The Highlander's Promise Read online

  More than one of the young girls blushed and giggled when Lachlan passed in the course of his labors, and Finley could hear the whispers of, “the Blair.” No doubt they were retelling the same inflated escapades of Lachlan that Finley had heard as a child.

  Finley found herself watching him, too, and when next he passed and caught her eye, giving her a wink, she turned away quickly while her cheeks heated and the girls giggled all the more loudly. Even Ina Carson had a secret smile on her face as she sat on a low stool, weaving wide, shallow baskets of strong, green reeds.

  Their family suppers, too, were lively, salted with recounting events and progresses of the day and Lachlan and Finley’s baiting of each other. By the time the storehouse was finished, a fortnight later, Finley realized the tight feeling in her chest she experienced when Lachlan took his leave from the farm every night as disappointment. She dreaded seeing his wide back pass into the darkness beyond the door, being relegated to following her parents to the rear of the house as if she were still a child while her husband escaped to the eerie peace of the old house.

  But this night, Lachlan did not stand with a kind word for Ina and excuse himself for the evening. Instead, he withdrew a corked flask from inside his shawl and placed it on the table as Finley cleared the dishes.

  “Sure and what have you got there, lad?” Rory queried in a high, admiring tone. “A need for the metal cups, have we?”

  “Aye, and we well deserve it after the work we’ve done,” Lachlan said with a grin, and then caught Finley staring at him and gave her another of his blasted winks.

  Ina reached for the two prized, stemmed pewter cups displayed on the highest shelf and turned with a wide smile, setting the vessels on the table before wiping each in turn with a corner of her apron.

  “I’ve nae had the mull in ever so long,” she said with breathy excitement. “Sure the Blair is good to share it with us after all his labors.”

  But Finley knew there was more going on that the Blair wasn’t revealing to her parents yet, and her senses were on alert as he uncorked the bottle with a surreptitious grin on his full lips set in the shadow of his stubbled jaw. He poured a splash into each cup and then picked them both up, handing one to Rory and then gestured toward the old man with his own.

  “May the road rise up to meet ye,” he said with a sparkle in his eye.

  Rory’s face brightened with hesitant surprise. He raised his cup a mite higher toward Lachlan. “May the wind allus be at yer back.”

  The two men drank, and then Finley’s father set down his pewter cup on the wooden table with a bang and a gasp. “By God, it’s Irish!” he said in a hoarse voice.

  Lachlan’s grin was pushing the wince from his face as he leaned up, already pouring another glug each into the cups. He handed his to Finley.

  “You might want some water with that, lass.”

  Finley gave him a skeptical look. “I’ve had my own share of drink, Blair, even if it weren’t Irish. I’m nae child.” She raised the cup and pulled a face, noting absently that her mother held her cup poised still, watching Finley. The stuff smelled odd; Finley could only describe it as hot, with a whiff of strong anise. She took the drink in a single gulp, and it seemed that her ability to breathe vanished.

  When she could finally draw a searing gasp, her eyes streamed tears and the group around the table was chuckling with laughter.

  “That’s nae mull,” she whispered.

  Rory Carson slapped the tabletop with his hand as Ina gave a happy little whoop, then tossed back her drink neatly without so much as a grimace. “I’m proud of you, lass. You just had your first taste of Irish waters. A gift from God I’ve nae had the pleasure of in many years. Where did you come by it, Blair?”

  Finley handed the cup back to Lachlan, noting the warming feeling in her stomach. It was pleasant, now that her throat didn’t burn quite so much.

  “Now that,” he said as he refilled the cups again and handed one to Rory, “is nae important. What’s important is that I’ve the pleasure of sharing it with one who appreciates it.”

  “Sure, and I do,” he said, giving Lachlan a toast. “Slàinte.”

  Lachlan tipped his cup. “Slàinte.” After drinking, he looked to Finley with raised brows. “Another?”

