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  THE LAIRD’S VOW

  Despite her pride that screamed at her to again fight him to gain her freedom, Glenna stood still, her hands at her side, her gaze now on his throat. This was all for a greater purpose.

  “Go on, then,” she commanded.

  But he was quiet for so long that Glenna looked once more to his face. Something smoldered in his eyes that stilled Glenna’s impatience. She could feel the beating of his heart against her breast, and her own seemed to answer his, knocking against the tender, mortal wall that separated them.

  “Would you submit to me?” he whispered, lowering his head until his face hovered over hers. “As my wife?”

  “Nay,” Glenna whispered against his lips. “I will never submit to you.”

  “Never?” He kissed her bottom lip, then her top, barely pressing her flesh. “What about now?”

  Glenna tried to shake her head, but it was still held in his large hand. She became alarmed at the sudden weakness in her own legs.

  “I think I could persuade you,” he murmured. “Aye, I think I could.” And then he kissed her fully, deeply, as she lay in his arms stupid and helpless to deny him, deny the powerful, unexpected feelings coursing through her body…

  Books by Heather Grothaus

  THE WARRIOR

  THE CHAMPION

  THE HIGHLANDER

  TAMING THE BEAST

  NEVER KISS A STRANGER

  NEVER SEDUCE A SCOUNDREL

  NEVER LOVE A LORD

  VALENTINE

  ADRIAN

  ROMAN

  CONSTANTINE

  THE LAIRD’S VOW

  HIGHLAND BEAST

  (with Hannah Howell and Victoria Dahl)

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  Table of Contents

  THE LAIRD’S VOW

  Books by Heather Grothaus

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  The Laird’s Vow

  Heather Grothaus

  LYRICAL PRESS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  LYRICAL PRESS BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2019 by Heather Grothaus

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  All Kensington titles, imprints, and distributed lines are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotion, premiums, fund-raising, educational, or institutional use.

  Special book excerpts or customized printings can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write or phone the office of the Kensington Sales Manager: Kensington Publishing Corp., 119 West 40th Street, New York, NY 10018. Attn. Sales Department. Phone: 1-800-221-2647.

  Lyrical Press and Lyrical Press logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  First Electronic Edition: September 2019

  ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0707-0 (ebook)

  ISBN-10: 1-5161-0707-1 (ebook)

  First Print Edition: September 2019

  ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0711-7

  ISBN-10: 1-5161-0711-X

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  Special thanks this time around to:

  The publishing team at Kensington, particularly

  John Scognamiglio and Rebecca Cremonese.

  My incredible agent, Evan Marshall.

  My friend Amy Blackthorn.

  Prologue

  January 31, 1427

  Northumberland, England

  Thomas Annesley was a dead man running.

  He felt rather than saw the large slabs of rock thrusting out of the frozen ground as he stumbled past them, the black winter night hiding scores of the treacherous obstacles that littered the land beyond the manicured gardens of Darlyrede House, his childhood home. Thomas staggered and gasped as his wounded shoulder caught the jagged edge of one such monolith, spinning him on his feet and throwing him backward onto another slanted boulder. He lay against it, shaking, his eyes squeezed shut but his mouth open wide with a silent scream of pain. Every reedy breath of frigid air sliced his parched, bruised throat.

  Thomas opened his eyes with a whimper to look up at the sliver of moon, its image blurred by tears held behind the frozen crust along his lashes. It was little light, but the trail of blood would make him easy prey for an expert hunter such as Hargrave. Thomas couldn’t go on much farther any matter—he’d pulled two arrows from his own flesh, and the cold had stolen most of the feeling in his extremities. But the most distressing indicator of his rapidly declining state was each painful, whistling breath confirming that the ball from the arquebus had damaged his right lung when it had exited the front of his chest. Hargrave’s boasting of the expensive new weapon’s accuracy had been warranted, it seemed.

  Hargrave would find Thomas and kill him, or he would bleed to death. Either way, Thomas Annesley, third Baron Annesley, Lord of Darlyrede, recognized that his life was already over even as he fled through the wild winter night.

  He was eighteen years old.

  Thomas tried to push himself aright and heard a soft riffle of sound; his clothing had begun freezing to the rock. He was wet from his bare head to his boots with sweat and blood, as though he’d been so full of fear and death that when he’d fallen onto the stone he’d burst like a dropped wineskin.

  Cordelia. Cordelia’s blood. Rivers of it, the stone floor flooded so that his boots splashed…the walls around him gummy and black…

  He wanted to scream and scream; the atrocity he’d seen burrowed in his chest and in his soul just as deeply and permanently as the stone he collapsed onto once more was sunk into the earth. There would never be any true escape for him—he was trapped in his own mind as surely as in the wide-open land of his own demesne.

