A Soldier's Salvation Read online

  Table of Contents

  A Soldier’s Salvation

  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

  Afterword

  A Soldier’s Salvation

  Highland Heartbeats

  Aileen Adams

  Contents

  A Soldier’s Salvation

  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

  Afterword

  A Soldier’s Salvation

  Book Seven of the Highland Heartbeats Series!

  Forever seeking salvation...

  Rodric Anderson isn’t a soldier anymore. Nay, many would refer to him as a mercenary—a soldier for hire. Now, he’s embroiled in a Duncan clan matter.

  He’s also hunted by the authorities, wanted by women, and tied to none. He’s a part of a band of brothers, all former soldiers, some outlaws, all who make themselves available for the right coin—sometimes, the right cause.

  One woman has caught his eye. A shrew of a woman. Why was it he could not get her out of his mind?

  Caitlin’s hand has been given in marriage by her wretch of a stepfather to a man who is no less a wretch himself. Her only escape is to run away. Except that things are never quite so simple when it comes to choices.

  1

  Come on, lads. Put your backs into it.” Rodric Anderson chuckled to himself, albeit quietly, so as to avoid arousing the ire of his friends. They were not the sort of men one wished to rouse to anger—as they’d proven more times than he could count.

  Brice MacDougal let out a growl which cut off suddenly as he smashed a large hand against the side of his neck to kill a bug which had lighted there. “Perhaps the work would go better if ye’d quit supervising and lend us a hand.”

  “Aye, and perhaps ye wouldn’t come off as such a prig if ye did,” his brother Fergus agreed through gritted teeth as he attempted to lift the wagon’s wheel out of the thick mud in which it had become hopelessly mired.

  Quinn Murray groaned in frustration, sweat rolling down his neck and under his tunic, where it spread in a growing patch of dark wetness. “We’ll never manage it, lads. I swear to all the gods, this mud is cursed.”

  Rodric could see how his old friend would believe this, as it seemed no matter how hard they fought against the deep, sucking mess, the wagon’s wheels only sank further into the muck. The three of them had grown up in villages, however, not in the Highlands. No matter how much of their adult lives had been spent out of doors, they were still unaccustomed to navigating through what could quickly become treacherous ground.

  Or, as in their current situation, ground impossible to travel across.

  They’d been at it for nearly an hour, losing precious time as the sun sank lower with each passing minute.

  “I give up.” Fergus left the muddy patch, covered up to his knees in the stuff, and flopped down with his back against the trunk of a birch. “I mean it. I give up.”

  “Come on, now,” Rodric urged. This was no longer a laughing matter. “I’m fresher than ye, so I’ll lift the wheel while you and Brice push the wagon from behind. Quinn, you lead the horses forward on my count of three.”

  “Och, the laird is deigning to dirty himself,” Quinn chuckled.

  Rodric barely avoided the impulse to cuff the man about the ears as they crossed paths.

  “I was daft, thinking the three of you lot could handle a task as simple as this without my muscle,” Rodric muttered as he pushed the sleeves of his tunic up past his elbows.

  He didn’t dare make a comment about them needing his reasoning skills, as that would merely anger them even further. Everyone was tired, dirty, hungry, and more than ready to arrive on Duncan land and unload the supplies they’d been tasked with bringing back to Jake Duncan and his family.

  Brice, always the thinker of the group, frowned as Rodric walked past. “Are ye certain this is a task you ought to be undertaking?” he asked in a quiet voice.

  Rodric shrugged off his friend’s concern. “I’ll be fine. You just worry yourself with pushing this wagon.”

  When Quinn took the reins and gave a signal that he was prepared, Rodric crouched in the mud with his feet planted at shoulder width, wedging his shoulder beneath the inside of the wheel’s rim. A glance over his shoulder told him the MacDougals were in place.

  “On three,” he ordered. “One… two… three!”

  They worked as one, with him lifting with the others did as he instructed. He grunted with the effort, grinding his teeth together and finally letting out a roar as the wagon began to roll forward. He slid from beneath the wheel and rotated the spokes with both hands to help with the motion.

  “For the love of all that’s holy,” Fergus huffed, bending at the waist with his hands on his knees as Quinn led the wagon and horses to a dry patch of ground.

  “Amen to that,” Rodric agreed, having fallen to his knees in the mud once the wagon began moving. After a spell of rainy weather, this had been their fate for much of the journey from Inverness. What would’ve taken two days, perhaps three at the most in good weather and on horseback alone had turned into nearly a week’s worth of slow going.

