“I am not most women.”
He smiled at her and nodded. “That you are not. Now, you’d best be getting back to sleep.”
Maggie closed her eyes. But what she saw in the darkness of her eyelids disturbed her greatly. She had two clear memories of her mother. One of her mother holding her tight to her chest and singing to her. The other was of a quiet summer’s night after her mother had taken ill.
Maggie had been trying to sleep that night too, but her mother’s crying had awakened her. Scared of the noise, she had crept from her bed to where a hanging cloth separated her sleeping bed from her parents’. Her mother had been weeping in the arms of Maggie’s aunt.
“How could he be with her while I lay dying?” Her mother’s voice was filled with such agony that it haunted Maggie to this day. “The least he could do is wait until I’m in the ground.”
“I know,” her aunt had soothed. “Men will be men. You know that.”
Her mother had died just a few hours later. Alone in her bed, waiting for her husband to come home to her.
And worse, her father had never married the woman he had gone to see that night.
“But Blar, you know I love you. I’d be taking care of your bairns for you if you’d let me,” Sila had begged her father outside their cottage one night three months after her mother’s passing.
“Sila, you’re a good lass, but I canna marry you now. Not after what has happened. Every time I look at you, all I can think of is the night she died. I should have been here with her, not out with you. The guilt of it is more than I can stand.”
“Aye.” Sila had wept. “You had no business with me. I should have never listened to you when you told me I meant something to you.”
With that spoken, Sila had run off into the darkness, and her father had come inside their small cottage.
He had glanced at Maggie standing in the shadows, and by his face she knew her father realized she had heard everything. He’d said nothing as he walked past her and went to his bed.
Like Braden, her father had been a good man, but a man nonetheless. And Maggie would rather die an old maid than be put in either the position of her mother or Sila.
Nay, she had dreamed of Braden the whole of her life, but it was time to let such foolish dreams go. Braden belonged to the world and she...
She belonged to herself.
Maggie looked wistfully to where Braden sat several yards away.
“Good night, my love,” she whispered. “And good-bye.”
That night, Maggie was tortured by dreams of Braden. Dreams of his sweet kisses. Of his arms holding her close.
“I’ll never leave you, little blossom.” His sincere voice made her heart soar.
She dreamed of having a home with him, of having his wee ones running about.
And then her dreams turned more wicked. Turned to things Maggie had overheard her brothers discuss when they thought her asleep.
Aye, she could see Braden slipping her clothes from her, running his hand over her body as he kissed her until she lost all reason. She could feel his hands sliding over her bare skin, cupping her body as his lips toyed with the sensitive flesh of her neck.
“Braden.” Her body was on fire with a need she could barely understand.
She wanted him.
And then, from a distance, she heard cruel laughter of the men in her village as they taunted the only boy who had ever noticed her.
“I would have thought she was below even your standards,” they’d said to David.
Maggie jerked awake as that haunting laughter rang in her head.
Disoriented, she glanced about to find Braden and Sin talking in low whispers a few feet away. The smell of fresh roasted hare greeted her.
Her hands trembling, Maggie tried to banish the memory of her dreams from her mind. The sound of the boys laughing at her the day David had helped her run an errand for Anghus.