  It took her only a moment to shake her head no, but in that moment it seemed as if Finley debated with herself for a month of days. She could just picture in her mind what could happen if she allowed herself a little too much to drink, and followed Lachlan through the door and up through the darkness into the old house; she could help him out of his shirt, rub his muscles, which surely must be sore…

  “Nay,” she said with a renewed flush blooming on her cheeks.

  Lachlan nodded with an air of understanding and recorked the bottle. Finley caught her father’s glimpse of disappointment turning to delight as Lachlan slid the ancient-looking flask across the table toward the old man. “For you and Mother Carson,” he said, pushing back his chair as he stood. Rory was already uncorking the bottle again while Ina commandeered both cups. Lachlan held out his hand toward Finley.

  “Fancy a walk?”

  For a heartbeat of time, the only sounds in the Carson house was that of the sizzling fire, and if Rory and Ina Carson thought their furtive glances at each other discreet, they were mistaken. It only caused Finley’s blush to deepen, which was uncomfortable enough; she wasn’t used to feeling self-conscious, but it often seemed she felt nothing but that while in the presence of Lachlan Blair.

  “I canna be running off as I fancy,” she tried to say breezily. “Mam needs my help with the—”

  “Och, doona even think it, lass,” Ina said loudly with an enthusiastic wave of her hand. “I’ll have this cleared in a thrice. Enjoying me taste with your da first, I think.”

  Rory Carson reached out a slender arm around Ina’s thick middle and pulled her close against his ribs. “That’s the word,” he agreed with a nod, and there was a merry flush to his usually pale face.

  Finley looked back to Lachlan, who was watching her parents with something akin to a wistful expression. He turned his gaze to her once more, glanced down at his offered palm.

  Finley frowned and swept past him, pulling her cloak from the peg before yanking open the door and stepping into the brisk night breeze to escape the suddenly uncomfortable familiarity. She heard the door shut behind her but didn’t turn, her eyes drawn to the ripening white slice of moon hanging over the inky sea like a broken pearl. The gusting wind swept up the hill, cold and clammy and washing Finley’s skin in gooseflesh beneath her clothes, although with the warm whisky in her belly and her tingling cheeks, the contrast was not entirely unpleasant.

  Perhaps he shall kiss me beneath the moon tonight, she found herself thinking, and rather than push such a traitorous idea from her mind at once, as she normally would, she let it stay this time, wandering around inside her head and brushing up against the prickly parts of her mind until the sharpness was all but rubbed away.

  He walked past her, tossing his head toward the path as he did, grinning that terrible, secret, dangerous grin. She noticed he had taken a lit oil lamp from her mother’s bench.

  Finley followed and caught up with him. “Where are we going?”

  “I want to show you something,” he said.

  “Och. What is it this time? Hoping to lure me to the river and drown me?”

  Lachlan laughed right away. “And why would I want to do that to such a pretty lass, and my wife, no less?”

  Finley’s stomach did a sweet, wheeling flip. “Nae your wife for long though, eh?”

  “Aye, probably nae for long,” he agreed mildly. “You are a pretty lass, though.” They walked on several more paces, through the cusp of the quiet little collection of dwellings that comprised the edge of the town while Finley’s heart pounded strangely in her chest. She fancied she could
even hear it’s loud thrumming.

  Lachlan didn’t speak again until they were on the path up to the old house. “I want to show you where I found the Irish.”

  “Found it?” Finley said. “I thought you’d brought it with you from Town Blair.”

  The moon outlined his queued hair in silver as he shook his head. “Archibald would have choked his mother to get his hands on some, I’d wager, but no Irish trader’s been through with such a thing in years.”

  The crunching gravel under their feet was loud, and she lost her footing for a moment as a larger stone turned under her sole. Lachlan’s fingers wrapped around her upper arm before she could stagger properly, and the touch of him seemed to burn through the layers of her woolen clothing, caused her thrashing heartbeat to skip clumsily.

  “Perhaps you could have brought me up here when it was still light?” she grumbled, seeking to distract herself from the embarrassment of her own awareness of him, but she forgot that her sharpness had dulled and so the thrust was nothing but a feint.

