A Highlander's Scars Read online

  A Highlander’s Scars

  Highland Heartbeats

  Aileen Adams

  Contents

  A Highlander’s Scars

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  A Highlander’s Scars

  Book Eleven of the Highland Heartbeats Series!

  Not all scars are visible…

  Donnan Ross, a friend of Padraig Anderson, is headed home from battle bearing more scars than a man should. He discovers that his father is dying, and his brother has left the family with hefty debts to pay. Beyond frustrated, Donnan retreats to a life of a hermit while spies infiltrate the Highlands and take “disloyal” folks as captives.

  A powerful laird offers Donnan’s father the opportunity to erase the family’s debt in exchange for helping him find his missing daughter. A woman that some claim has fallen in love with one of the enemy.

  Donnan remembers the laird’s daughter only too well. Fenella, they called her. A headstrong mouthy Highland lass. No one told Donnan that Fenella was involved with the spies. No one told him she’d blossomed into such a beauty.

  Now, Donnan has a difficult decision to make.

  Fenella is not the type to fall for traitors, nor is she naïve to the ways of the world. She is not enamored with one of the enemy, but her wish to serve her clan has dropped her in hot water. And, now the bitter recluse of a man she remembers from childhood thinks the worst of her. And she doesn’t care. But why is she so bothered, then?

  Prologue

  “Help me! Somebody help me!”

  Donnan Ross ignored the shouts, unmindful whether they were from one of his own men or a Norwegian. He could not risk stopping to find out. They were on the run, advancing on the enemy. Perhaps days from ending the entire war, gods willing.

  It couldn’t end too soon for Donnan’s liking. He was sick of the stench of blood, death, men soiling themselves in the final moments of their lives or the moments after their death.

  Flies swarmed all about him. The blood of another man whose name he’d never know coated his tunic, crusted his sword. Smoke rose in the air from dozens of small fires, dark haze dimming the sun and leaving him gulping for a breath of clean air he knew would never come.

  Not until he got out of there.

  Would he ever?

  He doubted it just then, slipping and sliding his way across the field of battle, the dirt beneath his feet turned to mud thanks to so much blood soaking into it. He fell to one knee, rose up, continued along with those of his group still alive.

  The few of them that actually remained. So many fewer. But just as many dead Norwegians littered the ground, their bodies hacked to pieces, their eyes wide open and staring up at that hazy sky.

  Eyes that would soon be food for the buzzards.

  A group of Norwegians was visible on the other side of a cluster of trees, moving further back from the skirmish line. Donnan led his small group, dodging and weaving among the trees and low-lying brush.

  Always knowing there may be a man lurking behind the next stately ash, waiting to slice his head off if given a chance.

  He would not give them a chance.

  His feet were swift and light, his body taking over for his mind as it tended to do when he was in a state of utter panic. Which he was, make no mistake.

  There was no shame in that panic. A man would have to be out of his mind not to feel some strong emotion. He’d seen men like that, the ones who’d gone clear unaware of anything around them. Lost in their broken minds.

  He would rather hear the blood rushing in his ears, feel the pit of cold panic in his stomach. It meant he was aware of what happened around him.

  And it meant he was still alive to feel something.

  He kept running, a sword in his right hand, a scarred wooden shield in his left. There were footfalls ahead, the sounds of movement through shrubs, the breaking of twigs. He followed the sound, willing himself not to look back to see how many of his men were behind him.

  It would only serve as a reminder of how many they’d lost.

  “Ahead!” one of the men closest to him shouted, and that shout flushed out a handful of the enemy.

  Donnan’s blood ran hotter than ever. He raised his sword, letting out a cry of rage and fury, rushing toward the closest of the men who turned and raised his own weapon in response.

  Metal on metal. Grunting, the cries of exertion as two dozen men struck blow after blow. Donnan slashed with the sword, driving his opponent back.

  Sweat-soaked hair hung in his eyes as he swung and swung, his shoulder aching, his arm screaming in protest each time the sword struck metal or wood, the shock running up from his hand and through his body.

  That screaming mingled with the yelling all around him, men falling on both sides. He could not stop. He could not look to see who’d fallen, for it would mean looking away from the man before him, and he could not risk such a thing.

  Not until a man—one of his—fell at his feet and caused him to pitch forward.

  So many thoughts, all at once.

  How pitiful it was to go through years of fighting, to live through battle after battle, only to fall this way.

  How he would never see home again.

  His father would find out—would he know that his son had died simply because he’d stumbled over another man at the wrong moment? Would he be ashamed, or proud that Donnan had at least fought bravely for so long?

