Free A Bride Worth Billions by Tiffany Morgan Page B

filthy shirt.
     
    “Since when it is it alright to be robbing a woman?” Shaun shouted as he slapped him hard across the face.
     
    I yanked the back off of the now cowering thief’s back and immediately started rummaging through it. Everything seemed to be still in the bag, all except for my transponder I started pulling things out, think that maybe I had somehow missed it. But as spilled everything out, I knew it wasn’t in there. As I stuffed my survival tools back in the pack, I suddenly became enraged, and I punched Shamus in the exact spot he’d punched me earlier in the day.
     
    “Where’s my bracelet, ya little bastard!” Shaun looked at me for a moment as if I lost my mind, but quickly returned to the task at hand.
     
    “Ya heard the woman, ya little shite! Where’s the bracelet?”
     
    “I… I sold it! I sold the cursed little thing hours ago!”
 
    “You’re going to show me where! And you’re gonna do it right now!”
     
    Shaun yanked the thief up to his feet and he quickly led us to where he said he had sold it. But all we found when we arrived was a muddy, empty patch of land.
     
    “I swear! The wagon was just here a little while ago! Ask the man in the other stall, he’ll tell you the same!”
     
    “Friend!” Shaun called over to a little bald man who was selling leather goods, “was there a wagon here earlier today?”
     
    “Aye, they were here. But they left out a couple of hours ago.”
     
    “Did you see which way they went?” I asked with a quaver of desperation.
     
    “Out towards the main gate from it what it looked like. They were wearing your colors, lad, so you must know ‘em.”
     
    “They were Comyn-Balliol?” Shaun asked as he picked at his kilt.
     
    “Aye, from what I understand, the Bruce ain’t too keen on having your kind around at the moment.”
     
    “Shite,” Shaun said, frowning at me. “They could be headed anywhere, lass.”
     
    As the words rolled out of his mouth, I sat down hard in the mud and started bawling my eyes out.

 
    Do you want to know what a highlander does when he sees a young woman crying in the mud like a crazy person? Well, first off, he horribly beats the man responsible for making the young woman cry like a crazy person. Second, he picks you up out of the mud and carries you off someplace safe and quiet so that said crazed woman can weep without five or six hundred people staring at her. Third, because said crazy woman won’t stop crying, he promises to help find the thing that is making the woman cry no longer how long it takes.
     
    When Shaun said this, I did indeed stop crying, but I’m quite positive that he regretted making the promise the minute the words tumbled out of his mouth. Because the fact was, we were traveling down a blind road in a war torn country, chasing after a group of people who were part of a clan considered to be enemies of the state. And no, Scotland isn’t a big country, but its people know how to hide, they know how to disappear. The fact was, what we’re going to attempt to do was near impossible. But we did, indeed, do it, and our search went on for close to two years and would change us both.   
     
                                                                                                 ***
     
    The first year of the search for my transponder was the most dangerous year I have ever lived. What was most dangerous about it wasn’t the roving bands of English soldiers or the Comyn-Balliol. It was so dangerous because I am truly a creature of the 21st century. Although I’ve studied various histories and cultures my entire life and felt that I had a real understanding of how these ancient peoples lived. But mind you, I learned all of these “facts” while sitting in my 1500 square foot apartment complete with central air and heating.
     
    I lived in an environment where food was always available