Free Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 02] by Master of The Highland (html)

a damp-frizzled lock of red-brown hair behind her ear. “Now I see, my lady.”
I pray you do not, Madeline almost blurted.
She didn’t want Nella to see, wasn’t quite ready to reveal she’d actually glimpsed the man.
Or risk having her friend guess the smooth richness of his voice had spelled her . . . especially when the few words he’d uttered had been anything but flattering.
For a very brief moment, other unflattering words, other masculine slurs echoed in her mind. Scornful voices expressing what they truly thought of her and why they’d come to Abercairn seeking her hand.
Cruelties she’d suffered repeatedly o’er the years, hearing them not with her physical ear but with her heart, thanks to her unusual talent . . . a plaguey gift surely bestowed on her by the devil himself.
The taunts, uttered by past suitors, still cut deep enough to send waves of emptiness and cold regret tearing through her.
Breasts resembling the udders of a milk cow, one marriage candidate had scoffed.
Hair so glaring a red, gazing upon it would blind a man, another insisted, incensing her further by declaring her curls too unruly for even an iron-tined comb to address its tangle-prone masses.
Lips as wide as the River Tay.
And most mortifying of all: passable enough to bed if a man simply dwelt on the depth of her sire’s pockets.
One by one, they’d crushed her confidence and stomped without mercy over her femininity until she’d wanted naught but to be left alone . . . perhaps even to seek the solitude and blessed peace of a veiled life.
And now, for good or nay, she must.
Madeline blinked, furious at how deeply her shoulders had dipped upon recalling the slurs, discomfited more to discover Nella’s sharp, perceptive stare on her.
“You were not meant for cloistered life, my lady,” the other woman commented with all the quiet confidence Madeline lacked, and so admired in her well-loved friend.
“Nay, verily I was not,” Madeline agreed, her gaze on a long series of splashing rapids. “Nor is it even close to what I’d once wanted of life.”
She sighed, wishing the cascading waters could carry away the remembered barbs.
And her dreams, for recalling them hurt far worse.
Especially now that she’d come face-to-face with the manifestation of those dreams.
She turned back to Nella. “I ne’er wanted aught but to be loved, truly and passionately loved, and for myself,” she said, the admission an ache on her tongue. “Not falsely, and not for my father’s fine keep and plentiful coffers of gold.”
“And you think to find such a man behind cloistered walls?”
“You ken why I shall take the veil,” Madeline said, folding her arms tight against her ribs, hugging her waist as she spoke. “And it scarce matters, for a man capable of such loving does not exist except in the songs of bards.”
Nella tilted her head. “Or in dreams, my lady?”
“Aye, in dreams, too,” Madeline admitted, looking aside.
In dreams . . . or at the sides of the privileged women who held their hearts.
As her shadow man’s heart was held.
Wholly and irrevocably, just as hers was inextricably bound to his.
Tied to him by invisible cords of golden silk.
The strange bond leaving her to suffer a dull, throbbing ache for what she intuitively knew could have been so dear if only they’d crossed paths in another time and place.
Unfolding her arms, Madeline pressed her hands against the small of her aching back and heaved a great, weary sigh. Such disturbing notions were best examined later, when she was no longer quite so tired, hungry, and dispirited.
Perhaps after she’d avenged herself on Silver Leg and whiled safe and secure behind the shielding walls of a suitably remote and obscure nunnery.
But even as she shrugged off her cloak and gathered up her skirts to join Nella in the burn’s chill waters, a tiny voice somewhere deep inside her laughed aloud at the flimsiness of her intentions.

In a different but not too distant corner of the same teeming bishop’s burgh, frustration