Free MacKinnons' Hope: A Highland Christmas Carol by Tanya Anne Crosby Page B

therefore she would never inherit her father’s demesne. In terms of politiks, it was far more reasonable to assume he’d pass his legacy to a bastard son. Had not King Henry’s illegitimate son, Robert of Gloucester benefited just that way?
    “Who are you?” Page demanded to know. The years may have mellowed her, but she would not so easily cow.
    “Someone with a vested interest.”
    At Aldergh, they’d had a kitchen maid with that very accent. She remembered her father smacking the woman on the arse quite a lot. In fact, there were quite a few evenings when he’d summoned her to his room—to bring him sweets, he’d always claimed. Only now she wondered, what kind of sweets?
    “A vested interest in what?” Now that they were far enough away and Iain wasn’t in immediate danger, Page dragged her feet, planting her heels.
    The man pulled her along across the field, against her will. The light of the bonfire and ringing of voices diminished behind them as he dragged her in the direction of the woods. A sliver of a moon lit the night sky, but it lay hidden behind a bank of puffy white clouds, giving the landscape a grey, otherworldly light.
    With every step, Page expected to hear Iain calling after her, but the sound of his voice remained absent from the hillside and the merriment fell further and further away.
    The man pinched the back of her arm, jerking her forward when she tried to sit. “What I have to gain is not important for ye to know.”
    “Och! Someone will notice I am gone,” she warned the man, remembering another time she’d made such threats in vain. And yet, this time, Page knew beyond a shadow of doubt that her husband and clan valued her. Someone would come searching the instant they realized she was gone. These were now her people, and they would never sit idly by, allowing this man to take her life. “They’ll come after you, they will find you and they will hang you from the gallows.”
    “Nay,” the man said confidently, once again jerking her arm. There was a smile in his voice. “They will find your father’s camp. They’ll blame Hugh. And when they kill him, I’ll be gone.”
    A spark of hope flared—inconceivably, not because this man meant to murder her, but because her father might not be the one behind this atrocity after all. Still she wanted to know, “Why is my father here?”
    “Because that bag of wind believes he can buy his way to heaven by rebuilding a few huts.”
    Page’s heart thumped against her ribs.
    Her father was the one who rebuilt the huts?
    Her brow furrowed, and then suddenly she realized … those odors back in the stable… they were scents from her past—lavender, cinnamon and cloves. The cloves she could still smell over-strongly on the man dragging her along—a tincture exactly like the one the kitchen maid had used to use to mask her body’s scent. She had a son, a bit older than Page, that she liked to claim was a servant of God. Page had often wondered if his father was a fish because his mother smelled so foul. She said the boy had a noble sire, and then one day he was gone...
    Page swallowed, hard. “I know who you are.”
    The man jerked her arm once again and said, “Shut up.”
    Peering over her shoulder, Page searched for moving shadows. She spied nothing. Nothing at all. Judging by the growing silence, her husband never reemerged from the stables, and her heart squeezed with fear.
    And neither did anyone else seem to realize what was happening here, and her father—wherever he might be—was in as much danger as she was: If Iain happened to find him first, and she hadn’t had the chance to explain—or if Malcom or Cameron discovered Hugh before Iain did, they would kill him without question.
    “What makes you think you’ll get away with this?” Page asked furiously.
    “Shut up,” the man said again, and Page grit her teeth.
    They slipped into the woods, and peering over her shoulder once more, gauging the bonfire’s