Bride of the Black Scot Read Online Free PDF

heavy.”
    “I am burdened,” he said. “You are a heavy lass.”
    “I am not that heavy,” she replied, wanting to throw
her arms around his neck because of the way he tried to make light of something
that obviously pained him. “Who has caused you so much suffering? Was it a
woman?”
    Even in the dim light, she could see the muscle working in
his jaw. He did not say anything for a long time. When she repeated her
question, he said, “Aye, it was a woman.”
    Now we are getting somewhere, she thought, priming
herself for a long discussion of this man’s past. “Want to tell me about it?”
    “No.”
    A minor setback, nothing more. Don’t give up, Juliette… “Sometimes that helps…you know, talking about it.”
    “I dinna need any help,” he said harshly. “Contrary to what
you think, it doesna bother me.”
    “ Something bothers you…unless you’ve always been this
way. Were you always solemn, even as a little boy?”
    “If I was, I ken it was because I had something to be solemn
about. Everyone is no as fortunate as you, lass. We canna all be born into
gilded perfection.”
    She would have said a word in her defense, but there was
something in his tone, a woeful lilt, a hint of melancholy that made her want
to understand this complex man more than she wanted to defend herself.
Suddenly, it was very important to understand him, to know what made him so
unhappy as a lad, so distrustful as a man. “Did you get on well with your
brothers and sisters?”
    “I had no brothers or sisters.”
    “Oh,” she said. “I am sorry.”
    “I was a bastard,” he said, “born out of wedlock. My father
was married to another woman. Now, does that satisfy your curiosity?”
    “Not completely,” she said. “Why didn’t your father claim
you as his own?”
    “Do you never sleep?”
    “No, do you?” she asked, then heard his resigned sigh.
    “He would have, but my mother took me away. She preferred
living in secluded poverty to giving me up.”
    “She must have loved you a great deal.”
    “Aye,” he said, in a way that made her think his thoughts
were spinning backward, to another time, another place.
    “Did your mother ever marry?”
    “Aye. She married my father…eventually. His marriage to his
first wife was a childless union. A few years after I was born, his wife died.
I was five years old when my father found and married my mother.”
    A bastard, raised in secluded poverty… She had
visions of him, a ragged little urchin, teased and taunted because of the
circumstances of his birth, a child with no one to love and comfort him, save a
mother who was as much an outcast as he. She thought of her own family, the
rich, full life she had enjoyed. Her heart went out to him. The look she gave
him was a tender one. “But by the time they married, it was too late to erase
the burden of being illegitimate,” she said, her voice low and full of feeling.
    “Aye,” he said. “By then it was too late.”
    She put her hand on his sleeve, feeling him flinch. “I am
sorry, Stephen.”
    He drew back. “It doesna matter now,” he said. “It was a
verra long time ago.”
    “But it does matter,” she said, knowing even before he spoke
that he would tell her no more about himself.
    “We have talked overmuch about me,” he said. “It is time you
spoke of yourself. Why were you the one chosen to marry the Black Scot?”
    She sighed and leaned her head back against his chest,
staring at the fast fading stars overhead. “It is a long story and not very
interesting,” she said, wishing there was some way she could bring a smile to
his tightly held mouth.
    “It is a long way to Craigmoor lass, and I have nothing to
do, save looking at the backside of Angus’s horse.”
    She smiled. “I am the daughter of an English earl. I am the
eldest of six sisters who are anxious to be wed, but my father said I must
marry first.”
    “Ah, as Katherine did in The Taming of the Shrew ,” he
said.
    Her heart lurched. A