Free Torn Between Two Highlanders by Laurel Adams Page A

Papa’s life, upon her knees, promising the laird her body in exchange.”
    Neither man said a word. And she regretted having brought it up. They were the laird’s men and bound in obedience to him, just as she was. Just as Heather was. It had been the laird’s idea to string up their father—no one else’s. It hadn’t been Davy or Malcolm’s idea to make her sister into a harlot either. And it seemed as if that day had happened in another lifetime. Arabella forced her blood to thaw a bit. Given what these men had done for her, risked for her, it wouldn’t be fair to hold it against them, she supposed.
    Davy was the first to speak. “If it helps to know, your sister and the laird…well, things may have started badly, but the time I saw them last, they seemed sweet upon one another.”
    Arabella glanced at him askance, trying desperately to imagine their stern laird as being sweet upon anyone. “Why do you say that?”
    “John Macrae is harsh and stingy as a miser,” Davy explained. “But he spared no expense with your sister. Bought her pretty new dresses. And when she wanted to learn her letters, he arranged for a tutor, too.”
    Arabella was intrigued. “Heather is learning her letters from a tutor?”
    “Who is to stop her? So long as she pleases the laird, her days are her own.”
    Arabella considered seriously. Her father hadn’t approved of book learning for his daughters, and when Heather had gone off with the laird, he’d cursed her name. But was it possible that Arabella’s sister was now freer as the laird’s harlot than she’d been as a virtuous crofter’s daughter?
    “I would like to learn my letters,” Arabella decided. “Numbers, too. It would help to be able to draw the names of the plants I sketch, and the healing herbs.”
    A husband might not allow it, but as a fallen woman Arabella wouldn’t have to answer to a husband. She was beginning to see many advantages to being ruined. Advantages that made her welcome it even more than her lustful body already did.
    “It’s Ian Macrae that’s the scholar amongst us,” Davy said, shifting closer to her. “But I could teach you a letter or two.”
    “But he can only teach you one or two,” Malcolm taunted. “Whereas I can show you them all.”
    There weren’t any books in Conall’s cottage, but there were bills of sale, signed with his mark on the line. Both men went over them with her, helping her to trace the letters with her fingers and say them aloud such that they made words. Arabella felt gloriously accomplished. Rebellious, too. “My Papa loses sight of me for a few days and look what mischief I get up to.”
    She meant the way she found herself wedged between the two men’s bodies at the table. The way an insistent pulse between her legs pounded with more urgency the further down the candle burned, the later into the night it went. But Davy replied, “Can’t say a kind thing about your father. T’would be disloyal to the laird. But you must be missing home. And we’ll get word to your mother of your safety as soon as we can. She must be worried for you.”
    “She died long ago,” Arabella explained. “Childbirth, it was.”
    Davy’s smile faded away. “Dangerous business, that. Taking up a sword and battling an enemy takes courage. But to bring forth a squalling infant into the world…” Davy shook his head as if it sounded terrifying.
    And Malcolm readily agreed. “I’d have liked a bairn. A whole houseful of them. But when I think about it now, it’s of some consolation to me that Lorna and I weren’t married long enough for me to put her through such a thing.”
    “Which is why I should take your maidenhead,” Davy said, to Arabella, smirking. “If you should still want to give it, that is. Less of a risk with me than with him.”
    “More chance that he’ll bungle it, though,” Malcolm said, stonily. “Davy can be a clumsy clod, whereas I’m the best swordsman in the clan.”
    And she knew he was