  Rodric knew without asking that none of them would’ve done it for anyone else but Jake Duncan. A shipment of goods had come which none of the men of the Duncan clan were currently in a position to retrieve. A more-than-fair price was offered to Rodric and his friends, the sort of sum none of them could afford to say no to.

  But, again, the fact that it was Jake who’d made the request meant more than the silver he was willing to part with. He’d been like a brother to all of them while they fought, side-by-side, at the Battle of Largs. Rodric remembered all too well the wound his friend Jake had suffered—they’d all earned wounds and scars of their own, but his had been enough to send him home for care.

  From what they’d heard months later, the second-born Duncan son had nearly died, no thanks to the callous creature who’d been charged with healing him. A scorned lover, as it had turned out, and she’d set her sights on killing Jake for jilting her.

  Yet another reason why Rodric had always felt it best to remain unattached whenever possible.

  The disloyal wretch of a healer was long-since dead and no longer a threat to the clan. Rodric had been glad to hear of it—had someone not put the creature out of her misery, he would’ve
gladly done it himself. He owed Jake no less than his life.

  He reminded himself of this as he removed his soiled clothing beside the stream they’d been traveling alongside, dunking them in and beating them against a nearby rock in the hopes of rinsing out the mud. A little discomfort was nothing to begrudge a man who’d withstood a wound which would’ve likely killed Rodric had he taken the brunt of it.

  There were times when the entire matter seemed to have taken place only a day earlier.

  The battle had raged on for what felt like an eternity, men falling on both sides in a blur of blood and screams. The clanging of metal on metal had rung in his ears until it seemed the entire world was nothing more than screaming and clanging, and the groans of the wounded and dying.

  Rodric’s horse had reared, though he was never quite certain why, even after having gone over the scene hundreds of times in his mind. The animal had been spooked, obviously, considering the death and chaos taking place all around it.

  He’d slipped from the saddle—that sickening moment of fighting to hold on, scrambling out of sheer desperation to stay atop the beast—and had landed on his shoulder, breaking it.

  In front of a warrior whose sword was already raised high, ready to separate Rodric’s head from the rest of his body.

  Until Jake Duncan had come between them.

  Rodric wrung out his clothing, shaking it several times to remove as much of the water as possible, then draped the tunic and trousers over a low-hanging tree branch before taking a few moments to wash in the cool, refreshing stream.

  The sun was low in the sky now, all of them having already decided to set up camp after fighting for so long to free the wagon, and the steamy heat of the day after a long summer rain had settled into a more bearable warmth.

  It wasn’t easy for a man to come to grips with the knowledge that he’d been mere moments—heartbeats—away from death. Had Jake not been there at just the right time to take that blow to his thigh, Rodric would have long since become a rotting corpse. One of so many who’d fallen for the last time during the battle.

  What would that be like? A question he’d asked himself countless times. To be alive one moment and then—what? The heaven he’d been promised as a child? The utter nothingness he was beginning to believe truly existed once a man passed beyond?

  For how could there be anything else? There was nothing glorious about death, to be sure. No final moment of peace had come over the men he’d watched suffer and die, sometimes with their insides pouring out onto the ground beside them. There had been no heavenly light shining down on their faces, no singing of angels as they came down from the heavens to collect the soul.

  There had been life, and there had been death. That was all.

  He might have been one of those dead men whose bodies were, he supposed, piled into a large grave and covered in blood-soaked earth. That might easily have been his fate instead of standing in the middle of a stream, letting the water run over his body.

  What was the reason for this? Why did he live while others died?

  He never would’ve shared this with his friends, knowing they would think him daft, but he’d often questioned whether there was a reason why his life had been spared. Never one for religion, no matter how his sainted mother had tried to convince her son to adopt the Church’s beliefs as his own.

  Even so, the sort of experience he’d endured had given him pause. Perhaps the God he’d often questioned the existence of had spared him for some higher purpose. Perhaps there was something bigger for him to do, something better.

  When he looked up at the sky in all its vastness, the thin clouds which hung about the tops of the Grampian Mountains—still too far in the distance for his liking, but closer all the time—it did give him cause to take a deep breath and assess his life.

  Perhaps it was for the best, then, that Fergus called out to him. “What’s taking you so long out there? Fall in, did ye?”

  Rodric snorted. “Not this time. When will you grow tired of bringing up things that occurred years ago?”

  “When they stop amusing me,” was Fergus’s chuckled reply.

