Bride for a Knight Read Online Free PDF Page A

of my sons.”
    “I will think on it,” Jamie offered, doing his best to hide his discomfiture.
    “Why don’t you hie yourself into the hall to get a meal and some sleep?” Kenneth clamped a hand on the courier’s elbow, steered him to the door. “Jamie will give you his decision on the morrow.”
    Turning back to Jamie, he arched a raven brow. “For someone who spent his life yearning to win his father’s favor, tell me why you lost all color upon hearing of the man’s sudden need for you? Surely you aren’t troubled by this talk of a desired marriage?”
    Jamie folded his arms over his chest again, felt heat creeping up the back of his neck. Damn him for a chivalrous fool, but he couldn’t bring himself to voice his misgivings.
    Admit he’d rather have his tender parts shrivel and fall off before he’d find himself obliged to bed one of Alan Mor’s daughters.
    If he even could!
    “Ach, dinna look so glum.” Sir Lachlan took the letter, glanced at it. “There is nothing writ here that binds you,” he said, looking up from the parchment. “You needn’t do aught you find displeasing.”
    And that was Jamie’s problem.
    Returning home, even now,
would
please him. So much, his heart nearly burst at the thought. And once there, he’d be hard-pressed to disappoint his father.
    Or Aveline Matheson.
    If indeed such an alliance required his compliance. Truth was, he lived by a strict code of honor. One that forbade him to shame an innocent maid.
    Even if sparing her feelings came at the cost of his own.
    And besides, arranged marriages were more common than not. With few exceptions, only the lowest-born enjoyed the luxury of wedding for love.
    Heaving a sigh, he snatched up his new tunic and donned it, unfinished seams or no. “We all ken I shall wed the lass if my da wishes it,” he said, moving to the door. “I’ll ride for Baldreagan at first light, and visit Alan Mor so soon as I’ve seen my father.”
    His intentions stated, he stepped into the great hall, pausing to appreciate its smoky, torch-lit warmth. The comfort of kith and kin, a crackling hearth fire. Everyday pleasures his brothers would never again enjoy. Indeed, compared to their fate, his own struck him as more than palatable.
    So long as Aveline wasn’t the sister almost his own size, he’d find some way to tolerate her.
    Or so he hoped.

 
    Chapter Two
    J amie knew he was in trouble the moment he drew rein on a lofty, gorse-covered ridge and surveyed the dark hills spreading out all around him. Mist curled in the higher corries, the sight stirring his spirit and squeezing his heart.
    Welcoming him with arms flung wide.
    An embrace in the old way of the hills and one that clutched fiercely, holding fast until his breath caught and he would’ve sworn he’d only left these northern reaches of Kintail that very morn.
    Wishing that were so, he blinked against the heat stinging the backs of his eyes. Now as never before, he recognized how the lure of hill and moor could make even the deepest cares seem far away.
    Behind him, his dog, Cuillin, stirred in his wicker saddle basket, almost as if the ancient beast also sensed a subtle change in the air.
    Knew, like Jamie, that they were home at last.
    And for certes, they were.
    Already deepening twilight, he could just make out the distant yellow-gleaming lights of Baldreagan. Little more than weaving pinpricks of brightness from his vantage point, but home all the same.
    The one place on earth he’d ne’er thought to see again.
    The place he’d expected to miss till his dying day.
    “God in heaven,” he breathed, a strong sense of belonging sliding around him.
    Duthchas
, the feeling was called. A Highlander’s fierce attachment to his home glen, a soul-deep sense of oneness with the land of his blood.
    A pull Jamie now felt to the bone.
    His chest tightening, he found himself sorely tempted to swing down from his saddle and kiss the peaty, moss-covered ground. He might have, too, but