“Good morning, father,” I said, lowering my eyes.
My father smiled even wider. “Thank you for breakfast, Sara. Delicious.”
“It was no trouble.” I slipped past him, angling myself as to prevent any contact and out the front door.
I didn’t turn back to look at him as I ran through the front garden, unlocked the front gate, and then began on the road to town. With each step farther from the house, I felt freer and happier, and looked forward to what the day might bring.
The village was raucous and joyful, full of the sights and smells of market day. I knew most everyone, and before I’d even gotten to the center square, my cheeks ached from smiling and joking and laughing. The dressmaker offered a bolt of blue calico, the color of cornflowers. She looked me up and down, and said, with a dramatic raise of her ample bosom, “I’ll even offer you a bargain, since a frame like yours, my dear, will need a somewhat generous cut.”
Her comment stung a bit, but I took it in stride, flattered even, because she was curvy and soft like me, and she looked so regal and luxurious in her voluptuous folds of damask and brocade. I knew I could never have such an extravagant fabric but it still brought me a smile to dream that someday I might wear something other than the plain, scratchy cloth of my shift dresses.
Next was the greengrocer, who bought most of my eggs and sold me turnips for tomorrow’s stew. He asked how I was, then after my father to which I simply answered all was well.
He screwed up his face adding, “such a useless good-for-nothing.” Not wanting to speak out of turn or be unkind about my father, I simply lowered my eyes and thanked him as I retreated out, scurried down the alleyway and emerged into the sunshine by the well at the town center.
The washer women were gathered there, gossiping as they worked. I sought out an old seamstress named Matilda who had grown into something more than a mere familiar face, to ask her about a particularly difficult embroidery stitch called the bullion knot that I was having trouble mastering. But before I could get the words out, the cobblestones trembled under my feet with the rumble of hoofbeats.
I looked up the road and saw a brawny, dark man on a chestnut stallion, riding with the reckless speed of either a gifted horseman or a careless fool, the reins held loosely in one gloved hand.
The muscles of his other arm rippled with each gallop as he smoothed the horse’s mane. His face was marked here and there with old wounds, and there was an irregular, thick scar running from the bridge of his nose and beneath one eye, so close that it could only have been a miracle that saved his sight. He brought the stallion to a whinnying stop just short of the well and didn’t even glance our way as he dismounted, patting his horse’s flank.
His frame was burly, his thighs so muscular and ample that his pants seemed to strain with his movements. He stripped off his mud-splattered jacket and shirt, right down to his snug britches. With his skin bare, I saw more scars, of all shapes and sizes. The scars of a warrior; of a man who had fought to live.
I shuddered as the tightness in my center I’d had upon awakening returned, and the image of that dark man from my dream felt suddenly like déjà vu.
I swallowed hard and found myself drawn to him, to his body, despite the way the other women around me fell silent and seemed to shrink back into themselves. Deep down in my core, I ached to touch him. I wanted to run my fingers over each scar and muscle, to know each story.
To know him.
Still holding the reins in one hand, he grabbed the well bucket with the other and poured it over his face and body, ignoring the stares. His skin glistened in the sun as rivulets of muddy water trickled down between his pectoral muscles.
“Who is that?” I whispered to the woman beside me.
Her voice was barely a squeak. “Bors MacDonald. He comes and goes, every few years. Pay him no mind and he’ll be gone before you know it...”
He glanced our way, his dark, unsettling eyes pinning me in place, and whatever the washerwoman’s next words were, they were lost to me, because all I heard was my own heartbeat. The intensity in his gaze caused a quiver to replace the tension down low, and I felt a trickle of fluid leak between my legs.
He dropped the bucket and the reins, and took a few long strides in my direction, never once unlocking his eyes from mine. His jawline hardened into a severe angle as the muscle there flexed under the days of unshaven beard.
I nearly cowered before him, half expecting to be bawled out for staring, but he stopped just a few inches from where I stood, appearing to battle with himself… Against what? I didn’t know. But in my mind’s eye I saw him stride over, pin me down and force himself upon me right there and then, and I felt my nipples tighten to peaks at the idea.
“This time I’m here to stay, Annie,” he muttered.
His eyes stayed up on me, as if he was trying to make some important decision. His brow tightened and I thought he might speak to me.
Instead, on a pained huff, he turned, scooped up his clothes without dressing, mounted his horse and rode on through the town center leaving me standing unable to draw my next breath.
Nobody spoke for a long moment after he was gone. The washerwomen went back to their tasks muttering and mumbling, and when I was finally able, I took a few deep breaths to settle the violent longing that had come over me.
“Who is he?” I asked Annie when I gathered my senses, then clarified, “What is he?”
She narrowed her eyes, as if reluctant to talk about him, then said, “A warrior of the clan. A dangerous man. You keep away from him.”
One of the other women laughed. “Though I hear he’s a devil under the sheets.”
“Aye, and what would you know about it, Maggie Fitzroy?”
My face turned red, though not from embarrassment. The thought of anyone else having him made my blood burn in my veins. I’d never known jealousy before but I now understood why it could drive a person mad.
“You keep away from him,” Annie said. “I mean it, you’re far too young and sweet to go near a brute like that.”
I thanked her, and sought out Matilda, barely able to pay attention as she gave me her advice, before making my way out of the town center and onto the path home.
And that should have been the end of it, but when I came to a crossroads, and saw muddy hoofprints heading in the opposite direction, it gave me pause. I considered the road ahead, then cast my mind back to my dream.
A feeling in the pit of my stomach told me something had changed. Something within me. And try as I might to shrug it off, I could not.
My mother and father had always forbidden any mention of men as it related to me. Marriage and love and all it entailed, all the mysteries of the bed that I so longed to know, did not seem to be my destiny. My sisters could marry but I could not, and I was unsure why but without prospect I dared not challenge my parents on the subject.
But a man like that, I thought to myself, swallowing hard and feeling my cheeks flush. A man with such strength, such passion, such intensity. My family would be powerless to stop a man like that from taking me as his own.
Wouldn’t they?
And I liked the thought of that very, very much.
Being taken.
There would be a beating in it for me, I was sure, but instead of taking the path toward home, I turned in the direction of the hoofprints.