stood, hands on his hips again, and his back to her. She opened it and read.
Chapter Four
Monteith wanted Lisle. Her? Barefoot, hoydenish, poverty-stricken, wild, red-haired, hot-tempered Mistress MacHugh? And not for just one night, either, or even a week—which she might be able to live through and then try to forget. He wanted her for life, at his side, as his wife. His wife?
Her steps halted, knowing she had only deep-rooted mulishness to blame that she’d had to find out what his offer was in person. His wife? she repeated in her thoughts yet again. No. Not that. Any portion of MacHugh land was better than that. Anything.
The shock was what had gotten her from the steps of his keep and across his drawbridge without having to ask one soul the way, or wait for anyone to open a door or lower a bridge. Anger got her all the way to the castle gate, more than half a league distance, and then it became rage, which had her stomping along the fence-lined roadway outside his property. Then the emotion turned to stubbornness, making it easy to ignore the blisters on her heels that were breaking open, the way the sun seemed to beat down on her, making sweat rivulet down her back, and how even the growth beside the road tried to reach out for her, catch and imprison her.
Despair dogged every step and every breath as the sun set behind her, sending her own shadow farther and farther along the road, and frightening her more than any deserted farmhouse along the way could. It should have taken nearly the night to reach the MacHugh property, rather than arriving just as the moon was sliding from behind the clouds, stirring wind and whispers and ghosts to accompany her.
It was exhaustion that owned the final leg of her walk, making every step on the well-worn path seem endless and futile. There was more written. She’d been too shocked to absorb it, but tinges of it flew into her mind then, when all she had to look at was the moonlit path in front of her, stirring over with the first vestiges of night mist.
There was a lot written after the word marriage…something about inheritances and land, supplying coin and dowries to her MacHugh stepdaughters, a payment of gold to the other MacHughs…children. There was something written about trusts set up for children; riches beyond her dreams. Children. He’d written the word children….
Their children.
Her feet stopped, and her body had no choice but to obey as the emotion resembling liquid fire touched through her belly and up through her breasts again at the memory. Children? Oh, dear God, she couldn’t! No one could make her. She’d rather starve! She’d rather walk the streets in rags than give one instant of thought to the shiver way down deep that had started the moment she read the words, and that no one would ever get her to admit to.
It had to become anger again, and that gave impetus to her feet and legs, turning her long strides into a semijog that put a stitch in her side and made her lungs burn worse than her thighs.
Then the resignation came, completely and totally. She knew she had no choice. He knew she had no choice. That was why no one had lifted a finger to stop her flight from the Monteith estate. He knew she was going to have to do it.
There was light coming from the lower MacHugh castle windows. Lisle stopped and looked at the place that had been home for a year now. That was ending. It had ended the moment she’d awakened this morning. She just hadn’t known it. Lisle dragged her feet the remaining steps to the door and opened it, looking at change only the devil’s gold could make, and knowing that the MacHughs hadn’t even waited for her to agree before accepting Laird Monteith’s terms.
“Angus?” she croaked from a throat dry enough to soak up a sporran full of liquid. “Mattie?”
“Look, lass! We’re in the parlor. Just look!”
They hadn’t used the parlor since before the Yule, because it was too large to keep warm in, and without any furnishings it was too vivid a reminder of what they were facing. That wasn’t the case anymore.
Lisle stood, swaying until she had to lean against a doorjamb to disguise it, at the three aunts snuggled into new woolen blankets and rocking in identical chairs, while the other members of the MacHugh family lounged about on what appeared to be some of the same furniture they’d bartered away before things got so dire.
“The butcher still had my chair. Can you believe it?” Angus rose from the chair that had embraced him like a lover, and approached her, arms outstretched. Then he turned and used his arms to encompass the entire room.
“And look at the settee, and the tables, and even the mirror! He still had them as well. Isn’t it grand?”
“Aye,” she replied, through the same dry throat.
“We’ve you to thank, too, lass. Now, thank Lisle Dugall, all. She’s gone and saved the MacHugh clan. That she has.”
Lisle’s eyebrows rose a bit, but it was too much effort to move them much farther, and she let them fall back down. She didn’t have the energy to lift her own brows?
“Dugall?” she asked, with the croak of voice she had left.
“The missives he sent today came with gold, lass. Lots of it. He’s offered thirty thousand for your hand. We couldn’t turn it down. Think of it! Thirty thousand!”
“You opened…them?” she asked.
“We couldn’t allow you to take us to the brink of disaster again, now, could we?” It was the eldest, Angela, asking it in a snide tone.
“And me…to my deathbed,” Fanny added, between bouts of coughing.
“Weren’t they addressed to me?” Lisle asked.
“Well…that there is the rub, lass.”
Lisle tried to find a backbone stiff enough to hold her straighter, but her own spine was giving up on her now. If it hadn’t been for the solidness of the wooden doorjamb she was clinging to, she’d probably be collapsed on the bare floor at their feet.
“What’s the rub, Angus?” she asked.
“Thirty thousand gold pieces is a powerful amount of gold, Lisle,” he said softly, and she noticed he wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“Aye,” she intoned.
“We could na’ turn such a thing away. You ken how it is.”
“Aye,” she replied again.
They’d been afraid they had to sell their pride. It hadn’t happened. They were selling her. The worst part was, if they had waited, they’d have known she would have gone without a fuss. She had to. There was no other choice.
His children? she thought again and shuddered, the motion making her own body tremble against the wooden support.
“And it isn’t as if we canna’ look ourselves in the eye anymore, either.”
“Your meaning?” she asked with a very careful, controlled voice that sounded like the same rasp as the other words, but had heartbreak attached to it. She was only grateful they didn’t hear it.
Angus cleared his throat. “I thought long and hard about this, lass. I did. Truly.”
“I like you better when you’re straightforward, Angus,” Lisle answered, although all the words didn’t make it to sound, and the last were said in a whisper. She knew he heard them since he flinched.
“The offers were addressed to Mistress Lisle MacHugh. That much is truth.”
“And?” she asked, when all he did was stay silent, and act like he was waiting for her to think it through.
“There was nae wedding consummation with a MacHugh.”
They weren’t just selling her, they were disowning her first? Lisle found her backbone, and thanked God silently and swiftly for bringing the emotion to a halt, just like what had happened last night. She couldn’t feel a thing, not even one blister.
“You