What the hell were they doing in Blind Jack’s Tavern? Patrick wondered, following Duff’s hastened footsteps inside.
Duff’s choice to sit at a table in the corner far from the hearth light drew no dispute from Patrick. If the shadows would conceal him from Hamish and his serving wench, Patrick would prefer it. It wasn’t a good idea to fight the same man twice. Hamish would know what to expect this time around and would likely use harsher tactics to ensure that he didn’t wake up again on the floor with a broken jug around his head. The brute’s wench was likely just as dangerous with any stoneware around.
But why were they here? Why was Duff hiding?
“Are we meetin’ someone?” Patrick asked, curious at the way Duff’s gaze spread over the inhabitants, as if he was searching out someone in particular.
“Nay.” Duff severed his gaze from the tables, and turned it to him. “We’re waiting.”
Patrick was relieved when Duff called over a serving wench who wasn’t the one he’d almost lost a tooth over. He’d told Duff that his interest in Charlie was piqued, that he wanted to remain here to possibly win her favor. Duff’s discovering that he’d been here a few nights ago, ready to bed a wench, wouldn’t be in his best interest.
“Two whiskies,” Duff told her then sent her on her way before she had time to fall into either of their laps.
“Now, tell me,” he said, returning his gaze to Patrick, “Where were you with my sister all day?”
The truth was the only answer to give him. If not to visit a tenant, where would he have taken her until the evening?
“We spent the day with the Wallaces.”
“The Wallaces?” Charlie’s brother asked skeptically. “What business do you have with Robbie Wallace that you spent the day with him and my sister?”
Patrick couldn’t tell him that they had visited the Wallace holding the night before to help this family survive his brother. Duff didn’t know his sister stole away from the house at night to help the villagers. If Charlie wanted her brother to know about her selfless adventures, she’d tell him. But Patrick had to tell him something.
“His hay needin’ balin’,” he said with a casual shrug.
Duff’s smile was as sharp as his gaze. “Why did you insist on Charlie accompanying you when she should have gone home with Hendry?”
Damn it. How many questions was Duff going to ask? He’d learned interrogation well from Allan Cunningham. Patrick didn’t blame Duff for his concerns, but he was growing weary of having to pull up the right answers. He let it be known in his deep exhalation of breath before he answered. “She wasna particularly pleased aboot goin’ with him. His presence was intolerable in the short time we traveled so I know why.”
“Hendry is unpleasant,” Duff agreed and barely looked up at the serving wench when she returned with their drinks. “I sometimes wonder if I have other brothers somewhere who aren’t…”
He stopped and drank from his cup. Patrick wanted to say something. Duff did have other brothers. Four of them.
“Did Charlie put you up to baling his hay?” Duff asked, setting his cup down. “She doesn’t think so, but I know her well.”
How well? Did he know that she’d robbed him to feed others?
“She has her mother’s kind heart,” Duff told him in a mild tone, his love for her softening his smile.
He did know her then. He’d know Patrick was lying if he denied her involvement. “She asked,” he admitted.
“And for her, you agreed.”
“I did.”
Duff nodded, looking pleased but doing his best to conceal it.
Patrick looked into his cup and smiled. “Whisky is a verra strong trait among Highlanders.”
Duff knew he had Highland blood. He knew he was a MacGregor. Patrick would have him be proud to bear the name, but it was outlawed. And though the laws against his clan weren’t as strictly adhered to as they had once been, MacGregor was still a dangerous name with unsavory implications. Duff wasn’t going to confess to being one, not to a man he’d only met a few days ago.
“Highlanders are stubborn,” Patrick continued, “and extremely possessive and protective of their kin, as ye are.”
Duff looked away. “Men don’t frequently travel through Pinwherry. What I know of Highlanders are things I’ve been told. They have not always been favorable.”
Hell, the poor lad was starving for some knowledge of his heritage.
“What have ye heard?”
“That they are troublesome,” Duff said. “They enjoy the sport of fighting. That’s why so many of them have given their allegiance to the Jacobite cause. I know also that one of them visited Pinwherry, fathered me, and then left.”
Aye, that. Patrick looked into his cup. He could not argue that truth.
He thought about how he would tell Duff while he lifted his cup. He took a swig and cringed. “Hell! This must be what unholy tastes like.”
Duff spared him a slight smile. “I fear ’tis of poor quality compared to what you’re used to.”
