Page 9 of Pride of Duty

Cullen shook his head. “How was I to know?”

His aunt made a “Pah” sound. “What red-blooded Highlander wouldnotknow he slept in the same room with a woman?”

“But you weren’t there. You don’t know how this, this so-called woman dressed. She dressed like a man, talked like a man… Why, she even assisted in a complicated surgery on a lad who fell from the rigging and did a damned fine job of it.” He shook his head again. “Ithoughtshe was a man. Hell, I’ve been trying to convince him, er her, for weeks he, she, should leave the ship and go study at Edinburgh so he, she, could set up his own practice.” Cullen leaned over and buried his face in his hands. “Herown practice.”

“But that’s the rub. Even though she has the skills to become a physician, she canna. She’s a woman. She has no family. You know what you have to do.”

Cullen looked up at his aunt and stared as if he were seeing her for the first time. “Me? What have I done to condemn myself to life with a woman I barely know? She’s bad enough as a lad - sullen, unhappy, challenging me all the time.”

“Try to put yourself in her situation. She’s just lost her father, she has no home, she obviously has the experience and talent for healing, and suddenly, she has to answer to a grumpy Scot like you.” His aunt’s accusing stare unnerved him.

“Will you at least give me some time to think this over?”

“We canna wait until someone who knows the Mortons spreads the gossip that will ruin her. You have until early tomorrow.” She rose and headed for the door. Fergus, who had been standing near the door, quickly opened it before she sailed through.

In the wake of her curt dismissal, Cullen stood and tried to stop her. “But why—”

Fergus cut him short with a thump of his arm against Cullen’s mid-section. “Yer aunt made herself perfectly clear. I heard her and I’m way older than you, ye wee bastard.”

Cullen stepped aside from Fergus’s warning, disbelief in his eyes.

The expression on the older man’s face softened a bit. “D’ye still drink good Highland whisky?”

Cullen’s eyes widened, and he gave Fergus an incredulous look.

Fergus clapped him on the shoulder and led the way down the back staircase to the lower level kitchen.

Once they were seated at Cook’s rough plank table with a loaf of crusty bread still warm from the oven, Fergus produced a dark brown glass bottle sealed with a cork stamped with the clan’s arms.

“Marriage, Fergus?” After Cullen had drunk several small glasses of the deep amber liquid, he was in the mood to argue his predicament. “I spend two weeks with a lad who’s actually a lass, and that’s my fault? That’s reason enough to spend the rest of my life with someone tall enough and scrawny enough to pass for something she’s not?” With each question, his voice rose higher.

Finally, Fergus laid a calm, but iron-grip of a hand over his arm once he’d stopped waving it about.

“Cullen,mo crideau, before you fash yourself into apoplexy, let me tell you a story.” The silver-haired clansman leaned back against the wall and stretched his long legs out beneath the table. Cook’s cat joined him on the bench and began to purr before sliding with sly stealth onto his lap. He adjusted the pleats on his kilt to accommodate the plump feline and pulled a pipe and tobacco from his jacket.

“You know how remote the MacKenzie Clan lands are. Twenty years ago, we had only one physician to serve all of our families. But then one winter measles swept through our villages, and old Dr. MacKenzie was one of the first to die. We sent a call to Edinburgh for a physician, and they sent Dr. Morton. When he came, he brought his wife and wee daughter.

“It was a terrible time. Many of the clan died, but the Mortons stayed until the danger passed. He and his child were fine, but his wife, who nursed our clansmen right by his side, caught the disease, and the fever took her down.”

“Why don’t I don’t remember any of that?”

“Your da came and took ye away to school.”

“Why didn’t he help the clan?”

“Because his practice in London was way too important for him to see to his dead wife’s barbaric relations in the Highlands.”

The bitterness in the old man’s voice caught Cullen by surprise.

“So, ye see, Miss Willa Morton is all alone in the world with no one ta protect her because her father answered the call ta save the clan families - yer people - all those years ago.”

Chapter Five

Hoursafter the hall clock chimed midnight, Cullen still stared at the ceiling medallion in his grandfather’s former bedchamber. How many times, he wondered, had the old man lain in this same position, puzzling out the weighty concerns of the clan?

He imagined there had been many situations where the elder Cullen MacKenzie had had to put the clan above his own needs and pursuits. Cullen’s grandmother had been a plain-spoken, stoic woman from one of the island clans. His grandfather had arranged their marriage in order to keep peace in the far northwest of the Highlands.

He’d been a loving patriarch to Cullen’s mother, sisters, and brothers as well as his grandmother and the rest of the clan. But everyone knew he’d loved Annie McCullough until the day he died. She’d never married but had remained at the home of her clansmen. Each year at the Highland games when the clans gathered, young Cullen could see how the two of them sought each other’s glances whenever they happened to meet.