  He turned her loose and continued on. “I’d rather there be no chance of us being seen for now.”

  “Anyone at all could look out their door and see us.”

  “Which doesnae concern me—you are my wife after all. They’re welcome to see where we’re going,” said he, “just nae where we end up.”

  Finley’s eyes narrowed.

  But then they had arrived at the old house, and were ducking into the central room. The skittering sounds of the pebbles, like the patter of rain, made Finley a different—unpleasant—sort of nervous. Whenever the seasons changed, the cliff showered its loosening stones more frequently. Finley feared they may not hear the next chunk of cliff to fall as it hurtled toward them, and they certainly wouldn’t see it, but she thought perhaps that was just as well.

  She felt her hand being pried away from the death grip she had on the front of her shawl, and Lachlan wrapped his fingers around hers.

  “Let’s go quickly,” he said.

  She jerked her hand free. “If you think I’m going up those stairs with you, you’re mad.”

  He reclaimed her hand. “Not the stairs—the storeroom. I cleared a path earlier, and I pray God it’s still that way.”

  “Oh well, aye, let’s just leave it to God,” she quipped with a roll of her eyes in the dark. “He obviously favors the Carsons above all others.”

  She thought she felt his fingers tighten for an instant before he nearly pulled her arm from her shoulder, dragging her through the room in a trot. Finley hunched down and brought her left hand up to cover her head, much protection as it would be. But in only a few moments, she felt the air go close around her ears, sensed the darkness deepening, and Lachlan stopped so suddenly in front of her that she ran into his wide back and bounced off. She would have fallen on her bottom if he hadn’t been holding on to her still.

  His hand slid from hers after she was steady on her feet, and in the next moment the weak light from the dampered lamp bloomed before Lachlan’s face, washing the little cave room with warm, yellow light and Finley blinked against the glare.

  He’d made a comfortable-looking pallet up off the floor against the back wall, and there was a collection of the few personal effects he’d brought with him from Town Blair on their wedding night.

  “It’s smaller than I remembered,” she said, looking up and around at the sharply sloping ceiling that disappeared in shadows on one side. “Odd that it’s so small, really. For a storehouse.”

  “That’s what I grew to think, too. Here,” he said, lightly touching her elbow and stepping forward, herding her toward the low bed. “Sit down.” He set the lantern on the ground near her feet.

  Finley did as he suggested without comment, her skin once more awash in gooseflesh at the intimacy implied by their location. She watched him walk back to the opening of the storeroom and crouch down before a small fire ring he’d made to one side of the doorway. He reached toward a little pile of dried peat while he talked.

  “I put the fire here so as to warm the room without suffocating,” he explained, and Finley thought it a rather obvious choice; the small room would easily catch the heat of the flames like the backside of a fireplace while the smoke traveled out into the cavernous opening of the main room. Did he think her so stupid?

  But as Lachlan fanned the coals to glowing, throbbing red beneath the blanket of dried vegetation, Finley saw the thick cloud of smoke billow up and then into the storeroom as if a tempest was behind it. She raised her shawl over the bottom part of her face and readied herself to rise and step from the room before her lungs were choked, but to her surprise, the smoke swirled up to the ceiling and away into the deepest shadows as the fire flickered to life beneath the little sticks of driftwood Lachlan was steepling over the pit.

  Finley rose to her feet, her face turned up as she walked toward the corner of the room, and Lachlan met her there.

  “Do you see it?” he asked quietly, seemingly right into her ear.

  Finley nodded as the bottom edge of the cut in the cliff flickered in the glow of the lamp. She turned her head to look at him and he was indeed right behind her. “Is it another storeroom?”

  He shook his head. “Not quite.”

  She didn’t hesitate to step up when Lachlan bent and cupped his hands into a stirrup. He boosted her as he straightened and then turned his hands, pushing her up as she grabbed at the edge of the opening. Finley hooked her elbows over, then one knee, and a moment later she was crawling into the cold darkness of yet another cave room. But Lachlan was right: it wasn’t quite a storeroom. It wasn’t really a room at all.