Patrick nodded, setting the cup down. “I’ll make certain ye taste Angus’s brew if I have to deliver it to ye m’self.”
“Angus?” Duff asked, one raven brow arched over his silver eye.
“Aye,” Patrick told him. He wanted Duff to know about his kin. Every man deserved that much. He wanted Duff to know that they were kin. Did Duff know the MacGregors were tied to the Fergussons? If Patrick told him that he was, in fact, also a MacGregor, it wouldn’t take Duff long to deduce that Patrick was a Fergusson as well and that he had likely been heading to Colmonell to visit Tarrick Hall at the time Charlie had struck him with her stone.
The time for that confession didn’t feel right just yet. First, Patrick needed to learn more about the feud between his kin and the Cunninghams—and what Duff might do to him for being the enemy and being interested in courting his sister.
That didn’t mean he couldn’t tell Duff about his father. He deserved to know. “Aye, Angus,” he told him while Duff lifted his cup to drink. “Angus MacGregor.”
The cup paused at Duff’s lips, though he quickly righted himself, careful not to reveal too much. “You know MacGregors?”
“I do,” Patrick replied, smiling, and then shattered Duff’s resolve like a canonball through mortar. “But more importantly, I know yer faither, Will MacGregor.”
As he expected, Duff looked as if he was about to leap to his feet, or purge the contents of his belly. He did neither but sat and stared at Patrick with eyes like hammered steel.
“Charlotte told you.”
“Nae, ’twas Hendry,” Patrick supplied then called for more whisky. Duff was going to need it.
“I should break Hendry’s jaw,” Duff growled, ignoring the serving wench and the plunging cleavage she dangled before him while she refilled his cup.
“I admit,” Patrick told him when the wench turned to him next. “I often find m’self longin’ to do the same thing.”
“Can I get you something else?” The gel leaned her face in closer to Patrick’s.
She was bonnie, with intensely blue eyes and pale yellow hair. Just days ago Patrick would have taken notice of the rest of her, and frankly, he wasn’t pleased that he found no interest in her whatsoever.
A very telling sign, that. Exactly how much trouble was he in?
“How do you know him? My father?” Duff asked after Patrick dismissed the wench.
To keep Duff…and ultimately, Charlie from discovering that he was a Fergusson, he made up a tale. “I was travelin’ home from Dunvegan last winter when a fierce blizzard hit. I was snowed in fer a month with the MacGregors of Skye. ’Twas there that I met him.”
“Skye?” Now Duff reacted. His color faded in the dim light until he resembled an apparition. “Are you telling me that my father is of the clan MacGregor of Skye?” When Patrick nodded, Duff wiped his hand down his face and swore a quiet oath. “The MacGregors of Skye are kin to the Fergussons of Ayrshire.”
So, he did know. “Are they?” Patrick asked, feigning surprise. “The Fergussons ye’re feudin’ with?”
Duff nodded. He seemed to be turning something over in his mind, something that urged him along. “How do you know he is my father, and not a man with the same name? I’m certain there are many Will MacGregors in Scotland.”
But few with the same sharp cut to his jaw and cool, merciless eyes.
“Ye share his face and his expressions,” Patrick told him. “Hell, I suspected ye were his the moment I knew Cunningham wasna yer faither. I tell ye the truth, ye wear his face.”
It didn’t look to be as satisfying for Duff as Patrick had hoped. His color hadn’t returned. In fact, he looked mildly ill. “Speak of this no more,” he said turning his face toward the shadows.
Patrick wished he hadn’t mentioned it in the first place. But hell, if he never knew his father and someone showed up in his life who did, he’d want to know. He could appreciate the emotions that must be surging through his cousin at this moment.
“D’ye want to know anything aboot him?”
Duff remained still. He wasn’t ready to learn such things. Mayhap Patrick didn’t blame him. If his father had abandoned his mother he might not be interested after all.
“What is he like?” Duff asked, giving in to every human need.
Patrick might be a careless, reckless rake who just happened to enjoy life too damn much, but he understood the magnitude of his answer. He had the task of shaping Duff’s first impression of his father. This had been his idea, hadn’t it? He’d wanted Duff to know. Why shouldn’t the duty of telling fall on him? But how does one tell a man about his father? Should he tell Duff everything; that there were a few men in Camlochlin who didn’t particularly adhere to its unspoken call for chivalry and Duff’s father was one of them. At least, he had been before he too fell ill to love when he met his wife, Aileas MacLeod, and became father to four of his own defiant hellions. Sons he’d chosen to raise. Would Duff hate his father for abandoning him and not the others?
