing.
The corridor beyond was utterly silent.
She hit the door with the flat of her hand once, a dull, swallowed sound that didn’t carry. She hit it again. Again.
“Bethany!” The word tore out of her. “Bethany, answer me, please—”
She stopped. Pressed her forehead against the wood. Breathed.
Then, much softer, in a voice she wasn’t sure she meant to speak aloud at all.
“Please. Please. Let me out. Someone, please—”
The corridor gave her nothing back but her own echo.
She stood at the door for a long time after that. Long enough for her breathing to slow, for the frantic hammering of her pulse to subside into something dull and steady. She turned back to the cell. The indentation in the dust where Bethany had lain was already cold.
She went and sat beside it anyway.
She did not mark a scratch in the mortar for the morning meal when it came. She simply sat with her back against the wall and her hands in her lap, and stared at the empty floor, and breathed, because breathing was the one thing left she could control.
I don’t know what happened to her.
The thought arrived with a terrible clarity and then settled into her chest like something that had decided to stay.
I don’t know, and I have no way of finding out.
She pressed her thumbnail into her palm until the pain sharpened into something useful, and then she did the only thing left to do.
They came for her without warning.
It was with a sudden, violent crack of the bolt being thrown back, and then the door swinging inward so fast she barely had time to get to her feet before a hand closed around her arm and hauled her into the corridor.
“Move.”
The man didn’t look at her. That was the first thing she noticed. He stared straight ahead, his jaw set, his grip on her arm impersonal and absolute, the way a man might carry a crate he’d been told to shift.
The corridor was lit by a single torch bracketed high on the wall, and after so many days of total dark, even that thin, guttering light was enough to make her eyes flood and sting. She blinked hard, trying to force them to adjust, stumbling once on the uneven stone.
He didn’t slow down.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked. Her voice came out raw. Two days since she’d spoken to anyone, and her throat had tightened around the disuse. “I demand to know where—”
“Quiet.”
He said it without heat. Without interest. It was worse than anger would have been.
She looked at the corridor as they moved through it—memorizing it as much as her warped thoughts could. The number of doors. The direction of the draft. A narrow staircase rising to the right, another descending to the left. He took neither, pulling her straight ahead through a low archway and into a passageway that widened gradually as the stone gave way to plaster, and the plaster gave way to something almost civilized.
She could feel the floorboards beneath her feet now. The smell changed. She could smell tallow candles, pipe smoke, and beneath both of those, the warm press of many bodies gathered in an enclosed space.
She could hear a low murmur ahead. Voices. A crowd.
Her pulse lurched.
Oh God. What is this place?
He stopped before a heavy velvet curtain, its dark fabric pooling against the floor. On the other side, the sound of the crowd sharpened slightly with the hum of people waiting for something.
He thrust her through a gap in the curtain’s edge into a space behind it that was dim and close.
Five other women were already there, ranged in a loose, miserable line along the back wall. Young, all of them, or young enough. Their faces wore the emptiness of people who had long since exhausted their tears and arrived at something harder on the other side of them.
They looked at her when she entered. Then they looked away.
Rosalind pressed herself against the wall, her breathing shallow. She looked at the curtain. The velvet was thick, but not thick enough—she could see the faint movement of light through it, the flicker of hundreds of candles, and through the gap where it didn’t quite meet the adjacent panel, a sliver of the hall beyond.
She looked through it and her stomach dropped.
The hall was large and well-appointed, its walls paneled in dark wood, its floors laid with a rush-strewn oak that had been swept clean. Men were filing into rows of chairs arranged in a neat, formal semicircle facing a low stage with a platform that was raised perhaps two feet from the floor, with a podium at its center. They were not rough men. They were not the type she had imagined. Fine coats. Silver buckles on their shoes. One wore a wig, powdered and carefully dressed. Several were conversing in the easy, unhurried tones of men who met like this regularly, men who saw nothing unusual in the evening ahead of them.
What is this place?
The thought flashed a second time, and then immediately answered itself in the slow, terrible way of a thing she had already known and simply refused to finish knowing.
She let the curtain fall back.
Her hands were trembling. She pressed them flat against her thighs and looked at the other women.
The one nearest her was perhaps sixteen. Dark hair, a dress torn at the shoulder and never mended. She was staring at the floor with a concentration that had nothing to do with the floor.
“What is this?” Rosalind asked. She kept her voice low, though her throat was closing around the words. “What are they doing out there?”
The girl’s eyes cut sideways. White-rimmed, and sharp with something that might have been pity.
“Ye ken what this is,” she spat, her voice hard.
Rosalind swallowed and turned to look around.
From beyond the curtain, a single man’s voice rose above the murmur. It was assured and smooth, with the practiced carry of someone accustomed to performing before a crowd. Rosalind heard the scrape of chairs being settled, the last rustle of an audience taking its place.
Then the voice began, and she stood very still, and she listened.
Lineage. Age. Temperament.
Each word landed in her chest like a stone dropped into still water.
In excellent health. A gentlewoman’s upbringing, well-suited to a discerning household.
She looked at the stage through the curtain’s gap. At the podium. At the first woman being walked out from the far side, her chin down, her hands bound in front of her. Then at the man at the podium who did not look at her face once.
At the slow, polite lift of hands beginning in the rows below.
Oh.
The word formed in her mind with a crystalline, terrible precision.
Oh, no.
Her legs wanted to give way, but she struggled until they obeyed her and remained locked. She would not fall in this room. Not in front of these women. Not in this place that had clearly been designed to reduce her to less than a person.
The bidding was quiet. That was the obscene part. It was not frenzied or loud or brutish. It was measured and businesslike, the voice at the podium rising and dipping with a professional cadence she recognized from the estate solicitor, from the cold, unhurried reading of terms and values and transfers of property.
That is what this is.
She pressed her thumbnail deep into her palm and let the pain anchor her.
A transfer of property. And I am the property.
From somewhere beyond the curtain came the sharp, clean crack of a gavel.
The first woman was led away through a side door. Rosalind watched her go.
She didn’t make a sound. Not one sound.
She understood then that the silence was not resignation.
It was the other side of every scream already spent.
The handler moved along the line. Five women. Then four. Then three.
Rosalind kept her eyes on the door at the back of the room, her breathing even, her feet exactly where they were. The guard had let his weight shift to his left hip again, his chin dropping toward his chest. Bored. Tired.
Now.
She moved. One slow, careful step toward the shadow at the edge of the wall—and a hand clamped around her upper arm so fast she didn’t hear him coming.
Not the handler. A different man entirely. He had been standing so still she had counted him as part of the wall.
He walked her back into her place in the line without a word. Didn’t grip hard enough to bruise, didn’t look at her face. Just corrected her position, set her back where she’d been, and went still again.
The casualness of it was worse than a blow would have been.
She thought about screaming. She could do it—one raw, jagged sound to tear through the performance happening on the other side of that curtain. Her chest was already full of it.
Then she thought about the woman taken through the velvet three minutes ago. The way she had gone without making a single noise. Not because she hadn’t wanted to scream, but because she was long past the point where it would change anything.
One woman left ahead of her now.
The voice beyond the curtain was building, the bidding quickening toward its close. She could hear the rhythm of it—the call, the counter, the pause, the call again, each one tighter than the last. Her jaw ached from clenching.
The woman in front of her was grabbed by the shoulder and shoved through the velvet.
The curtain swung back into place.
Rosalind was at the front of the line.
The dust from the curtain’s folds reached her nose. Behind her, the handler’s weight shifted. His fingers found her shoulder, digging in.
The gavel cracked.
She closed her eyes.
Then someone in the hall screamed. It was not a scream that came from fear. This was filled with rage, sharp and ugly. The next moment, the low murmur of the room broke apart all at once into shouting.
The curtain lurched toward her.
A man came through it backward, his face split open above the eye, and he hit her handler with his full weight. The grip on Rosalind’s shoulder lifted.
She moved sideways, away from the back door that was already blocked by guards piling into the corridor. Until her back found the cold stone wall. Steel rang out close. She pressed flat and kept her breathing steady.
Just as she was beginning to think she might be safe for the time being, the floor shook.
The explosion came as a single hard crack of force that punched through the wall to her left. Plaster dropped from the ceiling in a white, choking fall of dust. Two candles went out. The corner went dark.
From beyond the curtain, the screaming changed pitch. The composed crowd was gone. She could hear chairs overturning, boots hammering stone in every direction, men shouting over each other with no one in charge anymore.
Someone shouldered in from the corridor and hit the dark-haired girl full in the chest. She went down hard on the stone.
Rosalind drove her shoulder into the current of bodies, got her hand under the girl’s arm, and pulled her up.