  He would never have a wife, a family. The children he’d imagined for himself, heirs to the Ross name, gone before they had the chance to live.

  He hit the ground with a thud and a groan, rolling away from the downward slicing sword of his opponent, determined not to die easily.

  Thrusting upward with his own sword all the while.

  Because he rolled, the Norwegian sword did not slice through his throat, as had been intended. Instead, the sharpest, most soul-searing pain Donnan had ever known burst forth across his face as the blade carved a ravine from one temple to the jaw.

  It was over in a moment—the blink of an eye.

  As was the sinking of his sword in the Norwegian’s stomach. The man fell in a heap at his side, but Donnan could not see it for the blood which poured into his eye.

  And still, the fighting raged on, and the screaming and the groaning and the cries for mothers who would never see their sons again.

  1

  A fine rain fell the morning the man with the scar running down his face left the cottage in which he’d lived out the last two years. He glared at the rain itself as though daring it to avoid falling on him, the way those who looked upon his ruined face avoided looking twice.

  Rain did not think, it did not fear. It fell upon the wealthy, the beautiful, the broken and the whole, alike. Which meant it hung in drops on his hair, on his skin as he loaded the last of his food and homespun garments onto the back of his saddle.

  Not truly his saddle.

  Hers.

&nb
sp; She gave it to him, along with the garments she’d made so slowly, with so much care.

  She’d done everything slowly. There had been no choice but for her to do so, as her sight had faded with each passing day.

  A blessing, as far as Donnan was concerned. The less the old woman had looked upon him, the better for her.

  He took one final glance about the place, not that there was much to see. The round stone cottage with its straw roof, one he’d sweat over many a hot summer’s day in order to prepare it to keep out the winter snow. The fire pit against one wall, where he’d learned to cook as his companion—the woman who’d saved his worthless life—had lost her eyesight.

  It seemed a fair enough trade, at that. Maintaining the cottage for her, working the small patch of ground she used for gardening, cooking.

  She would talk all the while, giving instruction in her throaty voice. She’d been able to smell when a stew was ready, or when he’d added too many turnips or too much water.

  There were times when he’d been nearly certain of her sight being better than she claimed it was.

  His eyes grazed the only new thing about the place he’d come to know so well in two long years. The only bit that had changed.

  The mound of earth behind the garden.

  He’d buried her deep enough to keep away those animals that might disturb her rest, and had been certain to bind dried herbs within the layers of linen in which he’d wrapped her. She’d instructed him on which ones to use.

  Old Bronwen had never been one to leave things to chance.

  Which was why, when he’d first awoken in her cottage, he’d found himself tied down. Tight. Because she’d known he would do his best to run once he realized where he was and what it meant.

  He might have mounted the horse just then and been on his way, but it seemed only fair to pay one last visit to her grave.

  The flowers he’d tossed on top of the pile of earth the night before still sat, untouched, a handful of wildflowers he’d not be able to name if given a hundred years in which to do so.

  One thing she’d never been able to do was teach him the names of the flowers that grew wild in great swaths of color around the cottage. Knowing their names was unmanly, and it was enough that he’d already turned his hand to so many domestic tasks.

  Even so, the handful he’d chosen to decorate Bronwen’s grave were of a pretty sort, the type she had sometimes left around the cottage. Their blue and white blossoms would always remind him of her.

  As would so many things. Such as the scar from the wound she’d closed and healed. There would be no peering into a looking glass or seeing his reflection in a still pool of water, without memories of the old woman stirring to life in his mind.

  Better to think on her, he supposed, than to reflect on his destruction.

  “I do not know what to say that I haven’t already said,” he murmured, hands clasped before him. “I wish I could remember if I ever thanked ye before, when ye could hear me. I know I didna thank ye when I first awoke, that’s for certain.”

  He looked away, tilting his face upward that the rain might hit his skin.

  “Ye must’ve thought me quite the ungrateful wretch. Cursing ye, refusing to speak to ye for I canna remember how many days. How ye managed to stand it is a question I will never know the answer to, I suppose. You were always a far better person than I.”

  He lowered his head this time, staring at his hands. There was still soil beneath his nails which he’d not been able to scrub clean after the burial was complete. He’d been tired, after all, having dug the hole deep for her sake, and had given up so that he might not fall asleep in the act of washing.

  “I thank ye,” he murmured. “I do thank ye. I know not how I shall live in the world as I am. I would have stayed here with ye for as long as ye needed me, and ye left me the cottage, that I might use it for my own. But I’m a man, and a man canna hide behind the skirts of a dead woman. There’s no longer any reason for me to be here.”

