Saved by the Highlander Read Online Free PDF

help Alice belt it into an arisaid. Looking at the fabric between his hands as he folded, he said, “No, my lady, I am not well content to have had to punish you, though I am glad that I have made you see reason.”
    “Reason?” Alice asked with scorn. “You have made me see force, certainly.”
    Niall did not answer; he had already told the proud girl, after all, exactly why he had done what he had done, and though he regretted the suffering he had caused her, he did not regret his course of action. He turned his eyes to Alice’s for a moment, hoping she would see in the calm of his face what it appeared she could not hear in his words. Then he turned halfway round and called to Callum who, along with the other highlanders, was standing watching them from the other side of the road. “Callum,” Niall called, “can you fash yourself to fetch me a length of rope?”
    He had tried to keep his tone as light as he could, in hope of moving past the spanking his men had just witnessed, but he succeeded too well in bringing out the highlanders’ jocularity. “Aye, Niall,” Callum replied, “so long as you promise not to use it upon the poor girl’s rump.”
    “Callum,” he replied, “I’ll have no talk of what just happened. Lady Alice will accompany us to Kilmorin, and she needs to belt an arisaid.”
    “Aye,” Callum said, nodding. His nephew could be relied on despite his youthful age of nineteen years, Niall knew. Callum liked his jests, but though he did not yet have the same serious turn Niall did, he could already put away the freedom of his wit when the occasion required.
    Niall turned back to Alice. “An arisaid might seem barbaric to you, my lady, but it will keep you warm as we climb into the highlands, and it may be well for you to look like a highland lass just at the moment.”
    Alice took a deep breath, seeming with it to put away her weeping, though her eyes remained red-rimmed and the spanking had added fresh tear tracks to her dusty face. Somehow her long golden hair, which had long since come free of its coif, seemed to float around her face in such a way as to make her seem a much ill-used angel. Niall had to give his head a firm shake to clear it of the distracting vision. Why did fair hair have to bewitch him so?
    “You have said that word several times,” she said, “but I do not think I have ever heard it. What is an arisaid?”
    Niall laughed, and Callum arrived with the rope then. “Ach,” Callum said, “it is what women wear, instead of the great kilt.”
    “And the great kilt is the strange thing you wear over your shirts?”
    “Aye,” Niall said. “They are both made from plaids.”
    “And a plaid is a woven blanket?” Niall felt his mouth twist into a rather perplexed smile. This English earl’s daughter seemed to have more curiosity than her governess might have thought seemly, about highland life.
    “A woven blanket!” said Callum. He looked at Niall. “Is she daft?”
    “Daft?” Alice said. “If a plaid is that thing you are wearing, is it not daft to call it anything but a woven blanket?”
    Not only curious, Niall thought, more and more diverted by the girl’s resilience, if by nothing else. Spirited, as well.
    Callum laughed. “Aye, perhaps a Sassenach must see it thus. And there is no doubt that a Sassenach girl could wrap herself in one on a cold night.”
    “Callum,” Niall said warningly, just in case the young man decided to add a highlander to the admittedly enchanting picture of Lady Alice Lourcy wrapped up in nothing but a plaid, lying abed and awaiting what might befall her.
    “But you seem to say,” Alice persisted, “that a highlander’s plaid is much more than that.”
    “Aye,” Niall said, “the plaid is woven from yarn that highland women spun and dyed, that grew upon our sheep, who grazed upon our hills. Whether we belt it into a great kilt or into an arisaid, to wear plaid makes us who we are.”
    He saw her take in his words, and