“He’s a master archer…and he’s…” Patrick grinned and rolled his eyes at his inability to speak. He held up his cup, as if the watered-down whisky was the reason. Should he tell Duff that Will enjoyed agitating his cousins with his sharp tongue and playful smirk? “He’s the MacGregor clan chief’s cousin and closest friend.” Aye, that was the truth, and it sounded better. “In his younger days, he was known to be reckless with lasses and dangerous to have as an enemy. Despite the pepperin’ of gray hair, he is still dangerous but less reckless since he took a wife. He laughs often—and often at the expense of others. He fears nothin’ save his wife’s ire, and is the only man at whom Brodie MacGregor, yer grandsire, smiles.”
Duff’s expression lightened. He may have even smiled in the dim light. “You sound like you know him well.”
“One doesna spend time with the MacGregors of Skye without gettin’ to know Will. He’s friends with all.”
Duff swigged the remainder of his whisky. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and called for more. Finally, he turned back to Patrick. “Does he have other bairns?”
Hell, Patrick needed a stronger drink than what they were serving here. “He has…four sons.”
Duff’s eyes went heartbreakingly soft. “I see.”
Again, Patrick regretted telling him anything. Was not knowing you could have had a different, better life more merciful? Hell.
“An hour ago, I had no brothers. Now, I have four. What are their names?”
Patrick closed his eyes and breathed a sigh before opening them again, “Brodie, Beathan, Ailpein, and Niall. They are all younger than ye and will likely be the death of him.”
Duff stared into his cup and shook his head. “I would be the death of him.”
Patrick leaned in closer. “What was that? Ye would be? Why ye?”
Duff’s forced smile in the fluttering candlelight offered anything but assurance of his sincerity when he spoke. “I’m certain that discovering he fathered a fifth son, one of whom there is a lifetime he knows nothing about, would at least make him wish he were dead.”
He had a point. Patrick laughed and raised his cup with him.
They talked over two more drinks before Patrick found himself offering to bring Duff to meet them if he ever wished to. Patrick wasn’t sure what the hell had come over him, but he missed his home. It was because of Charlie. Because she reminded him of Camlochlin, untamable and as steady and sheltering as a fortress. His kin would…
Was that…Charlie he saw just walk through the door?
Forgetting his thoughts, he blinked at Duff to find him rigid and alert in his chair, his eyes fastened to his sister.
So, Duff knew about her nightly ventures. What the hell would she think of that? What was she doing back here? What had she been doing here the first time he saw her, dressed in shadows and candlelight? Why hadn’t he asked her? Why hadn’t he told her he had seen her that night? He didn’t want to care and especially not to the point of wanting to start tearing heads off any man who’d touched her.
“What is she doin’ here?” he asked, keeping his voice low, steady, and remaining in the shadows with her brother.
“She’s keeping her promise.”
“A promise to whom?”
“To our mother,” Duff told him while Charlie smiled and waved to the serving wenches and even the taverner. She’d changed her gown into heavier wool and an earasaid draping her delicate shoulders.
Patrick didn’t care about breathing. She was so very bonnie to him with her long glossy tresses a bit haphazardly plaited and drawing his eye to her breast where it fell.
“Does she know that ye follow her?” Patrick asked him.
“Nay, and I want to keep it that way. It wouldn’t make a difference though, she’d still come but I’d prefer not to fight with her about this.” Duff sipped from his cup without flinching. “She’s been visiting pubs for the last sixteen months, at least.”
A year and a half? Why? Was she here trying to find a way to earn coin to pay her a tenant’s rent? What the hell was he going to do about it?
“What is the promise she made to yer mother?”
“To care for Elsie. The others, she has taken on of her own accord.”
“Then ye know aboot the Wallaces.”
Duff nodded. “I know she’s friends with Mary Wallace.” Duff looked at him from his drink. “What else is there to know?”
That she sneaks out and to visit them and pay their rent? Patrick didn’t speak his thought out loud. Duff didn’t know. He couldn’t know how often he’d been drugged or he would not have put up with it.
“There’s nothin’ else to know,” Patrick assured him. “I assumed from yer earlier question to me aboot the Wallaces that ye didna know Charlie and Mary were friends.”
