Free Once Upon a Plaid by Mia Marlowe Page A

Glengarry approves it and he doesna trouble himself overmuch with what his servants want.” Nab was on solid ground now. If there was anything he was an expert on, it was his laird’s benevolent neglect. “Besides, he thinks girls are only good for making alliances and babies, even his own daughter. Ye know—”
    “What I know is that a younger son whose family didna know what to do with him is only good for serving as a fool.” She looked down her freckled, slightly too long nose at him.
    That stung, but he couldn’t let her see it. He was nothing to his parents except a burden from which they were relieved to be free. That knowledge was a small keening ache that never quite stilled. It didn’t help that someone else apparently knew how he felt about it either.
    “At least if I decide to wed, I willna have to crawl into bed with some gouty old—” He stopped when her little chin began to quiver. “Forget about what I said, Dorcas. I didna mean it. Ye’ll not have to marry an old ogre if ye dinna want to. Besides, ye’d have to find an ogre ye wish to marry first and that might take a long—”
    “Not so long as ye might think,” she interrupted while rolling her eyes at him. Even though of the pair of them he was sure he was the only one who could read, she made him feel like a dunderheid. “Girls grow up quicker than boys, ye ken.”
    He snorted.
    “My mother bore my brother Malcolm when she was fourteen. Ye’ve a passel of brothers and sisters at home. Which of yer older brothers is a husband?”
    She had him there. At twenty-eight, his oldest brother, Stewart, wasn’t even promised yet. Her smug smile reminded him of a cat with a mouse’s tail hanging from one corner.
    “So dinna dispute my word when I tell ye I shall marry for love, Nab,” she said decisively. “And he willna be an old ogre either.”
    He decided to let her keep her delusions for now. Life had a way of knocking the dreams out of a body without the need for him to take a part in the beating.
    Of course, allowing her to think she could join him in his tower room might actually encourage those unreasonable dreams.
    “If two of us are using the tower—” he began.
    “Stop fretting.”
    “I’m not fretting.” He was wondering why the middle of his strings of words kept interrupting the beginning of hers. It had happened five times now. It made him wonder. His words usually weren’t that careless.
    She tucked her skirts around herself and settled beside him, letting the shawl-like portion of her arisaid slip from her shoulders.
    He stopped wondering about words completely. Odds bodkins, a girl in my tower.
    It had seemed so unlikely a happenstance that he’d never considered it. He’d never considered how good one might smell either. Dorcas had a whiff of something sweet wafting about her, clinging to the folds of her arisaid.
    The real surprise was that Nab didn’t mind that she sat so close to him. He cut a glance at her and then pretended complete absorption with his hands in his lap.
    “The worst that will happen is that we’ll be found out here and the stairs will be resealed,” she said.
    That would definitely be worse. Where could he read if the tower was closed to him?
    “I brought ye something. I’m thinkin’ ye didna have much supper,” she said, pulling a small bundle wrapped in cloth from her pocket. “’Tis a bit of Clootie Dumpling. Are ye fond of sweeties?”
    He was. And Clootie Dumpling was his favorite—a rich, dense pudding flavored with currants and raisins. He took it from her with thanks and made short work of it.
    “I like to see a man enjoy his food,” Dorcas said. “But yer hand’s all sticky now. Here. Let me.”
    She took him by the wrist, and amazingly enough, he didn’t mind too much that she was touching him. But he was shocked to his curled toes when she licked off his fingers, one by one. It made him feel a whole different kind of hot and jittery inside.
    He pulled his hand