“The back door. Go. Go now.”
The girl stared at her, eyes wide. Then something behind them sharpened. She nodded once, got her feet under her, and ran.
The curtain tore free of its rail with a screech of iron.
The hall poured in.
Rosalind was shoved sideways, then forward, then sideways again. Her shoulder hit a pillar and the breath left her in one hard gasp. Her feet left the floor for a second as the crowd pressed in from every direction and her grip on the pillar slipped.
Don’t fall.
She got both hands back against the stone and held on. If she went down in this, she was not getting up.
Do not fall.
She held. The bodies broke around her and kept moving and she stayed, searching the smoke ahead for anything fixed—a wall, a door, anything that wasn’t moving.
That was when she saw him.
He was standing still.
Every other person in the room was running. He wasn’t. Dark auburn hair, jaw hard, eyes moving through the smoke with a steady, deliberate focus that had nothing of panic in it. He had made this happen. She was certain of it the moment she looked at him. He had set every piece of it in motion and was not afraid of a single second of it.
He’s looking for someone.
The crowd surged. The pillar was gone from under her hands.
Her knee hit the floor before she knew she was falling. Her palms scraped the grit. Boots churned the ground around her head, and the auburn-haired man disappeared behind the crush of bodies.
Get up.
Her hands were already moving.
Get up right now.
She pushed.
If you liked the preview, you can get the whole book here
Best selling books of Juliana
The Laird’s Dangerous Bargain – Get Extended Epilogue
You’ll also get a FREE GIFT…
The Laird’s Dangerous Bargain – Extended Epilogue
One month later, MacKay castle
The morning of the wedding, it rained.
Not the soft coastal drizzle that Lilian had grown up with, the kind that settled into your hair and your clothes and your bones without ever quite committing to being a storm. This was proper rain, coming in hard off the sea, rattling the castle windows and turning the courtyard below into something that resembled a very ambitious puddle.
Flora appeared in the doorway of the chamber, took one look at the rain hammering the windows, and set her tray down without a word.
“It’s raining,” Lilian said.
“I can see that.”
“On me wedding day.”
“Aye.” Flora began lifting the covers off the dishes, unbothered, rain not worthy of further comment as far as she was concerned. “Eat something. Ye’ll need it.”
Lilian looked at the window. The harbor below was barely visible through the grey curtain of it, the ships at anchor indistinct shapes in the mist. She thought about the clifftop, about crouching over a crack in the rock in the rain and finding white blooms there, small and stubborn and entirely untroubled by the weather.
Rain lilies. Things that appeared after everything had been difficult for a long time.
She turned from the window and sat down to eat.
Muire arrived an hour later,. She had a sprig of something green tucked behind her ear and a knowing look in her amber eyes that Lilian decided not to address.
“Ye look well,” Muire said, taking in the dress, the pinned hair, the expression Lilian was wearing. “Nervous?”
“Nay,” Lilian said.
Muire looked at her hands.
“Dinnae,” Lilian said.
“They’re shaking.”
“They’re nae shaking.”
“Lilian. They’re shaking.”
Lilian pressed them flat against the table. “That’s the cold.”
“It’s June.”
Flora made a sound from the corner, doing her best to suppress a laugh.
“I’m nae nervous,” Lilian said, to both of them. “I’m ready.” She looked at her hands, which had stilled. “I’ve been ready since I first saw him.” She paused. “I just didn’t know it then.”
Muire looked at her for a long moment, the herb sprig bobbing slightly as she tilted her head. Then she nodded once, satisfied, and went to help Flora with the veil.
***
Ewan had been dressed and ready for an hour before anyone came to find him.
He stood at the window of his study, looking out at the rain, and thought about the MacLeod negotiation that Lilian had handled with a skill that had left the MacLeod representative looking mildly stunned. His mind also wandered to the fact that in approximately two hours he was going to marry a woman who’d arrived on a sinking ship and had proceeded to take apart every excuse he’d ever made for living alone.
He was, if he was being honest with himself, deeply grateful for all of it.
Angus appeared in the doorway, looked him over once, and nodded. “Ye’ll dae,” he said.
“Thank ye,” Ewan said. “That’s very moving.”
“I thought so.” Angus came in and stood beside him at the window. They looked at the rain together for a moment. “She’s nae going tae bolt again, is she?”
“She’s nae going tae bolt.”
“Just checking. Last time she went out a window.”
“She went out the window tae protect me,” Ewan said. “Which I’ve been informed counts as romantic.”
“By whom?”
“Flora.”
Angus considered this. “Flora’s probably right.”
“Flora’s always right.” Ewan turned from the window. “Is everything ready?”
“The hall’s set. Tamhas is already seated, has been for twenty minutes. Sile has her sketchbook.” Angus paused. “I told her nae tae draw during the ceremony.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she’d be discreet.”
Ewan looked at him.
“She’s got a very small sketchbook,” Angus offered.
Ewan pressed his lips together and went to find Callum.
***
The Great Hall had been transformed.
Not beyond recognition, Lilian noted, as she stood at the far end of it waiting for the signal. It still looked like a MacKay hall, stone and timber and the smell of woodsmoke, the long table pushed back to clear the center, torches burning high despite the daylight. But someone, she suspected Flora with Muire’s enthusiastic assistance, had put white flowers along every surface, filling the hall with the kind of brightness the rain outside had decided not to provide. She looked at them and felt the corner of her mouth lift.
Rain lilies.
Every surface was covered in them.
She looked at Ewan across the length of the hall and found him already looking at her, which had been true with such consistency that she’d stopped being surprised by it and started simply accepting it as a feature of any room they were both in. He was standing at the far end in his plaid, dark hair scar and all, and he looked entirely certain of himself.
She walked toward him.
The hall was full, Angus and Callum and Gregor and the Council and the men who’d ridden north through the night and a great many other faces she’d been learning over the past month. She was aware of them the way she was aware of peripheral things during a negotiation, present but not the point. The point was the man at the end of the hall, watching her walk toward him with an expression that had nothing guarded in it.
She reached him.
“Ye’re late,” he said, low enough for only her to hear.
“Ye’ve been waiting four minutes,” she said.
“Three and a half.”
“Ye counted.”
“I always count.” His eyes moved over her face. “Ye look beautiful.”
She held his gaze. “I ken,” she said, and watched the real smile break across his face, warm and unguarded, and decided that was going straight into the collection of things she planned never to forget.
The ceremony was conducted by the clan’s elder, a man of considerable age and very little patience for lengthy proceedings, which suited both of them. The words were plain and direct and they said them to each other rather than to the room, which also them. When it came to the vows Ewan didn’t look at the elder or at the hall or at anything except her face, and she returned the courtesy, and the words they said were simple and meant and that was enough.
He put the ring on her finger. She felt the warmth of his hands around hers, steady as they always were, and looked up at him.
“Well,” she said quietly.
“Well,” he agreed.
***
The celebration lasted well into the night.
Ewan sat at the head of the table with Lilian beside him and watched his hall fill up with noise and warmth and the happiness of people who’d been through something hard and had come out the other side of it into something good. Angus was deep in conversation with Tamhas at the far end, which he hadn’t anticipated but probably should have. Sile had, in fact, been drawing during the ceremony, and was now showing the results to Callum. He was looking at the pages with an expression hovering between impressed and alarmed. She’d captured him in considerable detail from three different angles.
Gregor stopped behind his chair at some point in the evening and put a hand briefly on his shoulder though he said nothing. Ewan nodded. Gregor moved on. It was the most the old man had ever said to him about anything that mattered.
Lilian was watching the room, and he watched her do it, thinking about a woman who’d told him she had the sinking ship situation under control. She had been both right and wrong at the time.
“Ye’re staring,” she said, without turning.
“I’m watching.”
“Same thing.”
“Nae always.” He reached over and took her hand from the table, turning it over in his, the ring catching the firelight. “Are ye happy?” he asked.
She turned to look at him. The firelight caught the green of her eyes, the copper of her hair, and the faint line of the scar at her collarbone that had faded but hadn’t disappeared. In that moment, he thought, not for the first time, that she was the most striking woman he’d ever seen in any room.
“Aye,” she said. “I’m happy.” She looked at their joined hands. “Are ye?”
“Considerably,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow. “Just considerably?”
“Extraordinarily,” he said. “Is that better?”
“It’s more accurate.” She turned back to the room, but her hand stayed in his, her fingers curling around his. “Sile’s going tae try tae give ye the wedding portrait,” she said. “I’d prepare.”
“How bad is it?”
“She’s very talented.”
“That’s nae what I asked.”
“It’s very on point,” Lilian said, a small smile playing on her lips. “She captured the jawline particularly well.”