  “My God,” she breathed, gaining her feet and looking up. There was no sloped ceiling here: the space was a dark, rectangular shaft, soaring open perhaps fifty feet to a tiny sliver of night sky above.

  The walls danced with upward light. “Finley.”

  She turned and braced her hand against the side of the opening, looking down to see Lachlan holding the lamp aloft. She crouched and reached down to take it.

  “Back up,” he commanded, and Finley stepped away, her slippers crunching over large pieces of detritus. She looked around the floor, holding the lamp aloft, realizing that she had stepped on long, deadly-looking slivers of dry, rotted wood planks, and her eyes went up again, seeking the sky.

  She heard Lachlan’s huff and grunt as he jumped and scrabbled up beside her. The towering void above seemed to start to spin, and so Finley dropped her gaze to the man flickering with shadows, but very clear to her senses.

  “Do you have any idea what this place is?” he asked. “Stories you’ve been told…anything?”

  “Nay,” Finley said, and her words were hushed, as though she was afraid of being overheard even when they could not have been more alone. “None of us children were ever brave enough to stay in the storerooms for long. It’s where the ghost was said to live.” She looked down at the out-of-place wooden planks, and saw that some were still strapped together in broken pairs and trios, chunks of wreckage from what once must have been a construct of men’s hands; there were metal nail heads and bands, rusted to black now, the stain weeping out into the murky grain of the woods like macabre tears.

  It called to Finley’s mind the pile of rust at the top of the stairs. English armor…

  “Perhaps you were right to fear a ghost,” he said, and she turned quickly to look at him. He pointed to the top of the shaft, so high above their heads as to be barely discernible in the gloom. “There are pulleys and stops all along the wall, all the way to the top, is my guess,” he said. “Although I haven’t found evidence of a winding drum, I think we’re standing on what’s left of a hoist that met a bad end.”

  Finley squinted up. “But how…?”

  He took her hand again, steadying her across the debris to the corner of the room against the cliff. Once there, he slapped his lef
t palm against the wall, his fingers disappearing into a deep, rounded indent. He withdrew and moved his hand up in a zigzagging pattern, three, four times and then stepped back, looking up and then pointing again.

  “It’s a ladder. To the very top.”

  Finley felt her eyes widen. “Did you go up?”

  “Only half.” He paused, his hands on his hips, and Finley could sense that he was preparing to deliver the prize. He looked at her. “It’s where I found yet another chamber carved into the wall—just tall enough for a man to stand in, and filled with all manner of old things, including the Irish. A cache.”

  She stared at him for a long moment. “A cache. You mean the sort that smugglers would use.”

  His mouth turned down thoughtfully and he nodded. “Aye.”

  Finley shoved him. “You two-faced lout!” Lachlan rocked on his feet against her slight onslaught but stood his ground. “How dare you accuse my people of…of—”she sputtered, shook her head—“piracy?”

  “I didna accuse anyone of anything,” he clarified. “It could be from trade. I was only describing—”

  “Is there anything else in it?” she interrupted, setting down the lamp. “Or just whisky?”

  Lachlan stopped and pressed his lips together, watching her closely as she unclasped her weighty cloak and flung it aside. The corners of his eyes were slightly upturned.

  Finley could wait no longer for his answer. She spun to face the wall and hitched up her skirts until her slipper found the first foothold.

  “You’re going up there?” He half-laughed.

  “Well, sure; I’d see for myself,” she said, looking up and then reaching with her left arm for the tread.

  “Finley, wait,” he said, and she felt his hands on her calves through her skirts. “It’s more dangerous that it looks. If you slip…”

  “You’re the one who brought me up here, Lachlan Blair,” she snapped at him, twisting around to give him a saucy glare. “Did you think I was the sort of woman before whom you could dangle words like ‘smuggling’ and ‘Irish’ and I’d not wish to see it with my own eyes?”