  Rodric was still shaking his head as he returned to the spot they’d chosen for their camp. The fire they’d built was burning briskly as Quinn skinned rabbits for roasting. While he’d never been overly fond of rabbit as a rule, the thought of something hot to eat before retiring made his stomach rumble in anticipation.

  “How much longer, do you imagine?” Brice asked, coming back from feeding and watering the horses he’d tied to trees a short distance from the camp. Their soft neighing spoke of their relief at being given a chance to rest.

  He understood the feeling.

  Rodric’s nose wrinkled in distaste at his friend’s stench. “You were supposed to look after the horses, not rub their shit on ye,” he joked, waving a hand in front of his face. “And I’d say if we have a run of good luck tomorrow, we should make it to Duncan Manor before the evening meal. If we don’t all keel over dead from your stink long before then.”

  Brice grumbled as the others laughed, walking in the direction of the stream for a bath of his own. “It was a hot day, your lairdship, and some of us did more than simply walking about, shouting commands,” he pointed out over his shoulder, disappearing behind a tall bramble.

  Had the comment come from anyone else but the trio with whom Rodric traveled, or the handful of men with whom they normally joined up for more dangerous assignments, there would’ve been hell to pay. They knew each other well enough to throw harmless insults back and forth, like brothers.

  Rodric grimaced. In some ways, he was closer to them than he was with his own brothers.

  He rolled his arm in circles, rubbing the shoulder he’d used to help lift the wagon from the mud. It was the only reason he hadn’t helped sooner—the break hadn’t been set or treated properly, and therefore sometimes gave him pain. The wet weather they’d experienced for days prior had already left him achy, sore, and in foul temper.

  “Have ye any more of the tincture you purchased from the healer in Inverness?” Fergus asked, keeping his eyes on the fire.

  It was a casual question, carefully phrased. It wouldn’t do to show too much concern.

  Rodric let out a grunt of frustration. “Nay, the price was far too dear to purchase as much as I wished. It will be fine.”

  What he knew but wouldn’t share with the others was that he had a long, uncomfortable night ahead of him. Any stray movement in his sleep would make the shoulder ache even worse, to the point where it would wake him.

  And he would lie there, staring up at the sky, watching as the stars made their slow trek across the blackness.

  Quinn settled in against the saddle he’d propped up before a fallen tree, sighing deeply. “I wonder if there are any comely lasses in the Duncan household.”

  All of them chuckled, including Brice, who’d just returned from his bath. It was a familiar question which Quinn always managed to be the one to ask, no matter the nature of the journey their group was on. His mind was on one thing only—not that Rodric never thought about it. He thought about it all the time. But he’d managed to master his thirsts better than his friend had.

  “Like as not,” Fergus decided. “The manor house is large, likely the largest in the Highlands.”

  “Aye, but I don’t believe you’ll find any in the household,” Brice pointed out. “I hear they’re all good and paired up there, married off.”

  “There’s bound to be a lady’s maid or kitchen wench for ye,” Rodric offered, barely suppressing a chuckle.

  Quinn merely muttered a curse under his breath, causing the rest of them to break out in good-natured laughter.

  They shared their meal, still throwing jokes back and forth, placing bets on who would be the first to make the acquaintance of an unmarried beauty in the village beyond Duncan Manor.

  Three of them did, at any rate.

  Rodric remained silent on the subject, chewing his overco
oked rabbit, staring through the fire he no longer saw, and deep into the past.

  2

  Duncan Manor was indeed a sight to behold. “All the time we spent serving beside him, and I hadn’t the first idea Jake lived in such a castle,” Quinn marveled once they started up the rocky trail which led to the imposing structure.

  Even from a distance, there were lookouts visible in each of the towers.

  Rodric grunted in agreement. No one would have known of Jake’s upbringing had they only seen him on the field of battle, fighting hard alongside men who’d come of age in far lesser circumstances. He’d been as tough as any of them. Tougher than many.

  He’d only ever seen the manor house from a distance before, like the rest of them, and silence fell over the group as they drew closer, with Quinn driving the pair hitched to the wagon, and the other three on horseback.

  The slow-moving wagon gave them ample time to take in the expansive beauty of Ben Nevis as well, sitting behind the house and seeming to touch the sky.

  A band of riders greeted them before they’d reached the village, as was expected. At the front was a barrel-chested man who sized them up with a practiced eye. “What business have ye here?”

  Rodric spoke for them. “We’ve come to deliver supplies from Inverness, as Jake Duncan instructed.”

  “You’ll be the men he served with, then? He’s been expecting you.” The man’s expression softened to one close to friendliness as he held out a hand. “The name’s Maccay.”