He looked at her and she looked at the room. The corner of her mouth gave up the fight entirely.
He pressed his lips together, looked at the ceiling, and thought about the challenge of being married to a woman who found him funny but refused to admit it.
He thought he could live with it.
***
It was past midnight when the hall began to empty.
Tamhas had been seen to bed an hour before, steady on his feet in a way he hadn’t been in years, color in his face and Muire’s arm through his and the expression of a proud father. Sile had fallen asleep in the corner with her sketchbook, and Callum had found a blanket from somewhere and draped it over her, trying very hard not to wake anyone up.
The fire had burned low. The candles were down to stubs. Lilian stood at the window of the Great Hall looking out at the harbor, the rain long since stopped, the sea below gone silver under a clear sky. Ewan came to stand beside her, close enough that their arms pressed together, and she leaned into it without thinking, the way she’d been leaning into him for weeks without thinking.
“The MacLeod response came this morning,” she said.
“I ken. I read it.”
“They accepted the revised terms.”
“They did.” He looked at her sideways. “Ye’re talking about trade routes on yer wedding night.”
“I’m talking about trade routes on our wedding night,” she said.
He looked at her for a long moment and she looked back at him. The hall was quiet around them and the harbor was silver below and everything that had happened to bring them there sat between them like something neither of them needed to name.
“The northern routes are ours,” she said. “The MacLeod terms give us control of the crossing fer the next ten years. Combined with the Fairfield contracts and the MacKay ports, we hold the western trade lanes.” She held his gaze. “All of them.”
He looked at her. “Ye worked that out before the ceremony.”
“I worked that out three days ago. I was simply waiting fer the right moment tae share it with ye.”
“And our wedding night seemed right.”
“Ye’re a laird,” she said. “I thought ye’d appreciate the strategic implications.”
He reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, his fingers brushing her cheek. She felt it move through her the way she always did, all the way down. “I appreciate them,” he said. “I appreciate ye considerably more.”
“Considerably again,” she said.
“Extraordinarily,” he corrected. “I thought we’d established that.”
She smiled from somewhere deep. She turned back to the harbor, his hand finding hers at her side, and they stood together at the window while the last candles burned down and the sea went quietly about its business below.
She thought about Lochaline and the contract folded in her cloak and the father who’d sent her across the sea because he had no other move left. She thought about a man dropping from a birlinn onto a burning deck and telling her to stay behind him. She thought about all the instances between then and now, the clifftop and the kitchen and the locked room and the burning hall and the ring on her finger warm from his grip.
She pressed her thumb across it.
“Ewan,” she said.
“Aye.”
“I’d dae it all again,” she said. “The ship, the pirates, and the cage. All of it.” She looked at him. “Just so ye ken.”
He looked back at her, nothing held back, nothing performed, just him.
“So would I,” he said. “Every bit of it.”
Lilian MacKay stood at the window and thought that the numbers, for the first time in a very long time, added up exactly right.
If you haven't already, feel free to leave an honest review here!
Best selling books of Juliana
The Laird’s Dangerous Bargain (Preview)
Chapter One
Late 16th century, on a ship to the Hebrides
The merchant from Ayr had been droning on about rates for the better part of an hour.
“Ye’re brave, I’ll give ye that,” he said, mopping his brow with a gray kerchief. “Or perhaps foolish. Hard tae tell the difference, with a woman sailing alone tae MacKay lands.”
Lilian kept her eyes on the horizon and her hands wrapped around her teacup. “I’m nae alone. I have a crew.”
“Hired men.” He waved a dismissive hand. “It’s nae the same. The MacKays dinnae dae business with strangers. Certainly nae with—” he paused, searching for tact and apparently failing to find it, “—women merchants.”
“Then it’s fortunate I’m nae a stranger. Me faither has dealt with them before.” She took a measured sip. “And I intend tae continue that relationship.”
The merchant made a sound that was not quite a laugh. “Yer faither sent ye in his place and ye think that’ll sit well with a Highland laird?” He shook his head. “MacKay’s a hard man, they say. Fair, but hard. He’ll nae—”
The cannonball tore through the mainmast with a crack that split the sky.
Lilian’s teacup shattered against the deck as the ship lurched violently to starboard. She grabbed the rail, salt spray stinging her eyes, while screams erupted around her. Beside her, the merchant from Ayr scrambled toward the companionway, his wig flying off into the churning sea.
Another explosion. The foremast splintered, canvas and rigging cascading down in a tangle of rope and wood. Through the smoke, Lilian spotted three low-slung vessels closing fast, their dark sails cutting through the mist like shark fins.
Pirates.
Her eyes swept the deck frantically. She’d hired four guards in Lochaline, good men her father had vouched for. She spotted two of them already fighting near the foremast, outnumbered and losing fast. The other two she couldn’t find at all.
Her fingers found the small knife tucked into her belt, the blade her father had given her before she’d left Lochaline. Fer emergencies, he’d said, his voice weak from whatever illness was eating him from the inside. She’d thought he meant for cutting purse strings or threatening dishonest merchants. Not this.
A grappling hook sailed over the rail and bit into the wood beside her head. She jerked back as more followed, iron claws latching onto the ship’s sides with sickening thuds. Men swarmed up the ropes, faces wrapped in dark cloth, blades gleaming in the weak Scottish sunlight.
The first one came at her fast.
Lilian didn’t think. She twisted away from his reaching hands and drove her knife toward his ribs. The blade caught his forearm instead, slicing through leather and flesh. Blood bloomed hot across her knuckles. He cursed and stumbled back, eyes wide with surprise above his mask.
She’d actually hurt him.
The shock lasted exactly one heartbeat before his expression hardened. He blocked her next strike with brutal efficiency, catching her wrist and wrenching it sideways. Pain shot up her arm. He shoved her backward, and she hit the rail hard enough to knock the wind from her lungs. The knife clattered from her grip, skittering across the blood-slicked deck.
He raised his sword.
Lilian’s mind went blank with terror. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, could only watch the blade arc downward toward her throat. This was it. She was going to die on a nameless patch of sea, and her father would lose everything because she’d been too stubborn to hire proper guards.
Then the entire ship bucked like a spooked horse.
A birlinn, sleek and deadly, slammed into the starboard side with enough force to snap timber. The impact threw her attacker sideways, his sword clattering across the deck. Lilian grabbed the rail to keep from falling as the world tilted at an impossible angle.
A figure leaped from the birlinn onto the deck, landing in a crouch that would’ve made a cat jealous. He rose slowly, and despite the chaos, despite the screaming and the blood and the smoke, Lilian’s breath caught in her throat.
He was tall. That was her first coherent thought. Tall and broad-shouldered, with dark hair that fell past his collar. A sword hung at his hip, longer and heavier than the raiders’ blades, and he moved with the kind of fluid grace that spoke of a man who knew exactly how dangerous he was.
He didn’t hesitate. Her attacker was still scrambling to his feet when the stranger’s blade found him. The raider dropped without a sound, and the stranger was already turning, already moving toward the next threat.
“Stay behind me,” he said, his voice rough with a Highland accent that made something low in her stomach tighten despite the terror still coursing through her veins.
Then he was fighting, and Lilian forgot how to breathe for an entirely different reason.
He moved like violence set to music. Each strike flowed seamlessly into the next, his blade singing through the air as it met steel and flesh with no less skill. Two more raiders came at him together, coordinating their attacks, but he spun between them like smoke, his plaid flaring out to reveal powerful thighs and calves that flexed with each movement. One raider fell clutching his side. The other lost his weapon and stumbled back, hands raised in surrender.
The stranger kicked the weapon over the rail and moved on.
Sweat gleamed on his neck where his plaid had shifted, revealing the strong column of his throat and the edge of a collarbone that shouldn’t have been distracting but absolutely was. His jaw was tight with concentration, a muscle jumping beneath the stubble that shadowed his cheeks. When he struck, the muscles in his forearms corded beneath tanned skin, and Lilian had the wholly inappropriate thought that she’d never seen anyone make killing look so effortlessly graceful.
Focus. Men are dying.
But her body didn’t seem to care about propriety or timing. Her pulse hammered in her throat, and not entirely from fear anymore. When he glanced back at her, just for a moment, to make sure she was still behind him, his eyes were warm brown of hazelnuts, fierce and utterly unreadable.
A thin scar cut through his left eyebrow, disappearing into his hairline. She wondered how he’d gotten it. Wondered what those hands would feel like if they weren’t wrapped around a sword hilt.
Then he was moving again, and she shook herself hard. What the hell was wrong with her? Her entire future hung in the balance. And there she was cataloguing the way a stranger’s plaid clung to his backside when he moved.
