Page 3 of To Love a Scottish Lord (Highland Lords #4)
He pulled the cannon back on squeaking wheels and loaded it again, using bits of metal and stone as shot. As for powder, there was plenty of that. The defenders of Aonaranach had left a small magazine behind, buried beneath a pile of straw.
Reaching for his tinder box, he lit it and then the fuse, stepping back a few feet while the cannon belched its contents in a deep-throated roar.
There, he’d hit the pine tree exactly.
A shout made him straighten and approach the window. With one hand braced against the sill, he leaned out to his right. A scrap of red material tied to a long branch was emerging from the grove of trees. At the end of it was a very angry Brendan.
Hamish understood immediately. He’d been firing at a tree only a short distance from where his brother stood.
He waved his arm to signal that he’d seen the makeshift flag.
Brendan, in turn, frowned up at him, and then staked the branch in the ground, standing there with feet planted apart and arms folded in front of him.
A woman stepped out from behind a tree to join him. She wore a bright red wool skirt and cloak, but her kerchief was missing. Brendan’s flag, he thought.
Hamish pulled back but she didn’t move, her face tilted up to the window.
He wondered if she’d seen him and then thought not.
If she had, she wouldn’t have continued to watch with such a calm expression on her face.
Nor would her smile, small though it was, have remained so firmly moored on those full lips.
Her hair was brown, with hints of gold glinting in it even on this gray and somber day.
Her eyes were dark, but she was too far away for him to discern the color.
Her waist was narrow and her bosom ample.
Only her slender neck and delicate wrists showed, and glimpses of her ankles as she walked.
The vision he instantly had of her naked reminded him how long it had been since he’d been with a woman.
A wife? Three weeks was too little time for even his fast-acting brother to secure a bride.
“I’ll be married come the spring,” he’d said in India. “I have a yen to settle with one woman.”
“Where would you put this bride of yours?” Hamish had asked.
Brendan’s ship was large, one of the first vessels built at Gilmuir. Even so, his accommodations and captain’s quarters were too small for a family.
“I’m thinking in Scotland,” Brendan said. “Or maybe Nova Scotia. Either is as close to a man of the sea.”
“Do you think that’s fair? You’d be away for years at a time, and she might actually be lonely for you. If, that is, you manage to find the one woman in the world who would miss that ugly face of yours.”
Brendan had only smirked at him, secure in his ability to attract females.
No, she couldn’t be a wife. Even Brendan couldn’t be that fortunate.
Brendan turned toward her, saying something that made her smile fade. She tilted her head back and regarded the tower once more.
Hamish left the window and stood in the middle of the circular room.
If it had been only Brendan, he wouldn’t have felt any hesitation in descending the stairs and opening the oak-banded door he’d repaired.
But he was curiously reluctant to show himself now.
He’d not been in close quarters with a woman since he’d been captured.
He wished, for the first time since he’d left Brendan’s ship, that he’d thought to bring a mirror. After he stared into it, he’d be able to gauge the depth of her revulsion. How would she act? Would she gasp or shudder, or give in to tears?
There was nothing to do but let them in. Bending beneath the lintel, he descended the stairs. Once on the ground floor, he removed the bar and opened the door, taking the precaution of retreating to the steps again to stand in the shadows.
Brendan came first, looking around the tower. He marched to the bottom of the steps, and catching sight of Hamish, placed his fists on his hips and glared.
“It’s taken you long enough, brother,” Hamish said.
“Is that how you repay me for my tardiness, Hamish? By trying to kill me? Why the hell were you shooting at us?” Brendan’s shouts echoed through the tower. Where once there’d been no sound at all in the castle, now there was abruptly too much.
“I was not,” Hamish said stiffly, all too conscious of the arrival of the woman behind his brother. “I was simply amusing myself. If I’d known you were there, I would have pointed the cannon in the opposite direction.”
“Where did you get a cannon, Hamish? I would have thought this godawful place would only boast spiders and bats.”
There had been enough of those, but he felt a curious protectiveness for his hermitage and only said, “A legacy from a former owner, no doubt. Someone once wished to defend it.”
“I can’t see why.”
Brendan stepped aside, leaving Hamish an unobstructed view of the woman in crimson.
Her eyes were brown; an unremarkable color that nonetheless now seemed deep, dark, and almost mysterious.
“Who are you?” he asked in a voice sharper than he’d intended.
Brendan frowned up at him, almost protectively.
“Angel, this surly creature is my brother. Hamish, allow me to introduce Mrs. Mary Gilly. A healer of some repute.”
He told himself that he was enraged because Brendan had overstepped his authority, not because of the way his brother’s hand rested on the woman’s shoulder. Nor did his sudden foul mood have anything to do with the soft and winsome smile she gave him in return.
“A healer? All I wanted was for you to bring the provisions I asked for, Brendan,” he said curtly.
She took a few steps forward, and Hamish took another step back, wishing that he had the power to banish her with the blink of an eye or a commanding gesture of one finger pointed toward the door. He held up his hand, palm toward her as if to ward her off.
“I am sorry you’ve come all this way for nothing,” he said.
A perfectly rational sentence uttered in a remarkably civil tone.
Considering that he’d not talked to another human being in three weeks, he should be congratulated not only for the restraint of his utterance, but also for the clarity of it.
Abruptly, he turned on his heel and left them.