“Hmm,” Duff murmured and gave his attention back to his sister. “While you decide about her, you should know that she will always do what she wants. She will use whatever means necessary to see her desires fulfilled. She will defy you as she defies my father, silently and methodically. As much as I would like to see her find her own happiness, I don’t think she is a good candidate for—”
“She is perfect,” Patrick finished. Aye, damn it, it was his voice that just spoke—and worse, sounded like a love-struck fool.
“I don’t think she will be as easily won as you hope.” Duff watched her bend her ear to two patrons, smile, and then pat their backs as she moved on to someone else.
“I dinna want an easy victory.”
“Is that what she is?” Duff asked, turning to look at him. “A victory?”
“Aye,” Patrick said candidly, “a victory fer me to have won the heart of such a lass. A victory fer m’ kin to welcome her as their own. A victory fer yer faither because his daughter belongs to the most powerful clan in Scotland.”
“And for Charlie?” her brother asked, convincing Patrick, by his dedication to her well-being, that Highland blood did indeed run through this lad.
But this conversation was going too far. Patrick had wanted to stay for a few more days, and with freedom to be with Charlie. All this talk of marriage was making him feel antsy.
“I dinna know what she would think of it…if I decided to marry her.”
“Well, you heard her,” Duff told him, setting down his cup. “She doesn’t want to marry. She has refused all and chased them away. I don’t think she will ever be happy with anyone again.”
Patrick smiled remembering the tale Mary had told him about Charlie’s last suitor.
Then his smile faded.
“Again?”
Charlie had been in love before? He didn’t know why it fired a streak of jealously through his insides.
“Aye,” her brother told him. “She hasn’t loved anyone since him—and it has been a long time.” His eyes settled on his sister again and his gaze took on a faraway look. When he spoke, his voice was low and riddled with something like regret. “I haven’t spoken of him for many years. Too long.”
“Who is he?” Patrick wanted to know who had held her heart for years and stopped her from loving anyone else.
Duff wrenched his gaze back to him and shook his head. “No one. He’s gone, and ’twould be best if you don’t bring him up to Charlotte.”
Bring who up? How the hell was Patrick not going to talk about him if he didn’t know who he was talking about?
“But how do you know she still loves him?” Patrick asked, undeterred.
“Because she still carries his sling around as if it were a part of him.”
Patrick stared at him while his belly sank to his boots. Her sling, given to her and taught how to use by a Fergusson. She’d loved a Fergusson. According to her brother, she still did.
She’d spoken of him the first time they walked through the field. She’d mentioned learning how to use the sling and her father disapproving. Had Allan Cunningham forbidden the two from being together? Did her heart belong to one of his cousins? Was it one of Cameron’s sons? Shaw, or Tam, or mayhap Kendrick? Surely Tamas’s youngest son, Aidan, was too young. John had all daughters.
“It seems she’s found whom she came to see.”
Patrick followed Duff’s gaze to find Charlie sitting at the table of a well-dressed older man. They were engaged in what appeared to be a serious conversation.
What was she up to this time? Patrick wondered, watching her, unaware that his gaze had gone soft.
“You still consider her after finding her here in a pub in the dead of night?”
Patrick understood that most men wouldn’t want such a troublesome, defiant wife. But he had to admit, the idea of it was pleasing. She was a rose made of many petals and he enjoyed watching each unfurl.
“Is it no’ apparent enough to yer eyes,” Patrick asked, glancing at him, “that m’ interest in her is sparked?”
But which one of his cousins had claimed her heart?
“You don’t strike me as the kind of man who stays in one place too long,” Duff countered. “What becomes of her when the spark fades?”
Patrick wanted to tell him that it wouldn’t fade. But how did he know? What if it did? What the hell was he doing? Her heart was lost to one of his cousins. He couldn’t tell Duff who he was now.
His gaze shifted back to her and her companion still speaking. He’d stared at Charlie’s face and studied it enough in the past two days to know that she wasn’t pleased by the man’s words.
“Who is he?” Patrick asked and shifted in his chair. What bargain was being struck between them? What did she want? What did she have to offer? He wanted to leave his table and go find out.
“A physician, I imagine,” Duff replied. “Most of them are. None of them help though.”
What the hell was Duff saying? Patrick turned to him. “Why does she need a physician?”
“She doesn’t. Elsie does.”