  Cordelia’s wide-open eyes, staring up at that dank, dripping ceiling, the once-blue irises now a thin gray ring around gaping pupils, her pale, perfect heart-shaped face unmarked save for the tiny prickling of purple around her eyes…but below her bare, graceful neck, her alabaster skin slashed, ripped into bright ribbons, the body he’d worshipped in secret now ruined and mauled, her abdomen…

  Thomas shook so hard with fear and cold that his head nodded wildly. Cordelia was dead—horribly, violently dead. Dead.

  The rocky scrape of hooves on frozen track elicited a pained whine from Thomas’s scorched throat, and he cringed into the rock, as if it might animate and enclose him in a stony, protective embrace. He stopped breathing to listen in the crystal-cold night, and indeed the horse—horses?—was drawing
nearer, and he heard the rumble of a masculine voice.

  But it wasn’t his voice. It wasn’t Hargrave. It wasn’t any of Darlyrede’s men, Thomas was sure of it. Oh, God, please…

  Thomas lurched from the stone and staggered toward the sound, toward the narrow track of road that wound past Darlyrede House and to which he hadn’t known he’d been so close. There should have been no one traveling so remote a path in the middle of the night, especially during the coldest January Northumberland country had endured in generations. But as Thomas pushed himself from stone to stone, the shadowy images of two mounted riders approaching became clearer.

  Help, Thomas tried to call, but the wheezing from his mouth was barely audible even to his own ears. He staggered toward the road, stumbled over the toe of his boot, and clutched at his shoulder as he went down. He heard the men’s exclamations of surprise, but Thomas did not wait to see if they would dismount to come to him. He dragged himself to his feet once more, lurching into the road, starbursts appearing behind his eyes as he fought for breath.

  He swayed to a stop in the middle of the track, flinging his left forearm in a pathetic arc.

  Help…

  He braced his hand on his thigh and let his head drop as the horses halted. Thomas willed his chest to expand, his lungs to fill with air. Dizzy…

  “Great ghost, boy! What think you to be about on a night such as this, and frightening our—” a voice demanded near his ear, and then strong hands around his arm pulled him upright, and Thomas somehow found the breath to give a whistling scream before his vision went gray and a loud buzzing erupted in both his ears.

  “My God, what’s happened?” the man amended, his tone now one wholly of alarm.

  “Who is it, Kettering?” a second voice called out from a distance.

  “It’s a young man—he’s injured. I don’t believe I know him. Come, Blake, bring my horse—I daresay I shall require your assistance.”

  Thomas collapsed against the man, who took his weight easily.

  “There now, lad—I say, you’re all but frozen. Fortunate we came along just now.” Thomas was jostled, and then this saint, Kettering, eased him away to lean against a solid, warm, breathing wall of horseflesh. “Hold there a moment. Blake, take under his hip—with care. I believe he’s suffered injury to his shoulder and side—perhaps elsewhere, also. All right, we’re going to lift you onto the saddle, lad. Here, bite down on this.” Thomas felt a thin wooden rod pushed between his lips to settle between his teeth. “Steady, now. All right, Blake.”

  Thomas would have cried out again at the pain in his chest and shoulder, but he had no breath left in him, and so he merely tried to cling to consciousness as his teeth sank into the wood and the warm seat pressed his ribs into the muscles of his chest like blades. He lay limp across the beast, tears building up once more in his eyes, his stomach pushing into his throat.

  “Fortunate we came along, indeed,” the second man—Blake?—was saying, his voice seeming to echo queerly in the wide expanse of the night. “And good thing we’re so near Darlyrede House.”

  “Just so,” Kettering said. “I’ll lead him so as to disturb him as little as possible. Blake, you follow behind with vigilance—the criminal who beset this poor lad may yet lie in wait for us. Darlyrede shall be our haven.”

  Darlyrede.

  The word rang rings around Thomas’s head as he felt the horse beneath him begin to rock and turn. They were delivering him back to Darlyrede, that abattoir, that place of death where Cordelia lay in the river of blood. Delivering him into the stained hands of Hargrave…

  Thomas somehow pulled his right leg up and over the horse’s back, leaning heavily upon the beast’s neck. It took all the strength remaining in his legs to hold on.

  “There he is,” Blake said from somewhere behind Thomas. “Taking to it well enough, I say—upright before I can even mount. Fear not, my boy; we shall have you in the care of Lord Hargrave’s house soon enough, and then we shall most certainly get to the bottom of who has done you so ill a turn.”

  Thomas dragged his hand to his mouth, removing what he thought must be the carved wooden pin from the brim of Kettering’s hat and gripping it in his fist. He took the deepest breath he was able, and then stabbed the wooden pin down into the horse’s side. The animal screamed and reared, causing Thomas’s vision to gray again, but it must have pulled its reins free from Kettering’s hand, for in an instant the horse was thundering northward into the darkness, away from Darlyrede.

  If Thomas Annesley must die, it would not be in that house of the damned.

