Free Snowy Night with a Highlander by Julia London Page A

latch. “Are you impervious to ague?”
    “I’m fine,” he said. “Up with you, then. We should no’ tarry.”
    “At least take another rug with you to the bench,” she said, showing no sign of hurrying things along.
    Duncan impatiently dipped down, caught her around the waist, and ignored the squeal of surprise as she grabbed his shoulders. He lifted her up and sat her on the wagon’s gate—but he did not let go as he’d intended. Something happened to him—he was captivated by her amber eyes. He could not look away.
    Nor did she. Her hands remained on his shoulders, her eyes locked on his.
    Something passed between them, something intensely magnetic.
    Duncan was the first to move, slowly sliding his arm away from her waist. Such attraction as he was experiencing was pointless, useless. She despised him. And even if she could be persuaded that he was indeed a changed man, she had not yet noticed his face. When she saw his face . . .
    “You can get yourself under cover, I’ve no doubt,” he said abruptly, and retreated to the driver’s bench. But as he climbed up and dusted the snow from the seat and pulled a pair of furs over his lap, he heard her grousing behind him.
    Something about being ordered about by a Highlander.
    She fell silent as he sent the horses to a trot again, their breath rising in great plumes. Duncan imagined LadyFiona Haines on her bench inside the wagon, bouncing along, her hands gripping the edge.
    A headwind picked up, pushing the snow into neat piles alongside the road. The limbs of the pines under which they were passing were hanging low under the snow’s weight.
    After another hour of traveling in wretched conditions, Duncan realized they were far from a village and even farther from Blackwood. The team was tiring, and if the snow kept falling, it wouldn’t be long before it would be too deep to pull the wagon. Duncan did not relish a night spent literally on the road.
    It was dumb luck that as the horses began to labor up a hill where the trees thinned, he happened to see a cattle enclosure on the sheltered side of a large rock. And he considered it nothing short of a miracle that the enclosure held three sheaves of hay.
    “Whoa, whoa,” he said, pulling back on the reins, bringing the horses to a stop once more.
    When he helped Fiona out of the wagon, she only grumbled a bit when he explained their predicament and pointed to the enclosure. “We shall freeze to death,” she said.
    “We will no’,” he countered.
    “It will scarcely matter if we freeze, for wolves will feast on us.”
    “The wolf is dead,” he patiently reminded her. “And if he were alive, he’d no’ come near a fire.”
    She pressed her lips together, studying him, and nodded. “All right, then. What must we do?”
    “Help me remove the tarpaulin.”
    Between the two of them, they removed the tarpaulin from its frame and dragged it up the hill to the enclosure.She helped him make a shelter of sorts. With hay on the ground and one of the lap furs to cover it, he used the rest of the hay to form a lee around the fur. On the edge of the enclosure, he scuffed a circle and kicked hay and snow away, leaving the earth bare. “Stay here,” he said to Fiona. He trooped down to the wagon again, loaded wood onto his damaged arm, then returned to the space he’d made. He made the trip to the wagon thrice more.
    As Fiona watched, he built a fire, held his hand over the flame a moment, and when he was certain it would not go out, he touched the brim of his hat. “Here is wood,” he said, pointing to the little pile. “Keep the flame burning while I tend the horses.”
    The snow was beginning to thin, but now the wind was blowing and he was chilled to the bone. He disengaged the horses one by one from the harness frame and led them to a stand of Scots pines, where he hobbled them together. He hung oat bags on each of them—no small feat, given their height and his useless appendage. And with the four of