  Taking a knee, he placed his palm on the mound, closing his eyes. “I thank ye, and I wish ye peace. You deserve it. No man or woman deserves it more.”

  With that, he stood and turned away. He could linger no longer, not with the rain picking up in strength and such a distance to ride. It would be at least five days before he reached his father’s land, land he’d not stepped foot upon since the day he rode away from it to join his friends and begin their soldier training.

  Quite a lot could happen in seven years.

  Would that his father was still alive. And his brother.

  What would they think when he arrived? Alive and nearly whole?

  It had been for the best that they believe him dead. He reminded himself of this very thing as he turned the horse to the south.

  Best for himself as well as for them. Desertion was not an offense taken lightly.

  If he could only remember deserting. All he knew was the battle, the searing pain, the way the blood had blinded his right eye and left it useless.

  The tent in which the wounded and dying soldiers lay shoulder-to-shoulder, the dead bodies sometimes unnoticed for days.

  And the haze of fever.

  He supposed he must have wandered from the tent then, while at the worst of the fever and delusions had taken hold. The next clear memory he possessed was of waking in Bronwen’s cottage.

  She’d told him at the time, and every other time he’d asked her to explain it, that she’d found him delirious in her garden, dirt smeared around his mouth and caked under his nails. He’d foraged for food, it seemed, still while deep in a fever-induced confusion. The survival instinct had not failed him.

  Perhaps he might be excused for his desertion, seeing as how he’d been so ill. Had anyone come looking for him, Bronwen might have been able to explain on his behalf.

  She would have told them in that no-nonsense, solid way of hers that she’d found her charge babbling incoherently while in the act of digging up potatoes with his bare hands and eating them raw, unwashed. She would have explained in great detail the ragged slash across his face, the way his right eye had crusted shut under layers of dried blood, the infection which would have rendered him dead had she not come to his aid.

  Another day, she’d reminded him more than once, and the results of that poorly-treated, exposed, filthy wound would have reached his blood, his organs. And nothing could have saved him.

  Not that he had wanted saving. Not that he hadn’t cursed her up and down for putting him back together as well as she had.

  Still, she would have spoken for him, just as she’d always accepted that early, misdirected scorn with little more than a sad half-smile which had only served to infuriate him further. He hadn’t wanted her understanding. He’d wanted her to let him die.

  He had not died. In fact, as the months wore on, their positions had reversed, and he’d been the one caring for her. He could not have moved on if he wanted to. Duty had held him in place.

  No one had ever come looking, like as not because the cottage was so remote, hidden in the thickest part of the woods in which it sat. Just what Donnan most needed, solitude.

  Away from those who might ask questions.

  Away from prying eyes.

  He pulled up the hood of his cloak, keenly aware of the effect his scar had on others. After all, he recoiled from his own reflection.

  Little chance of coming across anyone just yet, but he did not wish to take chances.

  No use upsetting anybody.

  No sense in giving them reason to scream in horror.

  He’d heard more than enough screaming to last the rest of his life, after all.

  2

  When Donnan reached the familiar, rounded stones which composed the wall around his ancestral home, his heart betrayed him by leaping into his throat. The stone had come from the stream which cut a diagonal swath across the parcel—much like the scar cut across his face from temple to jaw, and had been worn down smooth by hundreds of years o
f rushing water.

  It all looked as though it always had, as though a single day had gone by rather than years of them. The grass was a bit tall, perhaps, growing thick and wild all the way to the edge of the stream and the footbridge which crossed it, then beyond.

  The hills behind the Ross land were as green as ever, the clouds hanging low, the air thick with the smell of rain and damp earth and life in all its forms. He breathed it in, allowed it to sink into his very soul, and told himself he was home.

  For better or worse.

  The bridge had seen better days, he noticed on closer inspection, and chose to walk his horse through the stream rather than chance it. The mortar crumbled, some of the stones had fallen back to the stream from which they’d come.

  All right, then, work needed to be done about the place. He would get to the bottom of why it had been neglected and see to it that things were put in their right state.

  Even in spite of the surface differences, the house stood in its same spot, and the same gnarled birch tree stood in silent watch over the tall, stone walls and straw roof.

  How many times he’d climbed that very tree, including the time he’d fallen from the highest limb and through the roof, onto the table at which he, his father and brother took their meals.

  Lucky for him there was no meal going on at the time.

  Though his backside had smarted painfully for nearly a week after, thanks to Clyde Ross’s stern punishment. It was no less than he’d deserved, for sure, seeing as how the hole had to be patched, and there was never an end to the work to be done around a farm.