A Very Highland Holiday - Kathryn Le Veque Page 0,60
who removed his hat to reveal sun-bleached brown hair. His skin had the tough brown hue of old leather, but his smile was wide, his teeth whole if stained. “Is that not what ye do when ye see a star guiding ye to an inn at Christmastide? Is there a wee babe in the stables we should visit?”
The men in the smoky common room laughed. Through the din, the innkeeper, Balthazar, stroked his beard with his fingers. “There’s already one wise man here, Gair Murray, and I’d not let ye within ten feet of a wee babe.”
“Ye know me, then?” Gair’s smile widened. “And ye bandy me name about, do ye? Worth a free jar, I’m thinking.”
“Everyone knows ye, Gair. You’re among friends here.”
Not likely, Fiona thought as she wrapped her hands around her cooling mug of tea. Gair Murray, a smuggler, had no true friends, not really. He did favors for men up and down Scotland, but for pay, at the same time on the lookout for anything he could lift for himself.
His only friend in the world, if he could be called so, was the thin but much taller man next to him. Padruig looked out at the world with one gray eye, the other, lost in some long-ago battle, covered with a leather patch.
Both men wore cloaks over their coats, Padruig’s black, Gair’s brown with a stripe that made it appear suspiciously like an old tartan. Fiona hoped he wouldn’t be caught wearing a forbidden plaid.
Padruig, as usual, said nothing as the more garrulous Gair bantered with the innkeeper.
Fiona regarded the third figure with growing tension. He was a huge bear of a man, a Highlander without doubt, his hair a strange shade of black. Soot, she realized as a streak of it came off when he removed his hat. He was trying to disguise the true color.
He was muffled to his ears in a plain gray scarf, he the only of the three not to have a cloak wrapped about him. He hunched his back as though trying to conceal his height, but he did a poor job of it. This was a man used to standing straight, proud, arrogant.
Perhaps his spirit had been broken, as so many of them had been. Fiona had once been a proud Highlander herself.
And still am. We are defeated, not gone.
The man had to pull down his scarf to drink the tankard of ale Balthazar shoved onto a table for the three men. More soot smeared from his hair, which shone like a streak of sudden flame.
Only one man had hair that brilliant shade of red. But he was dead, captured by the Hanoverians after Culloden, taken prisoner, vanished. Fiona’s heart had died that day. He’d have been executed by now. Fiona’s nightmares had showed her his death so many times in the last eight months that she was certain of it.
Until the man turned his head and looked at her.
Blue eyes like summer skies skewered her, and the firm mouth that had once kissed like fire pinched into a frown. He rose from the stool he’d just taken, as though unable to stop himself.
Stuart Cameron.
Her brother’s enemy and the man who’d stolen her peace before he’d run off to join the doomed army of Teàrlach mhic Seamas.
Padruig eyed Stuart in concern, though Gair continued telling the men next to them some tale he was inventing about their travels. Gair’s constant banter kept people mollified until too late to recognize his perfidy.
Fiona Macdonald shouldn’t be sitting in a wayside tavern in the middle of the Scottish Highlands with English soldiers hunting down any they even thought smelled like a Jacobite. She should have taken ship months ago to France or the Low Countries, or at least be home with her brother, anywhere she’d be safe. It was typical of her to decide not to flee or hide.
Stuart could not stop himself crossing the tavern to her. The room was crowded, so much so that none paid much attention to another weary traveler pushing through their midst.
The eagle-eyed maid, Una, glared up at Stuart as he approached. So she was still with Fiona. Loyal of her. Fiona sipped tea as though she noticed no one.
Stuart knew Fiona had seen him and recognized him. Best to corner her before she burst out with his true identity … not that the Fiona Macdonald he knew would do such a thing, although she might in her surprise. Or Una might, indignant at his return.