A Highland Inheritance (Highlands Ever After Book 2) Read online

  A Highland Inheritance

  Highlands Ever After

  Aileen Adams

  Contents

  A Highland Inheritance

  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

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  A Highland Inheritance

  Book Two of the Highlands Ever After Series!

  An English heiress has no cause to live in the Highlands. Or does she...

  Sheriff Colin Ramsey simply wants to keep the peace in the territory. He doesn’t want to have to enforce the Tartan and Dress Act of 1746. Nor does he want to babysit the feisty Highlanders that seek to create chaos and defy the laws—regardless how unjust said laws might be.

  He doesn’t like complications.

  Enter Iona Douglas, who brings complications in spades. This stubborn Englishwoman has inherited Scottish Highland property. She scandalously refuses to follow rules or suggestions. She insists—quite stubbornly—on brushing off advice in this lawless land.

  If only there weren’t feelings involved.

  If only she wasn’t irresistible.

  Colin’s problem is figuring out how to keep the lass alive when she seems hell bent on ending up dead.

  1

  Colin stood on the tip of the ridge, right at the top, gazing over the landscape dotted with copses of thick pine trees, meadows with long, green grass just beginning to dry into midsummer, blowing gently in the morning breeze. The sun rising slowly behind him cast the landscape into gilded shades of purple, emerald green, and silver, as dawn sent rays of light glinting off the mists slowly rising from the lake in the distance.

  Deceptively peaceful. The thought prompted a grunt as he shook his head.

  Peace. Just a couple of months ago, the English had seemingly grown tired of hunting for Scottish rebels who had joined the Jacobites during the rebellion. They had faded from the local landscape and mostly left the Highlanders alone, but Colin didn’t rest easy. The times were tense—weren’t they always—when it came to the struggles between the English crown and the Scots. Even so, the tenuous peace was often broken by political talks, the seemingly constant struggle for power, and though the foundation of that power lay a good distance away, its influences affected all of Scotland. Even here, in the central portion of the country where the Lowlands met the Highlands, prompting arguments, power struggles, and prejudices between the Scots themselves.

  He sighed. Would this strife never end? Rumors regarding the banishment of clan plaids had caused yet another uproar, which Colin could perfectly understand. It was one thing for a ruling monarchy to demand more taxes or pledges of loyalty, but to tell one how to dress? The tartans uniquely identified not only Scotsmen, but the clans they had been born into. Origins were important to the Scots, as was their history and their own perceptions of identity. If they—

  “If I were an Englishman, I could’ve slid yer throat already.”

  Colin cursed as he spun around and reached for the blade at his waist.

  Alasdair Macintyre grinned at him.

  Colin had been distracted lately, no doubt. But to the point he’d allowed someone to sneak up on him? This wouldn’t do. He needed to tamp down his annoyance with the English and their silly laws and focus only on his county and surrounding regions.

  Alasdair had been one of those rebels hunted after the battle of Culloden, during the aftermath of what had begun to be called the Forty-Five Rebellion.

  Colin had been a rebel, too, but not in an organized way. He hadn’t joined the recent rebellion, but one could say he’d spent most of his youth rebelling against the English during his younger years growing up in the Highlands.

  Alasdair had returned from the battle with a horribly scarred face only to learn that his dying father had betrothed him to Beitris Boyd, a blind woman—or nearly blind. Alasdair and Colin had known each other since they had reached young adulthood, although they had never been particularly close until the past spring when Colin had—unbeknownst to anyone but Alasdair, Beitris, and her best friend, Elspeth—defied an English magistrate who had come to the area hunting for rebels. Others had come looking for Alasdair as well, but Colin had come up with a plan to end their hunt, once and for all, by digging up a dead body, beheading it, and giving it to the English bounty hunters as proof that the Alasdair Macintyre they so desperately sought was dead.

  Since then, he and Alasdair had become tight friends.

  “How’s Beitris?”

  “Content and happy; anxiously awaiting the birth of our child.”

  Colin nodded. “And Elspeth?”

  “She’s regaining some movement in her left hand.”

  “Good.”

  In the hunt for Alasdair, Elspeth had been terribly injured by bounty hunters. Her recovery had been slow, but Beitris nursed her best friend back to health, supported her, and did whatever she could for her, much as Elspeth had done for Beitris for so many years. The two young women had grown up together, Elspeth often acting as Beitris’s eyes. As adults, their dedication and loyalty to one another were indisputable. Alasdair understood that and had invited Elspeth to live with them after he wed Beitris.

  “And how are ye adjusting to marriage?” Colin asked, and not just out of mere curiosity.

  Alasdair Macintyre was a soldier, a warrior, and the thought of him settling down with a woman, especially after he’d returned from battle with a massive scar that sliced his face in half, had seemed unfathomable. Perhaps it was fate that his father had betrothed him to a blind woman. A woman who would see Alasdair for the man he was, and not for the man he appeared to be.