The fight lasted maybe three minutes, though it felt like hours. The remaining raiders, realizing they were outmatched, scrambled back to their vessels and pushed away from the damaged ship. Within moments, they’d disappeared back into the mist, leaving behind bodies and blood and the acrid smell of cannon smoke.
The stranger turned back to her, breathing hard but not winded. Up close, he was even more devastating. His face was all sharp angles and harsh lines, saved from severity by a mouth that looked like it knew how to smile even if it wasn’t smiling. His eyes were warm in color but guarded in expression. Blood spattered his cheek, though she didn’t think it was his.
“Are ye hurt?” he asked.
Lilian realized she was still pressed against the rail, her fingers aching from gripping the wood so hard. She forced herself to straighten, to meet his eyes without flinching. “Nay. I’m… nae.”
His gaze dropped to her hands, then traveled slowly up her arms, her shoulders, her face. It wasn’t lecherous. More like he was cataloguing injuries, checking for damage. But the intensity of that gray-eyed stare made heat bloom in her cheeks anyway.
“Ye’re bleeding,” he said, nodding toward her hands.
She looked down. Blood covered her knuckles, though whether it was hers or the raider’s, she couldn’t tell. Her hands were shaking so badly she couldn’t make them stop.
“I had a knife,” she said stupidly. “I cut him.”
One dark eyebrow rose. “Aye, I saw. Ye fight like a cornered cat.”
“Is that a compliment or an insult?”
“Havenae decided yet.” He moved past her to the rail, scanning the water where the pirate ships had vanished. The movement brought him close enough that she could smell salt and leather and something darker underneath, something that made her pulse kick into an unsteady rhythm. “They’ll be back once they realize we’re still afloat. We need tae get ye off this wreck.”
“We?” Lilian’s voice came out sharper than she’d intended, but panic was starting to claw at her throat again. The merchant from Ayr was nowhere to be seen. Half the crew was dead or dying. And she was standing there having wholly inappropriate thoughts about a stranger who’d just killed three men without breaking a sweat. “Who are ye?”
He glanced back at her, and something that might’ve been amusement flickered in those storm-gray eyes. “Someone who just saved yer life, lass.”
“I had it under control.”
His laugh was short and rough. “Aye, I could see that. Another few seconds and ye’d have introduced yer throat tae his blade. Very controlled.”
Heat flooded her face, equal parts anger and embarrassment. “I loosened him up fer ye.”
This time his smile was real, just a quick flash of white teeth that transformed his entire face from forbidding to unfairly charming. “Is that what ye call it?”
Before Lilian could form a cutting response, he turned back to the rail and called out in Gaelic to the men on the birlinn. The orders were clipped and efficient: secure the lines, check the wounded, watch the water to the north. They responded immediately, tossing up ropes and securing the two vessels together.
More men began boarding the damaged ship, moving with the seasoned grace of sailors who knew their business. They checked the wounded, secured the deck, and began assessing the damage to the sails and masts. Through it all, the stranger stood at the rail like he owned the sea itself, giving orders in that Highland accent that made Lilian’s stomach do complicated things.
She watched the way his shoulders moved, the way he gestured with one calloused hand while the other rested casually on his sword hilt. Watched and told herself she was simply trying to understand who he was, what authority he commanded. That was all.
Not that she was noticing the way the wind caught his dark hair, or how the fading light caught the sharp line of his jaw, or the way his plaid rode up slightly when he leaned over the rail to speak to someone below.
Absolutely not.
***
Ewan had seen plenty of people get themselves killed through sheer stubbornness, but this one took the prize.
She stood by the rail like a storm-tossed kitten, all bristling pride and shaking hands, trying her damnedest to look brave while blood dripped from her knuckles and her dress hung in tatters around her ankles. She’d actually fought back against a man twice her size with nothing but a wee knife that wouldn’t have troubled a particularly aggressive rabbit.
Brave. Stupid as hell, but brave.
He should’ve been irritated. Should’ve been focused on the raiders who’d been hitting merchant ships with increasing frequency, on the pattern he still couldn’t quite pin down, on the fact that this made four attacks in as many weeks.
Instead, he was trying very hard not to notice the way her wet dress clung to curves that had no business distracting him during a crisis. Or the way her eyes, wide and green as spring grass, kept darting to his face and then away like she couldn’t quite decide if she wanted to thank him or stab him.
Or the way she’d called his backside attractive without saying a word, just with that quick glance when she thought he wasn’t looking.
Aye, he’d noticed. He noticed everything. It was what kept him alive.
“Secure the deck,” he called to Callum, his second. “Check fer survivors. Any who can walk, bring them aboard the birlinn.”
“Aye, Ewan.”
The girl stiffened upon hearing his name. He could practically see her mind working, putting together pieces she probably should’ve figured out when he’d crashed a birlinn into a merchant vessel and started giving orders.
But she didn’t say anything. Maybe she didn’t recognize his name. She just stood there with her bleeding hands and her ruined dress and her chin lifted like she was daring the world to knock her down again.
Ewan had to respect that, even if she was going to be a complication he didn’t need.
“Come on,” he said, gentling his voice slightly. “Let’s get ye somewhere safe.”
She opened her mouth, probably to argue, and he prepared himself for whatever sharp-tongued response she was about to deliver.
To his surprise, she closed it again and simply nodded.
Chapter Two
The port rose from the mist like something conjured from old stories.
Lilian stood at the rail of the birlinn, watching gray stone buildings materialize along the shore, their roofs slick with rain and sea spray. Fishing boats crowded the harbor, their masts bobbing like reeds in the swell. Beyond the port, she could just make out the dark shape of a castle perched on the cliffs, its towers stark against the clouded sky.
MacKay lands. It had to be.
The merchant from Ayr had warned her about him. She understood now what he’d meant.
Well, she supposed being rescued by one of them counted as an introduction of sorts.
The birlinn glided into the harbor with smooth confidence, the oarsmen working in perfect synchronization. Lilian’s rescuer stood at the prow, one hand on the mast, his dark hair whipping in the wind. Even now, watching him give quiet orders to his crew, she couldn’t stop noticing things she had no business noticing. The strength in his forearms as he helped secure the lines. That scar through his eyebrow again, that made him look dangerous even when he wasn’t actively killing people.
She forced herself to look away, focusing instead on the port growing closer. Wooden docks stretched into the water like fingers and people were already gathering to watch their arrival. News of the attack must’ve spread quickly.
The birlinn bumped gently against the dock, and sailors scrambled to secure it. Lilian’s legs felt unsteady as she prepared to disembark, though whether from the fight or from being at sea for hours, she couldn’t tell.
Her rescuer appeared at her elbow so quietly she nearly jumped. “Easy,” he said, offering his hand. “The dock’s slippery.”
“I’m well enough.” But even as she said it, she stumbled slightly on the gangplank, and his hand shot out to steady her. His fingers closed around her elbow, warm and solid, and for one breathless moment she was acutely aware of how close he was standing. Close enough to see the faint lines at the corners of his eyes.
He helped her onto the dock, and only then did he release her. “Are ye all right, lass?”
Lilian’s throat felt tight. The terror of the attack was starting to catch up with her now that the immediate danger had passed. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking and her knees felt like water, and she desperately wanted to sit down somewhere quiet and cry until the tightness in her chest eased.
Instead, she lifted her chin and met his eyes. “Me injuries are naething serious. Though the experience was…” She swallowed hard. “Terrifying.”
Something softened in his expression. “Aye. It would be.”
“Thank ye,” she added, the words coming out more quietly than she’d intended. “Fer saving me. I’d be dead if ye hadnae arrived when ye did.”
He tilted his head slightly, studying her. Then he turned to one a man with graying hair and a scar across his nose. “Callum, fetch a blanket from below deck.”
“A blanket?” Lilian frowned. “I dinnae need—”
“Ye’re soaked through,” he interrupted gently. “And ye’re shaking. Shock or cold or both, I cannae tell. But I’ll nae have ye catching yer death after I went tae the trouble of saving ye.”
Lilian glanced down and realized he was right. Her dress clung to her body, heavy with seawater and blood, and now that she was standing still, she could feel the wind cutting through the wet fabric like knives. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to stop the shivering.
The stranger moved closer, close enough that she had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes. His gaze traveled over her face, down her throat, across her shoulders. Not lecherous, she told herself. Just checking for injuries. Making sure she was truly unharmed.
But the intensity of his attention made heat bloom beneath her skin anyway.
“Where are ye hurt?” he asked quietly.
“I’m nae—”
“Dinnae lie tae me, lass. I saw ye fighting. I saw ye get thrown against the rail.” His hand lifted, hovering near her shoulder but not quite touching. “Where?”
