Beloved Highlander

“I’d hoped you’d kill him,” she sighed, “and I’d be free.”

Suddenly Gregor felt cold. He looked at her for a long, silent moment, and then he went back to saddling his horse. Behind him, Barbara was telling him how difficult it was to live with Airdy, how much she longed to be rid of him, but he was no longer listening. He was thinking about Meg and how he had to find her, how he had to explain to her that the sight of him and Barbara on the landing was not what she thought. That he had never loved Barbara, that he never could love a woman like Barbara.

It was Meg he wanted. Meg he couldn’t live without.

Gregor swung his leg over the horse’s back and rode it out into the yard. Malcolm Bain was running from the castle, Angus not far behind him. “Gregor!” he called. “Wait for me, lad!”

But Gregor did not wait.

“Gregor! Kenneth says he thinks they saw Lorenzo and his men, down in the glen. Do ye hear me?”

Gregor heard him. His stomach clenched, his hands tightened on the reins. Lorenzo was in the glen, and Meg was alone.

“Get as many men as you can!” he shouted over his shoulder. “We have to find her!”

He dug in his heels and his horse shot forward, away toward the bridge over the burn, and then up the glen in the direction Meg had gone.

Chapter 24

What if I canna find her?

The words went through his head, over and over again. They were taken up by the thud of his horse’s hooves on the ground. What if I canna find her? The thought left him feeling desolate, broken, a hollow man. If Meg was gone, then there would be nothing for him. He would have Glen Dhui, yes, he would be the laird again, and this he had longed for for twelve years, although he had not dared to speak his longings aloud.

But now…

Now all that was like rain on the wind, something that came and went and mattered not. It was Meg who mattered. Without Meg his life was nothing, he would be worse off even than he had been when he lost Glen Dhui. Meg was his future. He had not realized how much he had come to think of her as always being there, at his side. Until now, when he might very well have lost her.

As if to add to his anguish, the sky had clouded over, with mist hanging low over part of the glen, and a rainstorm sweeping down the slopes of Liath Mhor.

Where could Meg have gone?

He drew up his mount, wiping the rain from his eyes and tossing back his hair. Think! Where would Meg go for shelter? Where would she go if she felt alone and threatened, abandoned and unwanted?

Her retreat, of course. But if she could not go there, if she could not go home to Glen Dhui Castle, then where?

Another shower of rain swept over him, stinging his face, blinding him, but Gregor hardly noticed it. He was thinking back to the warm day by Loch Dhui, when Meg had lay upon the stones and told him how, when she first came here, she had ridden the glen upon her horse.

There had been a cave on Cragan Dhui, where sometimes she had sat for hours, looking down over the glen. Gregor had laughed, he remembered, and called her Queen Meg.

Of course, the cave! Gregor, too, had hidden there as a boy, playing games, drawing, or just enjoying his own company and that of the other boys of the glen. He knew the cave, and he had a strong feeling that was where Meg was now.

With a shout and a quick dig of his heels, Gregor set off at a gallop.

Smoke poured sullenly from cottage chimneys. Cattle and sheep stood, their heads b

owed, beneath the driving rain. The linen shirt Gregor was wearing was soaked through, and his kilt dripped, but he hardly noticed, and if he had, he wouldn’t have cared. He rode on, with only one clear thought. Meg was in the cave, and he had to find her.

At first he could not see the narrow opening in the lower slopes of Cragan Dhui at all. He could see the track, zigzagging across the side of it, but apart from that, the greenery appeared unbroken. There was an old rowan tree and bracken filling the hollows, and a hare went running, bounding through the grass. His eyes followed its path, and suddenly he spotted the cave. Like a thick, charcoal line, it cut through the green of the hillside.

With a smile, Gregor urged his horse forward.

As he moved farther to the left, the entrance to the cave opened up, becoming wide enough for a full-grown man to enter, if he stooped. He drew up his horse near the opening and stared, frowning. Was that a movement there, in the darkness? A flash of color? Or was he just seeing what he wanted to see? And if Meg was here, then where was her mare?

But he couldn’t ride all this way and then not look inside. He couldn’t leave without searching every inch of that dark cave. He turned his horse toward the rowan tree.

Gregor dismounted and tied his horse beneath the shelter of the tree. A protection against witches, he remembered, glancing up into the thick foliage. Perhaps it had acted as protection against Lorenzo, for Meg. Carefully—[ ]hopefully—he climbed back up the rough slope toward the cave. Everything was quiet, the only sound that of the rain falling softly and dripping from the foliage. Gregor heaved himself the last few feet to the cave and stood, panting a little, staring into the pitch blackness.

It was smaller than he had remembered. But that was part of getting older, wasn’t it? He was a big man now, and he had been a boy when he played here all those years ago. It wasn’t really a cave, just a fissure in the rocky side of the hill, with enough overhang and enough depth to make it a warm, dry place to hide out in bad weather.