  * * * *

  “Damn it all!” Blake shouted as his own horse jerked free and bolted into the black, frigid night after its companion. “Kettering, look what your good deed has done to us. I knew we should have stopped for the night in Alnwick.”

  “Well, that was most unexpected,” Kettering lamented. “I wondered that the lad had enough life left in him to persevere unto Darlyrede; I never thought him capable of absconding with our horses. Forgive me.”

  Blake went stamping about the road for several more moments, cursing and peering into the night while his companion stared contemplatively down the road where the young man had disappeared.

  “I say,” Kettering at last mused. “Speaking of Darlyrede, should I not think better of it, that lad bore a keen resemblance to young Lord Annesley himself.”

  Blake sighed and came to stand near his friend. “That’s more than a bit unlikely. Isn’t Annesley to be wed on the morrow?”

  “Indeed,” Kettering murmured. “To Lord Hargrave’s own Cordelia. You must be quite right, Blake. Whoever he is, he shan’t get far, I’ll warrant. He’s gravely injured. Even with such a brief encounter, I’m covered in the poor fool’s blood.”

  “Well.” Blake sighed again. “Let’s you and I get on to Darlyrede any matter and warn Hargrave. Someone of the house is bound to be yet awake with such a happy ceremony so soon to take place. Perhaps they’ll ask us to stay on, or at least lend us a pair of mounts; I’ll offer my prayer book as a pawn.”

  “Oh, Blake, look—here comes someone now. I’ll wager it’s a guard of the house in search of the lad. Ho, there,” Kettering called out, waving his arms toward the black-shadowed rider. “There’s an injured man who’s only just stolen my horse and frightened away my companion’s. Perhaps you—”

  Kettering’s words were cut off as the whine of an arrow ended in an abrupt thunk in the man’s chest.

  Blake stared mute at his friend as Kettering looked down at the stub of arrow protruding from his cloak, then crumpled onto the frozen road. He turned his horrified gaze to the steadily approaching rider and began backing down the road, stumbling, reaching into his fur-lined robe for the costly leather book he carried over his heart. He held it out in both hands like a small shield as the click and scrape of mechanism echoed across the cold expanse of frozen track.

  “I mean you no harm! I mean you— No, no! Don’t! Please!”

  The twang of the crossbow sounded again.

  Chapter 1

  March 1458

  Edinburgh, Scotland

  “’Tis beautiful, Tavish.”

  Miss Keane looked up through her eyelashes as she ran her fingertips over the striped silk folded on the bench between them, the refined lilt of her voice just as smooth as the imported cloth she admired. Her hand drifted to the edge of the silk where Tavish’s hand rested and grazed his skin. “Just what I was hoping for. I think I should like to have all of it. And even more, if your voyage was a profitable one.”

  Tavish felt his lips quirk as he looked down at the daughter of one of the wealthiest merchants in all of Edinburgh. Redheaded and pampered, Audrey Keane was alluringly beautiful. But, even if she and Tavish hadn’t been friends since they were little more than children, it was well known that Niall Keane hoped to elevate the station of his only child with a d
istinguished and titled match, and Tavish Cameron was neither. And so regardless of her coquettish banter, Audrey would remain nothing more than a good friend and a good customer.

  Except for this day—there could be no indulging of Audrey’s games with barrels of illegal French wine behind his bench and a stranger about the shop. Tavish glanced over at the black-clad man for what must have been the hundredth time; the stranger’s back was currently turned to the bench as if he were merely biding his time while waiting for attendance, inspecting the stacks and bundles of oily wool lining the shop floor. But Tavish caught sight of his straight jawline, could all but see the man’s ear cocked toward the conversation being carried on over the bench.

  A spy, if ever Tavish had seen one. And seen more than one, he certainly had.

  “I’m sorry to say that’s all I have this time, Miss Keane,” Tavish said, his cool tone causing Audrey’s eyebrows to rise. “Shall I have my mother wrap it for you?”

  The man in black was obviously not the only one whose ears were paying close attention to the business being conducted, as Mam appeared at Tavish’s elbow just then, reaching across him and pulling the silk from beneath Audrey’s hungry touch.

  “I’ve a fine flax that shan’t snag a’tall, Miss Keane,” Harriet Cameron said.

  Audrey gave his mother a brief, tight smile before looking to Tavish once more. “Naught else?” she cajoled pointedly. “But you said there would be—”

  “Ah, aye!” Tavish interrupted and caught sight of the man in black turning his head ever so slightly toward them. He reached into the wooden barrel behind the bench and withdrew two bright spheres, presenting them to Audrey as if they were Scotland’s crown jewels. “Forgive me. Here you are.”

  “Oranges,” Audrey said stiffly.

  Tavish smiled and then indicated with his eyes the stranger now turned fully toward them. “From Spain.”

  Understanding dawned at last in Audrey’s eyes. “Oh, oranges! How lovely! Thank you, Master Cameron—father will be so pleased.”