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He was teasing her, she knew. But her stomach was growling, and she wanted breakfast more than she wanted to argue about who might best tend the cook fire. He told battle stories as he cooked the porridge for breakfast. It was porridge again in the afternoon, when he told tales about the laird and his kinsman, Ian Macrae, who was as much the laird’s foe as his friend.
It was porridge again in the evening, and by then, it seemed to her as if Davy might never run out of tales to tell.
At least, until he asked, “Have you no tales of your own, Arabella?”
“I’m just a crofter’s daughter,” she replied, wrapped tightly in the plaid they’d stolen off a dead man, days before. “And not a very good one.”
“There’s a fire in you,” Davy said, stuffing porridge into his mouth. “No doubt that tart tongue of yours brought about a thrashing at your Papa’s knee.”
“More than once,” she confessed. “Papa once said I was more like a boy than a girl in that I could never seem to follow the rules. Liked my own company too much. Loved nature and my own experiments. Went out into the wilds to collect herbs and draw them. Lost track of time. But I always went alone, so I’m afraid I have no tales to tell.”
“You draw?” Malcolm asked, suitably impressed. “That’s a rare talent.”
Arabella bit her lip. “But a dull one.”
Davy snorted. “Come now, surely something exciting has happened to you.”
Arabella thought hard on it, and a memory came to her. “I suppose there was the time that the laird tried to hang my Papa from a tree for failing to pay what he owed.”
Davy stopped chewing. Malcolm’s eyes dropped.
And then she knew, they’d both been with the laird that day.
Perhaps if they hadn’t both looked so guilty, she wouldn’t have realized it. They hadn’t known her, and she hadn’t known them when it happened. The episode had been fraught with such fear that she couldn’t remember large chunks of what happened, which meant she wasn’t sure which one of them put the noose on her father’s neck.
But she felt certain it was one of the two of them.
“The laird spared your father, though,” Davy offered weakly.
Arabella’s heart hardened. “Only when my sister begged for Papa’s life, upon her knees, promising the laird her body in exchange.”
Neither man said a word. And she regretted having brought it up. They were the laird’s men and bound in obedience to him, just as she was. Just as Heather was. It had been the laird’s idea to string up their father—no one else’s. It hadn’t been Davy or Malcolm’s idea to make her sister into a harlot either. And it seemed as if that day had happened in another lifetime. Arabella fo
rced her blood to thaw a bit. Given what these men had done for her, risked for her, it wouldn’t be fair to hold it against them, she supposed.
Davy was the first to speak. “If it helps to know, your sister and the laird…well, things may have started badly, but the time I saw them last, they seemed sweet upon one another.”
Arabella glanced at him askance, trying desperately to imagine their stern laird as being sweet upon anyone. “Why do you say that?”
“John Macrae is harsh and stingy as a miser,” Davy explained. “But he spared no expense with your sister. Bought her pretty new dresses. And when she wanted to learn her letters, he arranged for a tutor, too.”
Arabella was intrigued. “Heather is learning her letters from a tutor?”
“Who is to stop her? So long as she pleases the laird, her days are her own.”
Arabella considered seriously. Her father hadn’t approved of book learning for his daughters, and when Heather had gone off with the laird, he’d cursed her name. But was it possible that Arabella’s sister was now freer as the laird’s harlot than she’d been as a virtuous crofter’s daughter?
“I would like to learn my letters,” Arabella decided. “Numbers, too. It would help to be able to draw the names of the plants I sketch, and the healing herbs.”
A husband might not allow it, but as a fallen woman Arabella wouldn’t have to answer to a husband. She was beginning to see many advantages to being ruined. Advantages that made her welcome it even more than her lustful body already did.
“It’s Ian Macrae that’s the scholar amongst us,” Davy said, shifting closer to her. “But I could teach you a letter or two.”
“But he can only teach you one or two,” Malcolm taunted. “Whereas I can show you them all.”
There weren’t any books in Conall’s cottage, but there were bills of sale, signed with his mark on the line. Both men went over them with her, helping her to trace the letters with her fingers and say them aloud such that they made words. Arabella felt gloriously accomplished. Rebellious, too. “My Papa loses sight of me for a few days and look what mischief I get up to.”
She meant the way she found herself wedged between the two men’s bodies at the table. The way an insistent pulse between her legs pounded with more urgency the further down the candle burned, the later into the night it went. But Davy replied, “Can’t say a kind thing about your father. T’would be disloyal to the laird. But you must be missing home. And we’ll get word to your mother of your safety as soon as we can. She must be worried for you.”