Lilian’s breath caught. Up close like that, he was overwhelming. Tall enough that she had to crane her neck, broad enough that he blocked out half the harbor behind him, and those storm-gray eyes saw entirely too much. “Me ribs,” she admitted. “And me wrist. But it’s naething serious.”
His jaw tightened. He reached for her wrist with surprising gentleness, turning her hand over to examine the angry red marks where the raider had grabbed her. His thumb brushed across her palm, and she had to bite back a sharp inhale at the touch.
“Naethin’ serious,” he repeated, his voice gone flat. “Ye’ve bruises forming already. And these cuts on yer hands need cleaning before they fester.”
“I’ll survive.”
“Aye, ye will. Because I’m going tae make sure of it.”
Before she could respond, Callum returned with a thick woolen blanket. Her rescuer took it and draped it around her shoulders, his hands lingering for just a moment longer than necessary. The blanket smelled like salt and peat smoke, and the warmth of it made her realize just how cold she’d been.
“Better?” he asked.
“Aye. Thank ye.”
He nodded once, then stepped back, putting a more respectable distance between them. But his eyes never left her face. “I should introduce meself properly. I’m Ewan MacKay, laird of these lands.”
The name hit her like a physical blow. MacKay. The laird himself. The man she’d sailed halfway across Scotland to negotiate with, and she’d been standing here having wholly inappropriate thoughts about him while covered in blood and seawater.
Perfect. Absolutely perfect.
“Lilian Fairfield,” she managed, trying to inject some dignity into her voice despite the blanket and the shaking and the disaster of her appearance. “I’m… I’m the merchant that was expected tae arrive. Tae negotiate the wool and salt contract.”
Ewan’s expression shifted, something flickering across his face too quickly to read. “Are ye now?”
“Aye.” She pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “Me faither was meant tae come himself, but he’s ill, so he sent me instead.”
“Ye came all this way alone?”
“I had guards. Good men.” She glanced back toward the harbor mouth, where the damaged merchant ship was just now limping into view, towed by another birlinn. “I dinnae ken if they made it.”
Ewan followed her gaze, his jaw tight. “We’ll find out soon enough.” He turned back to her, and his voice gentled slightly. “Ye’ve had a hard day, Miss Fairfield. But I need tae ask ye some questions.”
Lilian’s stomach sank. “Questions?”
“Aye. I was patrolling the coast when I saw the smoke from the fighting. Several merchant ships have been attacked in recent weeks,” he explained. “This one follows the same pattern. Coordinated strikes, professional raiders, specific targets.” His hazelnut eyes studied her intently. “Ye may be able tae help identify who was behind it.”
“I scarcely saw anything,” Lilian protested. “We were talking, and then the cannons fired, and then they were boarding. I was too busy trying nae tae die tae take notes.”
“Even so. Ye’re an important witness, lass.”
The endearment made something flutter in her chest, which was absurd. He probably called every woman lass. It didn’t mean anything. “And the contract?”
“Will have tae wait.”
“Wait?” Desperation sharpened her voice. “I cannae wait. I dinnae have time fer delays.”
Ewan’s expression remained implacable. “I understand yer urgency—”
“Dae ye?” Lilian let the blanket slip slightly as she straightened, anger giving her strength. “Me faither made a bad business decision years ago. A very bad decision. We’ve been paying fer it ever since. Creditors have been circling like vultures, and this contract is the only thing that might save us from ruin.” Her voice cracked slightly, but she pushed on. “So nay, me laird, ye dinnae understand me urgency. Every day I delay is another day closer tae losing everything.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not pity, exactly. More like… understanding. “I dae ken what it’s like tae carry a family’s future on yer shoulders, Miss Fairfield. More than ye might think.” He moved closer again, and despite her anger, despite everything, she couldn’t stop her pulse from quickening. “But this is the fourth attack in as many weeks. Good men have died. More will die if I cannae find the pattern, if I cannae stop whoever’s behind this.” His voice dropped lower. “So aye, I acknowledge yer urgency. But until ye’ve given me a full account of what ye saw, there’ll be nay negotiations.”
“Ye’re holding me contract hostage.”
“I’m protecting me people.” He didn’t flinch from her glare. “And whether ye like it or nae, lass, ye’re a piece of a larger puzzle. One I need tae solve before more ships burn.”
Lilian wanted to argue. Wanted to tell him exactly what he could do with his questions and his protection and his bloody puzzle. But she looked at his face, at the grim set of his mouth and the weight of responsibility in those gray eyes, and realized he meant every word.
It wasn’t negotiable.
“How long?” she asked finally.
“As long as it takes tae get the truth.”
“That’s nae an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have.” He gestured toward the castle on the cliff, dark and imposing against the evening sky. “Ye’ll stay there while we sort this. Ye’ll be safe, fed, and warm. And once ye’ve told me everything ye remember, we’ll discuss yer wool and salt routes.”
“I’m a prisoner, then.”
“Ye’re a guest under me protection.” His mouth curved slightly. “Though if ye prefer tae think of yerself as a captive, that is yer choice.”
“How generous.”
“I thought so.”
They stared at each other for a long moment, and Lilian became uncomfortably aware of how close he was standing again. Close enough that she could see the faint pulse at his throat, the way his chest rose and fell with each breath, the hint of dark hair visible where his plaid had shifted slightly.
Close enough that when the wind changed direction, she caught his scent again. Salt and leather and something earthier underneath that made her thoughts scatter like leaves.
She forced herself to look away first. “Fine. I’ll answer yer questions. But I want yer word that once I’ve told ye everything I ken, we’ll negotiate immediately.”
“Ye have it.”
“Yer word, laird Ewan MacKay. Say it.”
His eyes glinted with something that might’ve been approval or amusement or both. “Ye have me word, Lilian Fairfield. Once ye’ve given yer account, we’ll discuss terms.”
It wasn’t much. But it was something.
Lilian pulled the blanket tighter and nodded stiffly.
Ewan stepped back and offered his arm like a gentleman, though the gesture felt absurd given that he was holding her future ransom and she was covered in blood and seawater. “Shall we?”
She ignored his arm and started walking toward the castle path. Behind her, she heard his low chuckle, rough and warm.
“Stubborn lass,” he murmured, probably not meant for her to hear.
She smiled grimly to herself. He had no idea.
If you liked the preview, you can get the whole book here
Best selling books of Juliana
Sold to the Highland Brute- Extended Epilogue
One year later, Castle MacKenzie, Scottish Highlands
“Ye’ve given me a second chin.”
Hamish glanced up from the parchment spread across his knee. Isobel stood at the solar window with one hand pressed against the small of her back, afternoon light catching the loose dark waves that tumbled past her shoulders.
Her other hand rested on the high curve of her belly—round and full and unmistakable beneath the soft blue wool of her gown.
“That’s meant tae be the shadow beneath yer jaw.”
“Hamish.” She crossed to him slowly, the way she moved these days—careful, deliberate, one hand always bracing the weight of the child that would arrive within weeks. She plucked the parchment from his hands and studied it with the same critical eye she’d used the very first time she’d corrected his grip on charcoal. “That shadow has its own shadow. And why daes me nose look like it belongs tae Lewis?”
He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. “Lewis has a fine nose.”
“Lewis has a crooked nose because ye broke it when ye were fourteen.”
“Twelve.”
She handed the parchment back, her fingers brushing his. “Ye’ve been at this fer a year, husband. I’m startin’ tae think yer stubbornness is greater than yer talent.”
“Aye, well.” He set the charcoal down and wiped his blackened fingers on a cloth. “Ye married the stubbornness. Nay talent was part of the arrangement.”
Isobel laughed—that full, unguarded sound that still caught him off guard sometimes. A year into their marriage, it had become the most common sound in his home and his life, and some part of him still couldn’t believe he was lucky enough to hear it every day.
He watched her lower herself into the chair across from him, one hand gripping the armrest while the other cradled her belly. She’d gained weight in all the right places.
Health looks good on her. Happiness looks better.
“Dinnae stare at me like that,” she said, settling back with a sigh that was half comfort, half weariness.
“Like what?”
“Like ye’re tryin’ tae memorize me.”
“I am.”
Her expression softened. She reached across the gap between their chairs and took the parchment from where it rested on his knee. Studied the clumsy lines again—the lopsided eyes, the chin, the vague suggestion of dark hair that looked more like storm clouds than anything attached to a human head.
“Ye ken,” she said quietly, tracing one of the charcoal lines with her fingertip, “the very first time I sat ye down with paper and told ye tae draw, ye looked at me like I’d asked ye tae compose a sonnet in French.”
“I remember.”
“And ye were terrible at it.”
