Page 1 of The Scot Who Loved Me

Chapter One

August 22, 1753

Torchlight flickered over a monster of a man sitting on the ground, his braw arms manacled to the wall of Marshalsea Prison’s strong room, the outbuilding for troublesome criminals. The floor reeked of piss. Night soil’s scent clogged the air. Rebellion had a cost, and it was paid for in the shed. Anne crumpled a handkerchief doused with lavender oil against her nose and stepped gingerly inside.

The warder’s bruised eyes searched her hooded face. “There’s less beastly men I could show ye, miss.”

“No, he’s the one I want.”

Chains clinked, the cold noise rippling over her skin. The sleeping beast stirred, shifting a tattered MacDonald kilt on massive thighs, and the bottom of a hairy ballock swung into view.

“See what I mean?” The warder sniffed. “Not fit for the kindness of yer bosom.”

She was eyes on the beast, a generous purse dangling from her fingers. “It’s my bosom, Mr. Ledwell. I’ll thank you to keep your concern to yourself.”

Grasping hands cupped the offering. “Yer payin’ a lot for one worthless highlander.”

In the shadows, eyes of molten gold glared through lanky hair, riveting eyes that stripped lesser souls. The brute was bound but not defeated with his head tipped back and arms resting in fetters as if he took his ease. The English could never conquer him. He’d rotted on a prison hulk at Tilbury Fort for his part in the Jacobite Rising of ’45 and lived to tell the tale.

But this imprisonment he’d done to himself.

Why?

She winced behind her scented cloth. Untended cuts and nasty bruises showed through his torn shirt. Still, he was a sight. Blond-brown hairs glinting on rock-hewn thighs. A thickly carved chest whittling to a lean waist. With his size came a large nose and a wide, once familiar, mouth. Passionate, soft (the only part of him that was), and utterly kissable.

But those eyes had the power to mark a woman. Brash on his best day, moody on his worst. Spite flashed in their depths at the warder sifting a bony finger through the purse.

Ledwell raised a polished coin to the light. “A Queen Anne half guinea. Don’t see much of this fair lady.” His thumb rubbed the stamped profile. “Looks newly minted too.”

“You have thirty pieces of gold, as agreed,” she said.

“No’ thirty pieces of silver?” Mocking words climbed out of the dark.

He speaks.She stepped closer, dank straw submitting to her foot.

“Ledwell is greedy, but he’s no Judas.”

Husky laughter floated from the floor. “And I’m no savior.”

The warder’s face scrunched in confusion. The beast, however, fixed a keen gaze on her. With her hood pulled forward, a single torch lighting the shed, and a cloth muffling her voice and hiding her face, Will couldn’t know it was her. Yet, for all her confidence, his presence tied her in knots, and he was the one in chains.

“What makes ye think ye can handle him? Three men couldn’t.” A leering Ledwell slid the purse into a pocket inside his coat. “Countin’ on yer feminine wiles to get that filthy rag off him?”

She bristled at the unseemly question. “Where did you find him?”

“At the Ram’s Head on London Bridge. Tavern maid said he sauntered in wearing his kilt, demanding ale. She obliged him ’til he was drunk as David’s sow. That’s when the Night Watch was called.”

“Raised the hue and cry, did she?”

“She did, an’ two Watchmen hauled him here in a cart.” Ledwell hiked up sagging breeches and sniffed. “But it was me who bound him to the wall.”

Preening man.There was no need to glory in the downtrodden. It was bad enough the Dress Act of 1746 outlawed kilts.

“If he was tied up, how did you come by those bruises on your face?”

Ledwell’s chin jutted at two large feet covered in loose leather boots, the tops folded under big square knees. “Kicked like a madman, he did, when we tried to cut off his kilt.”

“Try cuttin’ it off again, and I’ll break your nose,” the highlander boomed.