Page 4 of The Scot Beds His Wife

“You have to hide.” His mother was sobbing. “He’s going to break the door.”

“Eleanor!” One of the hinges gave beneath the Laird’s mighty boot. “Ye would dare lock me out of a room in my own home? Do I have to remind ye what happened last time?”

Ye gods, he was drunk. They could hear it in the slur of his words.

“Hide,” his mother begged again, creating a protective shield with her body.

“Nay.” Thorne, nearly as tall as his petite mother now, vowed that he was never hiding again. He could protect her now that he was a man, or die trying.

The first thing he saw when the Laird finally splintered the hinges was the whip.

He’d never forget how his father looked that night. Not enraged, nor the least bit angry. He wasn’t even breathing hard for all the evil he’d wrought. Some of which would remain unknown to anyone until decades later.

It was a cruel sort of triumphant mirth that sparkled in his coal-black eyes. He appeared very much the barbarian marauder, fresh from sacking an entire village, drunk on plunder and bloodlust and his own ruthlessness.

“Goddamn the two of ye.” He staggered into the darkness with them, leaving the door open so his bulk was backlit by dim hall lights. “Know what I think?” he asked, seizing Thorne by the arm in a grip so strong, he feared his bones might crumble. “Ye’re too pretty to be my son. I’d believe it if ye were my daughter, but all my sons are dark and braw, like me. Ye’re no bigger than a toad, and if ye donned a dress, everyone would think ye a cunt.”

“Leave him be,” his mother pleaded. “Hamish, please. Of course he’s your son.”

“Did ye take a pretty lover, Eleanor?” Thorne could hear the smile in his father’s voice. He knew the terror his question incited, and he reveled in it.

“Never.” His mother sobbed. “I’d never dare be unfaithful to you.”

“I believe ye,” he scoffed. “Ye’ve not the spirit for such things, and neither does yer git. I’m going to make a man out of this prissy whelp.”

Hamish started whipping then. Whipping and whipping and whipping, his arm falling with unnatural precision, even in the dark.

Thorne knew better than to cry out, but he couldn’t stop himself. Once the whip was wet with his blood, the bite became an unimaginable agony. The open skin of his back was a queer and terrible sensation he’d not soon forget. After a while, he dimly wondered if the high-pitched cries belonged to him or his mother. Either way, they needed to stop.

Now.

Something dark and preternatural rose within him, andin one fell move, Thorne turned, caught the whip on the next down stroke, and wrenched it from his father’s hand. Driven by madness and instinct, he struck back. A stunned sort of triumphant pleasure swathed him as the whip made contact with his father’s skin.

His absurd sense of victory was cut tragically short as his father yanked him off his feet, wrenched the casement open, and tossed him out the second-story chamber window.

The fall didn’t last long enough for Thorne to fear his own death. It was just beginning to occur to him when impact with the frosty ground surrounding Ravencroft stole his ability to breathe. Fire lanced from his shoulder into his neck, and any kind of auditory stimuli disappeared, cocooning him in a shroud of silence and pain and biting cold.

His mother’s screams ripped through the night like a claymore through chain mail.

It cut him with just as jarring a wound.

When Thorne tried to push himself from where he landed, the burn in his shoulder intensified with such astonishing profundity, he didn’t know which impending reaction to fight off first, retching or fainting.

His arm, he could not move it.

Gritting his teeth until he felt they would crack, he gripped the moss embankment with his one good hand, and pulled himself to his knees, still fighting to fill his lungs.

A crash broke the stillness of the night, and then the split of a shriek was cut abnormally short.

“Mother?” he gasped.

Nothing.

“Mother?Mother? Answer me!”

“Survived that, did ye?” His father’s head appeared from two stories above. “Ye’re a damn sight tougher than I thought. Though crying for yer mother ruins the effect.”

“What did ye do?” Thorne demanded.