“I remember that too.”
“Ye’re still terrible.” She looked up, and her eyes were bright. “But ye never stopped tryin’. Nae once.”
He held her gaze. “Ye asked me tae.”
“I asked ye tae try. I didnae ask ye tae spend a full year producin’ portraits that make me look like yer braither.”
A laugh escaped him—low and genuine, rumbling through his chest. She grinned at the sound of it, pleased with herself.
This is what we fought fer. This ordinary, unremarkable afternoon wi’ the woman I love.
The solar was warm around them. It smelled of charcoal dust and beeswax candles and the dried heather she kept in a clay pot on the windowsill. Their books sat stacked on the low table—his ledgers alongside sketchbooks she’d filled over the past year.
“The coalition’s holdin’ strong,” he continued. “Alpin wrote that Mhairi’s been workin’ wi’ the clans in the east—findin’ the lasses who were sold there. Gettin’ home who she can.”
Isobel nodded slowly. “She told me in her last letter that one of the women she found—a Cameron lass, barely sixteen when she was taken, is learnin’ tae read now. First time anyone thought tae teach her.”
Something moved behind her eyes. Not grief. Something fiercer and more fragile—the particular ache of someone who understood exactly what the other women had faced, because she’d endured it herself and come out the other side.
“Come here,” Hamish said.
She raised an eyebrow. “I just sat down.”
“Then may I come tae ye?”
Her mouth twitched. “Ye dinnae have tae keep askin’, ye ken,” she said, the same thing she always said.
“Aye,” he replied, the same thing he always replied. “And I’ll keep askin’ regardless.”
He moved to her chair and knelt beside it, ignoring the protest from his knees. This close, he could see the faint scatter of freckles across her nose, could see the tiny scar above her left wrist where a guard’s rope had bitten too deep that terrible night, could see the steady pulse at her throat, calm and even.
Alive. Safe. Mine.
He placed his hand on the armrest beside hers, palm up. An offering. She took it without hesitation, lacing their fingers together with the ease of a gesture repeated a thousand times.
“The bairn’s been restless today,” she said, guiding his hand to her belly with her free one, pressing his palm flat against the taut fabric of her gown. “I think he kens his faither’s been ignorin’ him.”
“He?”
“Or she. Either way, they’ve opinions about yer sketchin’.”
He waited. And then, he felt it—a kick, firm and unmistakable, flat against his calloused palm. Something rolled beneath her skin, a heel or a fist, and Hamish’s breath caught the way it had every single time since he’d felt the first kick three months prior.
“There.” Isobel’s voice had gone soft. “Did ye feel it?”
He couldn’t speak for a moment. Just kept his hand where it was, fingers spread wide, feeling the impossible miracle of life moving beneath his wife’s skin. His child. Their child—conceived in love, carried in safety, to be born into a world they’d both bled to make better.
His vision blurred. He blinked hard, once.
“Aye,” he managed. “I felt it.”
Isobel’s hand came up to cup the back of his neck, her fingers threading through the dark hair at his nape. She pulled him closer until his forehead rested against her belly, and he could feel the baby shift again—restless, impatient, already making demands.
Like yer maither, he thought, and the corner of his mouth curved.
“Hamish?”
“Aye?”
“I want ye tae finish the sketch.”
He lifted his head. “Ye’ve just spent ten minutes tellin’ me how terrible it is.”
“It is terrible.” Her thumb traced the edge of his jaw—following the faint scar there. “But ye drew it. Fer me. And that makes it worth keepin’.”
He looked at her for a long moment. The firelight played across her face, catching the gray of her eyes, turning them silver. Her dark hair spilled across the green tartan draped over the back of the chair. She looked nothing like the starving, terrified woman he’d first seen on that auction platform—hollow-eyed, shaking, stripped of everything but the bare will to survive.
“Then ye’ll have it,” he said simply.
Because she’d asked. And he would always at least try to give her anything she asked for.
He returned to his chair, picked up the charcoal, and bent over the parchment again. Isobel watched him from across the warm space between them—the solar quiet around them except for the crackle of the fire and the scratch of charcoal on paper and, somewhere beyond the stone walls, the distant sound of the clan going about its evening.
“Hamish?”
“Aye, Isa?”
She smiled. “We’re goin’ tae be all right. Arenae we?”
He looked up from the sketch. Met her eyes across the firelit room—this woman who had taught him that tenderness was not weakness, that asking was not cowardice, that the strongest thing a man could do was open his hands and let someone choose to stay.
“Aye, mo chridhe.” The charcoal moved across the parchment, clumsy and honestly him. “We already are.”
If you haven't already, feel free to leave an honest review here!
Best selling books of Juliana
Sold to the Highland Savage – Get Extended Epilogue
You’ll also get a FREE GIFT…
Sold to the Highland Brute (Preview)
Chapter One
Private Auction Hall, Glen Dochart, Scottish Highlands, March 1657
“Turn around fer us, if ye please, me dear.”
The voice came from behind Isobel Munro—cultured, almost gentle, as though requesting a dance rather than commanding her display. Isobel’s legs felt numb beneath her skirts, her body fighting the command even as her mind understood the futility of resistance. She turned slowly on the raised dais, her throat tight enough that each breath required conscious effort. She was dressed in a plain but well-made dress of dark blue Highland wool that made her fine-boned frame appear even more delicate, her hair neatly braided at the crown, tumbling over her shoulders.
I look like a laird’s daughter acceptin’ an arrangement, nae a captive bein’ sold tae the highest bidder!
The hall was small, intimate in the worst possible way. Shuttered windows blocked any glimpse of the outside world. Candlelight flickered from wall sconces, while perhaps a dozen men sat around the platform. Their faces were partially obscured, but their attention on her was absolute.
Cold sweat gathered at the base of her spine and her hands trembled where they hung at her sides—visible, shameful proof that she understood precisely what she was to these men.
This was not a public auction. This was something far more deliberate, calling for no witnesses beyond those who had paid for the privilege of being present.
Bile rose in her throat and she swallowed it down forcefully.
Lord Eòin Calder of Calderbrae stepped up beside the dais, his presence as refined as his clothes. Iron-gray hair swept away from a face that might have been handsome if not for the calculating coldness in his pale eyes. Even his posture suggested a man accustomed to being obeyed without ever needing to raise his voice.
“Gentlemen.” His words echoed in the auction room as silence settled among the assembled crowd. “Thank ye fer yer discretion in attending tonight’s private auction. As promised, our offering is quite… extraordinary.
Isobel forced herself to breathe slowly despite the tightness in her chest and her hands trembled where they hung at her sides. She wanted to cross her arms over her chest, to shield herself from the male gazes that traveled over her body with unsettling interest.
“May I present tae ye, Lady Isobel Munro,” Calder continued, his tone conversational, almost pleasant. “Second daughter of Laird Angus Munro.”
Around the room, Isobel heard the subtle shift of fabric as men leaned forward with renewed interest.
“Delivered here,” Calder added softly, “by her own kin.”
Where are ye, Mhairi? The name blazed trough her mind. Her older sister had been sold a year ago—also to settle their father’s debts—and Isobel hadn’t seen or heard from her since. Not knowing what happened to her gnawed at her.
Shame flooded Isobel’s veins like poison. Her father had now successfully sold both his daughters to pay off debts, and now, every person in the room knew it. The humiliation of it pressed against her throat until she could barely draw breath.
Then, a surge of desperate defiance rose in Isobel’s throat. “I dinnae… I never agreed tae this!” The words burst from her. She took a step toward the edge of the platform, reaching for the steps, but firm hands clamped onto her shoulders from behind—one of the guards holding her in place with bruising strength. “Please,” she begged, struggling against his iron grip. “Please dinnae dae this!”
“Mind yerself.” Calder’s voice was smooth. He nodded to the guard who released her shoulders, only to grip her elbows, holding her centered on the dais. “There’s nay need fer such feminine dramatics.”
Isobel’s chest heaved as she glanced around the room. Not a single man moved to help her. Some looked away. Others leaned forward with interest. The room tilted slightly. Months in the dark had left her weakened and in a constant state of hunger, daylight something she’d nearly forgotten existed.
The fight drained from her limbs as quickly as it had come—or perhaps her body simply had nothing left to give. Her vision blurred at the edges, and defeat crashed over her’. Isobel swayed slightly where she stood, dizziness draining any fight she might have had left.
Then, the heavy door at the back of the hall swung open. Every head turned. Even Calder paused, his gavel suspended mid-air, a flicker of annoyance crossing his refined features.
Two men entered, and the atmosphere in the room shifted.
