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I’d known what I was before he and his slack-jawed brothers started calling me a lass-licker.
Once the betrothal contract between Angus and me had been set, I’d had no choice but to pluck up the courage to explain to my father I had no interest whatsoever in tupping with the male of the species after anguished years of keeping the truth to myself.
Joseph Abernathy had risen from his chair, placed a hand atop my two-and-twenty-year-old head, and told me not to worry. My relief had been remarkably short-lived when he followed his reassurance with the declaration that a man can just as easily sire a bairn on a woman who wants a chambermaid as he can on one who wants a Laird. That, if I played my cards right, Laird Angus MacLeod might actually enjoy watching me with a chambermaid.
And that had been the end of that.
Faced with marriage to Angus as the only other alternative, I had been all too eager to accompany Mark when he first proposed the idea of our leaving our ancestral home.
Not because I gave two shytes about this mysterious heir he was obsessed with. But because I was obsessed with the idea of freedom.
“Tell me how ye really feel, why dinny ye?” Mark said, drawing me out of the unpleasant fog of memory.
My words caught below a knot at the base of my throat. I’d harbored these feelings so long that I hadn’t expected speaking them out loud to be this difficult.
“I’m through searching, Mark. I’m pure done in.” I lean toward him to be heard over the din. “I’m not coming with ye this time.”
All traces of levity evaporated from his features. “What would you do? Where would you go?”
“Dinnae ken.” I shrugged. “I hadna really thought about it.”
“You have.” Mark pulled his hands away from mine. “And for a while, I’d wager.”
He knew me that well.
“I’ve always wanted to see the Colonies,” I said, tracing the ring’s wet circle from Mark’s stout mug.
“You hate sea voyages,” he pointed out. “You couldn’t sale from Aberdeen to Edinburgh without baptizing the mackerel the whole way.”
“Aye,” I said, lifting eyes of our mother’s green to meet his. “Which is why I only intend to make the journey once.”
A crease appeared in the center of my brother’s broad forehead. “You mean not to come back.”
“There’s nothing for me here, Mark. Save our father’s filthy reputation. I want to go somewhere I can make my own fortunes.”
“Aye,” he snorted. “Because nothing says fortunes like Puritanism.”
I fixed him with a chilly look. “At least they see women as spiritual equals.”
Mark studied his glass of muddy brown beer. “Nay,” he said. “You’ll not be going. It’s oot the question.”
I blinked at him, outrage, and rage-rage warring for supremacy within my corset-constricted chest. “Noo jist haud on,” I said, my sharp tongue tripping back into our native dialect. “How’s it ye think ye can tell me what to do?”
Mark leaned forward to rest his massive forearms on the table. “I’m your older brother. Failing our Da, isnae a county or country that wouldna put me in charge of ye.”
Great gouts of heated blood sizzled into my veins, filling me with the bitterest of gall. Whatever my face might’ve been doing, it caused Mark’s to soften.
“It isna safe for you to travel without me to protect ye.”
“Protect me from who?” I challenged, folding my arms across my chest.
“Highwaymen. Thieves. Pirates,” he ticked off on thick fingers.
“So, we agree that men are the problem, then?”
Lately, I’d been hoping for it. Inviting it, almost. The chance to defend myself rather than allowing Mark to do it for me. To see what I could do, permitted the full use of my teeth and claws.
“Aye,” he allowed. “They’re the problem, all right. And that’s not like to change anytime soon.”