  “Why?” Alasdair asked. “Ye have a lass in mind?”

  Colin snorted and shook his head. “Och, who’d want to marry the county sheriff?”

  “Who’d want to marry me?” Alasdair countered with a shrug. “I never imagined myself wed, soon to be a father, but I find I’m enjoying it. Farming is not as exciting as battle, but God’s truth, I enjoy the feel of dirt in my fingers, the pride of watching my crop grow.”

  Colin nodded. Maybe someday he would be fortunate enough to find a wife, but he was a busy man, often out riding the region from sunup to sundown, settling disputes, searching for lost cattle, trying to maintain peace in the region. Rumors of the imminent banishment of the tartan plaids worn by different clans, primarily in the Highlands, but also by many who had settled into the Lowlands, had caused Colin no little unrest. His fellow Scots were annoyed, many of them acting out. More than he’d like to admit had taken to illegal activities to express their frustration and discontent.

  “Yer daydreamin’ again, Colin.”

  “Nay. I’m thinking we’re going to have trouble,” he said, again shaking his head and turning his gaze from the peaceful vista before him to speak to Alasdair. “The clans to the north are growing restless, and the Lowlanders are raising their hackles again, angry with the English government in their efforts to wipe out our identity with the new law soon to pass.”

  “The banishment of the wearing of the plaids.” Alasdair grunted.

  Colin nodded. What good woul
d come of trying to erase such a culture? Colin didn’t understand it, but as sheriff of the county, he would soon be ordered to ensure that the law would be followed.

  For the past three decades, the English had attempted to quash Scottish identity. The actual Forty-Five Rebellion had begun when Alasdair and Colin were infants, during the reign of George the First of Hanover. That year, over ten thousand clansmen from the Highlands took to arms in their hopes of winning the crown for James Edward Stuart. Reprisals had begun immediately, with the execution of two of the Jacobite leaders, others fleeing into exile. Still others were forced to forfeit their lands and some were even captured and thrown into servitude as slaves on plantations across the ocean. The same year, the English had passed the Disarming Act, and while the Scots had pretended to comply, turning in older, sometimes rusted weapons, they had spent years hiding new ones.

  The law had proven unsuccessful, and another Jacobite uprising had prompted more bouts of clashes between Field Marshal George Wade—at the time Commander in Chief of his Majesty’s forces in North Britain—and tens of thousands of weapon-wielding clansmen in the Highlands. Those years had brought into existence a number of clansmen commanded by different clan leaders deemed loyal to the English government, known as the Black Watch. Such clans loyal to the English were charged with watching Highland passes and stifling any attempts to attack, deny, or otherwise spurn the English government and its laws. At that time, the tartans of the Black Watch grew especially important, making such clansmen easily discernible and recognizable by their black, green, and blue government tartan plaids, easily identifying them—in the eyes of the other clans—as traitors to Scotland.

  After the rebellion, the English government believed that the wearing of the plaids encouraged Scottish natives to think of themselves as separate, distinct, and culturally different than other subjects of Britain and more likely to engage in rebellious activities. Which brought Colin to the present with this upcoming rumor of the dress act, a culmination of reprisals brought forth by the English government, especially after yet another uprising of the Jacobites that culminated in their defeat on Culloden Moor near Inverness.

  “It’s this blasted dress act,” Colin grumbled. “Have ye heard of the reprisals the English are demanding? The punishment for wearing a plaid?”

  Alasdair shook his head.

  “Simply put, after the first day of August, those caught wearing a plaid face imprisonment, without bail, for six months.” He shook his head, scowling, finding it hard to believe that any government would pass such an act. “If they’re caught and convicted a second time, they’ll be sent away to English plantations across the sea, where they’ll endure a life of slavery for seven years.”

  “They’re singling out the Highlanders.”

  Again, Colin nodded. “Don’t get involved in this, Alasdair,” he warned. “As far as the English are concerned, you’re dead. We need to keep it that way.”

  He could tell Alasdair wasn’t happy. He had his own clan colors, as did Colin. They didn’t wear them often, mainly for ceremonial events such as Alasdair’s wedding, but it was the thought of a government telling them what they could do, what they couldn’t, and how they could do it, that annoyed Colin to no end.

  “Alasdair,” he finally said, now ignoring the landscape and pushing thoughts of the English from his mind. “What brings ye up here?”

  Alasdair raised his eyebrows and smiled in amusement. Because of the scar dividing his eyebrow and pulling at his cheek and jaw, the grin looked more like a devilish grimace. Sometimes, like now, Colin had to hold back a shiver. He looked fearsome indeed.

  “I suppose ye won’t want to hear it now, but I came up to tell ye something that I thought ye might find interesting.”

  “Och, and what’s that?”

  “From what Elspeth told Beitris, and don’t ask me how she knows because I don’t know, there’s a woman coming up to these parts from the Isle of Skye.”