The first was tall—powerfully built in a way that spoke of hard labor and battle rather than leisure. His dark brown hair was pulled back at the nape of his neck, revealing a weathered face marked by a faint scar along his jaw. His clothing was practical—Highland wool and leather, with a broadsword belted at his hip, and boots that had seen better days.
Och… those eyes!
They were deep blue, steady and scanning the room with a sort of controlled intensity that suggested he was cataloging everything—every face, every exit, every potential threat. When that gaze landed on her, something in Isobel’s chest tightened in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with fear.
He is… strikin’. Not handsome in the polished way of the Lowland nobles, but compelling in a way that made it simply impossible to look away. He had strong features, a full mouth set in a hard line, and a presence that commanded attention without effort.
And he looked furious.
It was not the explosive fury of a man losing his temper. It was something more dangerous—a banked rage that simmered beneath absolute control.
Beside him stood his companion, leaner, but no less alert, with sandy-brown hair and sharp gray eyes that swept the room with obvious wariness. His hand rested near his own weapon, ready but not threatening.
The two newcomers moved into the room without apology, claiming the space as though it belonged to them. Several of the bidders shifted uncomfortably. Even Calder seemed momentarily unsettled, though he recovered without missing a beat. “Gentlemen,” he said, his tone remaining pleasant despite the interruption. “How good of ye tae join us. Ye’re just in time.”
“Aye, I can see that.” The tall man replied, his Scottish burr cutting through the space. His voice was quiet but carried easily—the kind of voice accustomed to being heard without needing to shout. He inclined his head to proceed.
“As I was saying,” Calder circled her, his footsteps soft against the stone as he paced around the platform. “The terms of tonight’s arrangement are quite straightforward. One item. One sale. Complete discretion guaranteed tae all parties.” He paused, allowing his icy gaze to sweep across the men. “But most importantly—once me gavel falls, the transaction is final. Nay exceptions. Nay renegotiations. I trust ‘tis understood.”
Murmurs rippled through the room.
Final. The word echoed in Isobel’s mind.
Nye reprieve. Nay rescue. Nay second chances fer me.
“Excellent.” Calder’s mouth curved into something that might have been a smile if it had reached his eyes. “Now then, gentlemen. As ye can observe, the lady possesses the refined qualities one would expect from noble bloodlines. As of this very day, the eighteenth of March, she’s a tender eighteen years of age, well-bred, educated in all manners appropriate tae her station.” His pale gaze swept over her with clinical assessment. “Note the beautiful dark hair and the gray eyes—distinctive coloring of Clan Munro. And …” his voice dropped slightly, taking on a quality that made Isobel’s stomach turn. “It has been confirmed by her kin that she remains… untouched.”
This cannae possibly get any more humiliatin’!
Heat crawled up Isobel’s neck and face, splotching her fine skin. She did not dare look up. If she looked at them, if she saw the hunger and calculation in their expressions, her fragile composure would shatter entirely.
“I’ll open the bids with fifty pounds sterling,” Calder announced, lifting a small wooden gavel.
“Sixty.” The response came immediately from a portly man in the front row, his jowls quivering as he shifted forward in his chair.
“Seventy-five.” Another voice came—older, belonging to a thin-haired gentleman whose steady gaze made Isobel’s skin prickle with unease.
The numbers climbed with frightening speed. Eighty. Ninety. One hundred. Each increment felt like another piece of her being carved away, until she wondered if anything that made her who she was would be left by the end of the night.
Her delicate fingers curled into fists at her sides. She wanted to scream, to fight, to do something—but what? The two guards flanking the dais would stop her before she managed to take three steps. And even if she somehow escaped that room, where would she go?
Back tae a faither who sold me? Intae the Highland winter with nay coin, nay horse and nay protection?
The trap was complete and absolute.
“One-hundred-and-five.”
The new voice carried the refined accent of English nobility. Isobel’s attention snapped to a well-dressed man in the second row, perhaps fifty years of age, with eyes that studied her with the cold assessment of someone evaluating an investment, rather than a person.
There was something in his gaze that was worse than the open lust some of the others displayed.
“One-hundred-and-twenty,” countered the portly man, sweat now beading on his forehead despite the cool air.
“One-hundred-and-twenty-five.”
“One-hundred-and-forty-five.” The Englishman said again, his tone utterly unconcerned, as though the large sum meant nothing to him.
There was a tense pause, the other bidders shifting in their seats, some settling back in their chairs with expressions of resignation.
Calder raised his gavel, and Isobel’s heart lurched against her ribs. “One-hundred-and-forty-five pounds sterling,” he said smoothly, “Going once—”
He paused, clearly expecting another bid. When none came, he continued.
“Going twice,”
“One-hundred-and-fifty.”
Isobel gasped, despite herself. The words came from the tall Highlander, spoken with the same quiet intensity that marked everything about him. His companion muttered something in his ear as the bid sent a ripple through the room.
It was an enormous sum under any circumstances.
The Englishman turned in his seat, his pale eyes narrowing as he studied the newcomer. “One-hundred-and-sixty,” he countered, his refined accent somehow sounding even more clipped than before.
“One-hundred-and-seventy.”
The Highlander didn’t hesitate. Didn’t blink. Just blurted out the offer that made even Calder’s eyebrows lift.
Around the room, men exchanged glances. The Englishman’s jaw tightened. His gaze traveled from the Highlander to his companion, who lounged against a pillar with deceptive casualness. The two men exchanged a glance.
Slowly, deliberately, the Englishman settled back in his chair, his expression neutral, but Isobel noted the rage simmering beneath the surface.
“The Highland gentleman is welcome to his prize,” he said, each word carefully measured, but his pale eyes promised that it wasn’t over.
Isobel’s attention snapped to the tall man who had just offered a fortune for her. His blue eyes were fixed on Calder now, that barely contained fury still evident in every line of his body.
His companion stepped closer, murmuring something. The Highlander’s jaw tightened further, but he just gave a single, sharp nod.
Calder raised his gavel, and Isobel’s world narrowed.
“One-hundred-and-seventy pounds sterling to the Scottish gentleman,” he announced. “Going once,”
The entire room held its breath.
“Going twice,”
Isobel’s hands trembled.
Me fate’s been decided then.
The gavel fell, reverberating through the room like a death knell. “Sold.” Calder said smoothly.
And just like that, Isobel Munro belonged to a stranger whose name she didn’t even know.
Probably the most handsome stranger in all of Scotland.
Though his eyes, she realized as he turned to look at her fully, held no triumph or possession as she’d expected them to. What they held instead, she couldn’t say. But for the first time since being dragged into that hall, the weight in her chest loosened just enough to let her draw a full breath.
“Two-hundred pounds.”
A new voice came from shadows near the entrance and Isobel’s head snapped toward the sound, her heart hammering.
Chapter Two
“I believe that should suffice,” the new bidder said, addressing Calder as though the room held only the two of them, “tae reopen the matter.”
A silver-haired man stepped into the light, perhaps around sixty with the bearing of someone who’d been wealthy long enough to forget what refusal felt like, his refined Scottish accent screaming nobility.
Isobel looked at Calder, silently willing him to refuse, but there was a gleam in his eyes that made her stomach drop.
“The gavel’s fallen.” The Highlander’s voice cut through the space—quiet, but with an edge that made several bidders shift nervously in their seats. “Sale’s done.”
A pause. The new bidder tilted his head slightly, assessing.
“Ach, I ken who ye are, Laird Hamish MacKenzie.” At least four men stiffened at the name. Calder inclined his head as though they were discussing weather over wine. “In most circumstances, ye’d be quite correct. However…” his gaze drifted to Isobel, and lingered. “Extraordinary value occasionally merits… extraordinary accommodation.”
The word slithered through Isobel’s mind. The gall! As though breaking his word was simply good business.
“Ye set the terms yerself.” Hamish hadn’t moved, but somehow his presence filled more space than before.
Calder’s tone remained pleasant. “Any reasonable man would recognize—”
Isobel’s breath caught. How can he stand there with a straight face, threatenin’ that beast of a man?
“I made an offer.” MacKenzie pointed a finger at Calder. “Ye struck yer wee gavel and accepted. Simple enough.”
For a long moment, no one said anything. The silence stretched, pulled taught as a wire, until Isobel could hear her own pulse hammering in her ears.
Then MacKenzie moved. Not toward Calder, but toward the platform. Toward her.
“Lady Isobel Munro.” He stopped at the base of the dais, looking up. His blue eyes were steady on hers. “Yer faither gave ye tae this man?”
Isobel’s throat closed up entirely. She managed a single nod.
“Did ye agree tae it?”
Her hands were shaking. “I…”
“‘Tis a simple question, lass.”
“Nay.” Her voice cracked and she pressed her lips together, fighting for control.
