Elizabeth Mayne - The Highlander's Maiden

Ignoring the beautiful woman, Robert tipped the dipper and poured its contents into his bucket. The excess splashed onto a layer of dirty straw. Cold water skittered across snow, ice, straw and black mud, soaking the toughened soles of his bare feet.

“There’s a huge kettle full of heated water to bathe with in the shed behind the kitchens,” Cassie said, reluctantly deducing his purpose for sojourning out into the elements in only his kilt.

It neither alarmed nor impressed her to see any man going about without his sark at this time of the day on the farm. Nor could she figure out why she was speaking to him. She might well owe him something for her life, but that debt ought to be well paid by Euan’s offer of hospitality. Then she remembered, Gordon hadn’t just saved her. He’d rescued Ian, too. So Cassie offered more…as an appeasement to her conscience. Maggie would expect that of her.

“Euan keeps soaps and razors and scrub brushes for all to use. You are welcome to help yourself. Your friend has already gone in to see to his toilette. You’ve time before supper. Do you want me to show you where to go?”

Robert looked down at the full bucket of cold water. She couldn’t have tempted him more if she’d invited him to share her feather bed, provided the sheets were clean, and her body sweet and perfumed of lavender or roses.

He made a strangled sound inside the back of his throat that Cassie took to mean “give me a moment,” about-faced and marched back into the barn. He came out moments later, his plaid swirled around his body, his feet stuffed in muddy boots, strutting stiff-legged like the soldier he really was straight to her.

She thanked the coming night for obscuring her reaction to his face and those eyes that had taken her breath away when she’d come out of her deep faint with his lips hovering over her freezing mouth. He’d been so warm and alive and concerned, she’d thought him an archangel. Thank God he didn’t know who she was. No one at this farm would reavel her connection to Lady Quickfoot, either.

“The washhouse is this way.” She gathered her cloak around her and picked up her hems, leading the surveyor to the back of the manse. There, the kitchens and laundry room became a tangled warren of additions, expanded the south wing of the house.

Cassie opened the door and peeked inside, then stood it ajar. Her quick glance confirmed that the other surveyor looked better for the washing he’d already done. He was about to shave as Cassie motioned Robert Gordon to pass inside.

She stared frankly at Robert Gordon and boldly wondered if his darkly handsome face would wash up as well as his companion’s had. A bit shy of her own romantic thoughts and troubled by the memory of his life-restoring kiss, she wagged her hand in the general direction of tubs, soaps and huge black kettle steaming above the washhouse hearth.

“Euan and Old Angus have already gone in to the hall,” she said in a husky voice. “Help yourself to what you need. Excuse me, I have to get candles for the table.”

“Your servant, milady.” Robert bowed precisely to her. She surprised the very devil out of him by dropping to a brief but very formal curtsy. Then she was gone from his sight, vanished beyond the closed door in a heartbeat.

That rattled Robert. The last deep curtsy to him personally had been given by the Duke of Atholl’s youngest daughter. The silly twit had thought him some romantic knight errant, equivalent to the gallantto-his-very-soul adventurer, Sir Walter Raleigh. Granted the setting had been Holyrood and Lord Hamilton had insisted Robert and Alex attend an audience with King James and explain their ambitious plan to the king and his full court. Both Robert and Alex had been flush with enthusiasm and idealism of the kind that belongs only to the very young and foolish.

As suited the king’s pleasure, each had dressed in his foppish best to please the court. Robert Gordon had cut the best figure with his lean, athletic grace and inbred military bearing, and well he knew it. At twenty-one his young man’s conceit had been without limit. The magical part of that affair was King James was not much older than he, Timothy or Alex, and was instantly caught up in the romance of their altruistic quest. Instead of being bored to tears by their pompous reasoning, James VI was delighted.

Had a bitterly contested civil war not interfered, their map would be complete today.

But war had interfered and could do so again before this new year was out. Robert accepted what he must. When a Gordon cross truach, a fiery cross, summoned the men of clan Gordon to their laird’s aid, Robert answered duty’s call. Today was another day of tenuous peace, forced upon the Campbells and Gordons by their king. Each day that the peace continued, Robert thanked God for it and best used the time to advance his work closer to completion.

Privately, he added his own prayers that the king’s peace would continue into a second year with no renewed hostilities.

The young woman whose life he’d saved was a Campbell kinswoman, his clan’s avowed enemy in every way, shape and form. He must never forget that fact when dealing with Cassandra MacArthur. Nor could he forget that he, needed the king’s peace to accomplish his goals of finishing his work. How much could Lady Quickfoot affect the uneasy peace? Would he: be better off ignoring her identity and hillfolk title. completely?

Robert snapped out of his reverie-induced thoughts as Alex snapped a razor blade against his face. He cut a crater through the thick lather coating his cheeks and hiked a fair eyebrow into the tangled elflocks dripping on his brow. He pointed the blade at the empty tub and full kettle, then spoke. “The water’s still hot, Robbie.”

When Alexander Hamilton deigned to speak at all, it was most commonly in the acquired brogue of the Lowlands. Alex’s innate inclination to shy from conversation with most Highlanders had been honed to a finely measured reticence by their travels in Glenlyon and his reluctance to place any further claim on his Lowlander father’s good graces. That they had funding to pursue their work was enough.

“Did you see that?” Robert asked in amazement.

“Eh, Robbie, what? No, I guess I didn’t.”

“That young woman curtsied to me. To me! For pity’s sake, don’t I look like something that just crawled out of a cave or washed up with a pile of wreckage from the Armada?”

Alex looked him up and down with a familiar jaundiced smirk, then said, “Oh, aye, laddie, you look all of that disreputable and then some—with your skinny arse barely keeping that kilt around your hips. Better ask MacGregor’s goodwife if she can sew a few more pleats in that raggedy scrap before you put it back on.”

“Shut yer face, ye half-wit.” Robert flung his kilt onto a peg and folded into the steaming, soapy tub. He sat a while just enjoying the heat swirling around his feet and hips, the tub deep enough with him in it to cover his navel.

“Mayhap it wasn’t so curious. You did save her life, Rob.” Alex resumed his silent shaving, the understatement in his words reverberating against the low rafters.

Robert swatted that statement aside as he might an annoying horse fly, firmly and irrevocably. He wasn’t going to launch himself on any young woman’s heroic pedestal and remain there long enough to be snared romantically deep in Campbell territory. Not when his surname was Gordon and would stay Gordon all the rest of his days.

“What do you intend to do about your Lady Quickfoot?” Alex asked softly. As a spy this quiet man ‘was always quick to draw the clearest deductions.

Robert’s dark eyebrows narrowed in a concerned frown. “I haven’t thought it through yet.”

He didn’t want to consider it now, either. He took a deep breath of the heavily scented air of this dark room and found it achingly aromatic. The sweet smells of soap and hair tonics competed with the overpowering aroma of the haunch of mutton sizzling in the kitchen next door.