Page 34 of Devil Black

“You love your home right well.”

“It goes, Wife, beyond love. The roots of my heart run deep in this place, my ancestors’ blood soaks the ground. I have hope of it—” his gaze swept her body, “for my sons. I will do what I must to retain it.”

“Could the King take it from you?”

“The King can take anything from anyone.”

“I am surprised, then, that you defy him.”

“Do I? Have I not married, as he decreed? Do I not dutifully and diligently plant my seed?”

“Diligently?”

“And with great pleasure. Tell me, Wife, what did you plan to do when Bertram MacNab discovered he had the elder sister after all—the one who, presumably, could not give him his much desired sons?”

“I planned to seduce him, and then it would be too late. I would prove myself by getting, almost at once, with child. What could he do then?”

“What, indeed? A complete sacrifice, then?”

“Yes.”

“So,” he said softly and with particular intensity, “you thought of everything?”

“Almost everything,” Isobel allowed. She had not considered endangering her heart to the man she married. And she had not dreamed of a man like Devil Black MacRae.

“And what, Wife,” he asked, leaning close, so close his lips almost brushed hers, “did you overlook?”

“The bandit of Central Scotland,” Isobel replied, and turned her face away.

Chapter Fifteen

“He is a bandit, a man without honor or scruples,” Meg said of her brother, impatiently. “I do not know why the King—or you, for that matter, Isobel—expect any better of him.”

Isobel gave her new sister-in-law a searching look. Meg seemed unusually irascible today, and that said a great deal of a woman who spent her days in an ill temper. She seemed edgy, and though part of that could be laid at the door of the continued vile weather, Isobel suspected yet another cause.

Two weeks had passed since Isobel’s marriage with the Devil Black MacRae. The search for Bertram MacNab’s missing bride had been suspended, yet Dougal still spent much of his time abroad on the roads—doing the good God only knew what. Isobel and Meg, the only two women in a household of rough warriors, had perforce struck up a relationship of sorts.

Isobel held no illusion that Meg liked or even approved of her. Obviously, Meg liked no one. But, Dougal’s sister came to tolerate her, merely because there was no one else.

“I expect nothing of your brother,” she replied now. The two women shared a room called the solar, a small, intimate chamber meant for sewing and conversation. A shabby place, it nevertheless always boasted a decent fire.

“I wish I need not acknowledge him my brother,” Meg complained, “curse him to hell!”

This was not the first such opinion Isobel had heard. She bit her lip and then decided to ask the obvious question. “Why do you hate him so?”

Meg shot her a scathing look. “Are there not a multitude of reasons?”

“Maybe. But I think you are a woman who deals in specifics. Will you tell me?”

Meg swore bitterly. “Is it for me to recount your husband’s sins and failures? Let him tell you himself.”

“Failures?”

Meg gave Isobel a disparaging look. “What do you know about Dougal’s past?”

Isobel shook her head. “Nothing.”

Meg turned away, walked to the window and stood looking out.