  Colin frowned. “And what has that to do with me?”

  “Apparently, she’s inherited property here. The old McGinty property just southeast of the village.”

  Colin still didn’t understand why Alasdair was telling him this. “And?”

  “Her name is—”

  Colin frowned with impatience. “And…?”

  Alasdair chuckled. “I thought I’d better come up and warn you.”

  Colin heaved a put-upon sigh. “Alasdair, what are ye blathering about? Why should I care?”

  “Because Beitris and Elspeth have already got their heads together looking for a suitor for her.”

  Colin bit back his annoyance, glaring now at Alasdair. “Will ye just spit it out? Ye are nae making any sense!”

  His friend merely grinned wider, and it was then that Colin understood. He lifted his eyes skyward. Just what he needed. Beitris and Elspeth acting the matchmakers.

  “Nay,” he said, shaking his head firmly. “I won’t have it. Ye tell Beitris and Elspeth to mind their own business. When I’m in the mood to go looking for a woman, I can do it myself, thank ye very much.”

  Alasdair chuckled and then turned, walking down the side of the slope toward his horse, who was waiting patiently at the bottom next to Colin’s. He turned to speak over his shoulder. “Good luck with that.” He paused. “Och, and I forgot to tell ye something else important about this woman.”

  Colin strove for patience and lifted an eyebrow. “And what is that?”

  “She’s English.”

  Colin was speechless.

  Laughing, Alasdair reached his horse, mounted, and rode away.

  Normally, Colin didn’t become easily annoyed or lose his temper. At the moment, however, he felt the blood race through his veins, throbbing in his neck, warming the flesh of his cheeks. What the bloody hell?

  An Englishwoman coming here, during these troubled times, to live? What was she thinking? Obviously, she wasn’t.

  “More trouble,” he muttered, heading downslope toward his own horse. “As if I needed more trouble.”

  Colin sat behind a small desk in the structure that served as both the jailhouse and his home. The oblong, clay and stone building with a thatched roof stood at the far eastern edge of the village and the road that traversed it ran from east to west. The entrance to the structure opened to the official jail section, which held his desk, a single jail cell, and two chairs. A door located in the corner behind the desk opened into his personal living quarters. The tiny room contained a small stone and clay brick fireplace in one corner, a stack of wood against the wall, plus a narrow bed against the other, a small table with water pitcher and basin in between, pegs inserted into the wall for clothing, and a small table and chair in the opposite corner, which he used for eating, or on occasion, reading.

  He sat in the front portion of the structure now, fingering the missive he had received last week. He’d learned the Englishwoman’s name was Iona Douglas—soon to arrive in their region. For the hundredth time, or it seemed so to him, he shook his head, wondering why any woman would think it was a good idea to travel from an island located along the western coastline of northwest Scotland into the central area of the country, along the border between the Highlands and the Lowlands.

  And to the McGinty place, no less. Colin barely remembered Afiric and Ealasaid McGinty, an older couple even when Colin was a youth. They had kept fairly much to themselves, rarely venturing into the village except for worship services. They were a nice enough couple, but it seemed they preferred their isolation. The parcel of land was good-sized and located roughly four miles by English standards and just over thirty furlongs by Scots measures outside of the village, butting up against the forest. Surrounding the half-single and half two-level home stood now fallow fields. And while the stone house was in fairly good shape after years of abandoned neglect, it would need plenty of work to get the place livable again. Rechinking the stonework, a new thatched roof, and perhaps replacement of floorboards and stairs. He hadn’t
been there in a long time. He’d ridden past it, but not ventured into the house, set back a distance from the road. He only occasionally rode by the place just to make sure no squatters had taken up residence there. No one ever had, and he knew why. He’d heard the rumors about the place being haunted. In addition there had been gossip when he was growing up of some type of treasure buried somewhere on the property. Even the lure of gold or treasure had waned as the stories of ghosts had prevailed. Even in his youth, he had scoffed at such rumors. It seemed there was a rumor, a legend, of evil spirits hovering about in the moors, up in the craggy foothills of the mountains beyond this small valley. Of course, over the years, plenty of people had disappeared in these wild lands as well.

  He glared down at the missive again with a put-upon sigh. Iona Douglas was probably some middle-aged, entitled, snobby woman who would look down her nose at the locals. Didn’t he have enough problems to deal with? Trying to keep the tenuous peace around here without even more? With Scottish sentiment toward the English these days, he hoped the woman would find the region—and the people—unacceptable and leave.

  The missive had become tattered over its long journey, the ink smeared a bit after having been splattered by raindrops, written in a feminine hand, although one could never be sure. There were many people in the village who couldn’t read or write, but he could, even though his penmanship left something to be desired. Nevertheless, the woman had requested, upon her arrival in the village, an official escort to her property. Meaning him.