MacKenzie held her gaze a moment longer. Then he turned back to Calder, and despite the control in his movements, violence radiated from him like heat from a forge.
“So.” His voice had gone deadly quiet. “Ye’re nae just a thief, but somethin’ worse.”
“Her faither’s debts—”
“I dinnae give a damn.” Each word was precise, clipped. “The lass just said she daesnae want tae be here.”
Calder’s pleasant mask slipped fractionally. “Ye’re overwrought, Laird MacKenzie. Perhaps if we stepped outside, discussed this like civilized—”
“There’s naethin’ civilized about this and naethin’ tae discuss, ye pompous bastard,” MacKenzie said as his companion moved toward the door. Casually. As though simply stretching his legs.
“The audacity….” The silver-haired bidder’s voice dripped with disdain.
MacKenzie’s head turned. Slowly. “That’s interestin’, comin’ from a man offerin’ gold fer flesh.”
“Fergive me, Laird MacKenzie, but it rather seems like the thistle is calling the heather purple. Ye’re going tae an awful lot of trouble fer a bit of merchandise—”
“She’s nae merchandise. And if anyone here’s brave enough tae call her that again, they’ll get what’s comin’ tae them.” His hand settled on his sword hilt, fingers gripping tightly.
His partner had reached the door. His hand paused on the latch.
That earned him a single, almost imperceptible nod.
The door swung open, and his companion returned with six Highland warriors on his heel—armed, silent, spreading through the hall with confidence. They took positions near the door, beside windows—a threat that needed no words.
MacKenzie gave another nod, and the room erupted—men rising from their seats, shouting, reaching for weapons. The Englishman was demanding explanations. The silver-haired bidder had gone pale, his earlier disdain replaced with something that looked remarkably like terror.
Isobel’s heart leaped into her throat, her eyes wide as her feet remained firmly planted on the dais of their own accord.
And through it all, Calder remained calm, his pale eyes fixed on Hamish with an expression that promised retribution. For a long moment, the two men stared at each other—Highland laird and Lowland noble.
Then, Calder smiled. “Take her then,” he said pleasantly. “If ye believe ye can.” He glanced at his guards who had materialized behind him, armed, tense and ready.
MacKenzie didn’t budge. Around the room, weapons cleared leather with harsh, metallic whispers.
MacKenzie’s right-hand man moved back to his side. “Aye or nay, Hamish?”
“Aye.”
A Calder guard lunged first, his blade singing thought the air toward MacKenzie.
He swerved, and Isobel’s breath caught. She’d expected brutality, but this… this was something else entirely. His sword met the guard’s blade with a shriek of steel that made her teeth ache, but the impact barely slowed him. He twisted further, using the guard’s momentum against him and his blade opened the man’s throat in a single, precise strike.
Blood sprayed across the stone floor and the guard collapsed in a wet gurgle.
MacKenzie’s breathing remained steady, controlled—as though killing a man required no more effort than drawing water from a well.
Shock crashed over her and Isobel pressed her hand against her chest, trying to keep her heart from bursting through.
How can he be so calm?
Then, chaos erupted. Chairs splintered as men dove for cover or reached for weapons. Two more guards rushed to Hamish from opposite sides.
He spun between them without hesitation. His blade caught the first man’s sword arm, severing muscle and sinew. The guard screamed but before he could finish Hamish had already pivoted, his dirk appearing in his left hand as if conjured, driving deep into the man’s ribs.
The silver-haired bidder scrambled backward, his expensive boots slipping on the slick stone underfoot.
Isobel couldn’t tear her eyes away. She knew she should—knew the violence happening mere feet from her should send her cowering. But she was utterly transfixed by the way MacKenzie fought. Every movement flowed into the next with lethal grace, each strike devastatingly efficient.
‘Tis like watchin’ a predator move through water!
MacKenzie cut down another guard, then turned. His blue eyes found hers across the chaos—steady, unwavering and absolutely focused despite the mayhem. Blood splattered across his face and chest as his partner slashed his sword across a guard’s chest.
He took two strides and then stopped at the base of the platform.
“Isobel,” Her name came, spoken quietly, like a prayer. “I need ye tae come down. Now.”
Around them, violence bloomed. Another Calder guard rushed forward, his blade raised high. His partner spun, his blade carving upwards, opening the man’s throat in a spray of crimson. Another lunged from behind, sword aimed at MacKenzie’s unprotected back.
MacKenzie’s head turned slightly. Without looking away from Isobel, his sword came up and back, meeting the attack blind. Steel shrieked. He twisted his wrist, disarming the man, then drove his elbow into the guard’s nose.
The guard dropped instantly.
How? How did he even ken he was there?
Isobel’s legs trembled.
Even as one of the MacKenzie warriors drove his axe into an attacker’s skull right next to him, his focus on her remained absolute.
A jolt that terrified and thrilled her in equal measure surged through her malnourished frame.
“I cannae…” Isobel breathed, her voice cracking. Her hands were shaking and she couldn’t feel her legs. “I cannae walk…”
“Aye, ye can.” MacKenzie’s voice remained steady. Absolute. As though nothing was happening around them. “Trust me, lass. Just fer now. Can ye dae that?”
The word felt foreign and impossible. Every time she trusted someone, it had been weaponized against her. But this man, this massive Highland warrior simply stood there, hand extended, waiting for her to make a choice.
“What will it be, lass?” MacKenzie said, his tone urgent, yet gentle.
Isobel moved. Her legs barely supported her—months of captivity had stolen her strength, left her hollow and shaking. She stumbled down from the platform steps, her vision blurring at the edges, her body failing even though her mind screamed at her to hurry.
MacKenzie caught her elbow—firm, steadying, but not restraining. The moment her feet hit solid ground, he positioned himself between her and the fighting, using his body as a shield.
“Stay behind me,” he said. “Dinnae let go, ye hear?”
His other hand came up, steadying her. Up close she could see the controlled tension in his jaw, the barely leashed rage still thrumming through his powerful frame.
A nauseating lump lodged itself in her throat. He was soaked in blood, and yet his grip on her was careful, gentle.
I dinnae understand ye. And I dinnae understand why I’m nae scared of ye.
“Move!” Lewis’s shout cut through her spiraling thoughts.
MacKenzie rushed her toward the door. Around them, the hall had erupted into pure mayhem. Calder’s guards fought the MacKenzie warriors with desperate brutality.
“No… please… I don’t want to die in this godforsaken place!” The Englishman shouted frantically from where he had wedged himself into a corner.
Sassenach coward!
The silver-haired bidder cowered against the wall, pale and trembling, while Calder stood near an overturned chair, watching them go. His mask had cracked completely, revealing something cold and vicious beneath. When his pale eyes met Isobel’s, she saw a promise there.
This isnae over.
MacKenzie pulled her through the door and the cold air hit Isobel’s face like a slap, pulling her back from the edge of panic. Outside, horses waited—Highland garrons, sturdy and steady, held by two more of Hamish’s men.
“Can ye ride?”
Isobel nodded. She’d grown up with horses. And before everything had gone wrong, before her father’s debts had consumed their family, she’d loved to ride every chance she got.
“Wi’ me, then.” Hamish swung up onto a massive black stallion, then reached down, offering her his hand.
She grabbed it, noticing how sure his grip was as he pulled her up behind him. She lost her balance, and his hand came back, steadying her.
“Hold ontae me lass. Tight as ye can.”
Isobel’s arms slinked around his waist. He was solid and warm, smelling of leather and wool and pine. Even through his shirt and plaid she could feel the rigid planes of muscle, the steady rhythm of his breathing. Her cheek pressed against his broad back, and despite the terror, the uncertainty, the chaos, she felt her racing heart begin to slow.
He’s real. This rescue is real!
MacKenzie’s heels touched the stallion’s flanks and the beast surged forward.
Behind them, shouting men poured through the door. Isobel heard Calder’s voice, refined even in fury. “Ye will regret this, Laird MacKenzie! Laird Graham daesnae take kindly tae losin’ his merchandise!”
The MacKenzie warriors flanked Calder’s guards, blocking the narrow approach, buying their laird precious time.
The night swallowed them—dark and absolute. Their hoofbeats thundered underfoot, the rhythm matching Isobel’s racing heart. Trees flashed past, and the road—barely visible in the moonlight—twisted ahead.
Hold on, just hold on! She gripped tighter to MacKenzie, to consciousness, to the fragile hope that maybe—just maybe—this time, someone had actually meant what they’d said.
That perhaps, this time, she was being rescued rather than claimed.
If you liked the preview, you can get the whole book here
Best selling books of Juliana
Sold to the Highland Savage – Get Bonus Prologue
