Highland Brawn (The Band of Cousins Book 8) Read online

  The man didn’t look like much of a warrior—he’d lost most of his hair and had a small paunch—but he had the audacity to lift his head up and say, “I’ll do as I like with the bitch.” He placed his hands underneath him to lift himself back up.

  The man apparently had a death wish, so Connor decided to oblige him. He bent over, rolled him over onto his back, picked him up by his tunic and lifted him into the air. “Say the word, Sela, and I’ll twist his scrawny neck.”

  Sela ran toward him and grabbed his arm, “Nay, don’t hurt him, please. Set him down. He didn’t do anything to me.”

  He looked at Sela, barely able to speak. “You defend him? I saw him grab you. You’ll be bruised on the morrow. One twist of his neck and he’ll never touch you again.”

  He saw her glance down the street to a small group of horses headed their way. He still had the man in the air, and his face had turned a deep shade of red, but the look in his eyes was something Connor hadn’t seen before. Despite the situation, which was very much in Connor’s favor, the older man looked defiant.

  “Put me down,” he rasped.

  “Sela? Do you need help? What goes on here?”

  Three men approached them on horseback, one of whom Connor recognized from Inverness, an older man with dark hair sprinkled with white.

  “Vern, help us, please,” Sela called out to the older man.

  Connor set the fool down, glancing around him. “I’m defending a woman’s honor. Someone ought to teach your friend how to treat a woman.”

  “Hord, what did you do?”

  “I always do exactly as I wish.” The man rubbed his neck where Connor had held him. “Sela, you’ll pay for this.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong. Please.”

  The fear in Sela’s face affected Connor, especially since she was usually so adept at hiding her emotions, but he was at a loss as to how to help her. He’d offered to twist the man’s neck. Other than getting rid of him, what else could she want?

  “Climb on and I’ll take you back, Sela,” Vern said. “Hord, behave yourself.”

  Sela glanced at Connor as she mounted the horse, but her gaze drifted back to Hord with a fear that brought out his every protective instinct. He would not forget the bastard, or the twisted grin he now wore as he stared after Sela. The expression on the daft man’s face alone begged Connor to react.

  He was outnumbered by far because another group of guards had come along to join them. Six men stepped toward him, but he turned and walked away. He wasn’t ready to instigate another attack.

  For now, he had no choice but to back down, but he knew he would face this man again. How had such a weakling turned the Ice Queen into a bowl of porridge?

  ***

  Connor bolted up in bed, wiping the sweat from his face.

  He’d been dreaming about Sela, so real that he could smell her scent of wildflowers. She’d kissed him before running away and yelling over her shoulder, “Help me, Connor. Please help me.”

  He moved over to the table in the middle of the chamber. They were staying at the inn on the edge of town, The Buck’s Inn, an arrangement that ensured Gregor and the others could find them.

  He poured himself a goblet of water from the ewer and swallowed it in one gulp. Hell, but the dream had seemed so real.

  He had to get her to talk. Grabbing his sword, he left the chamber and headed down the staircase for a breath of fresh air. He heard snoring from behind one of the doors, and someone moving about in a chamber down the hall, but he doubted the inn was full. There hadn’t been many people about earlier. He strode toward town until he could see the castle up on the hill, the mighty fortress he had to penetrate. In the dark of the night, it looked even more imposing. He had to get inside.

  But how?

  He guessed they would have a hundred guards or more, so he’d have to use subterfuge.

  “My lord,” a voice called out to him in the dark.

  He glanced over his shoulder, surprised to see Thorn racing toward him. “What are you doing awake at this hour? ’Tis the middle of the night.”

  “But I will help you. I’ll slip into the castle and find Mistress Sela. I can do it. I surely can!” His eyes were huge and luminescent in the dark of the night.

  Connor thought the idea had merit, but only if he was certain she was inside.

  “So you think you can sneak inside that fortress on the hill and get to Sela?”

  “I can. You’d be surprised how well I can sneak around. Do not forget I am the son of Thor.”

  His cheeky comment nearly made Connor chuckle, but he controlled it because he could tell the lad meant every word.

  “But some of the Dubh men would recognize you from earlier,” he countered.

  “If I put enough dirt on my face, they’ll never see me in the dark. What do you wish for me to tell her?” The lad groped the ground in the dark to prove his point.

  Connor pondered his proposition carefully, looking up at the half moon, the gray clouds passing over it every so often. His decision finally made, he nodded to Thorn. “You’ll go inside, but you must accept one condition.”

  “What? I can do it,” the lad said, hopping from one foot to the other.

  “You will find out where she is—which window, which floor—then come back and tell me. Can you do that and return to me in less than an hour?”

  “Aye, I will make you proud, my lord. You’ll see.” The scamp took off at a dead run only to be caught by Connor’s whistle. He stopped and spun around. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ll go with you to find the best way in.”

  The lad paused, and he could see it was a difficult thing for him to do. He was anxious to take part in what he clearly saw as an adventure. Looking up at Connor, he whispered, “Shall we go now?”

  Connor glanced around at the few drunks wandering the street and decided he saw no one threatening. Perhaps he should go back to get Braden or Roddy in case he needed assistance, but there was no point in waking them when he and Thorn could uncover what they needed and be back inside before they ever opened their eyes. Making his decision, he pointed. “Let’s move. You stay with me until I give you instructions to go. Understood?”

  “Aye!” The lad’s enthusiasm reminded Connor of himself at a much younger age. He’d often tried to follow his twin brothers, Jamie and Jake, but more often than not they would send him back to the keep without any satisfaction.

  Although he was now the tallest lad in his generation of Grants, he’d been the runt for a good while. Even Braden and Roddy had been bigger, and Loki? He’d appeared to be a giant.

  When he was a wee laddie, his sire would lift him up onto his shoulders and say, “There. Does it look any different from up there?”

  Everything had looked better from atop his father’s shoulders. “Someday you may be taller than me,” he would tell Connor, “and if so, this would be your point-of-view. Use it wisely, lad. Because everyone will want to take the biggest man out.”

  How right his father had been.

  He was taller than his father now, something he’d never expected to happen, but he still looked up to the man. Alexander Grant was the wisest man in the Highlands.

  When they reached the outside of the castle walls, Connor found a hiding place and showed Thorn exactly where to climb the wall for the best footholds. The wall crumbled in spots, which made it easy.

  “Thorn, promise me that you will only search for Sela’s location. Understood?”

  “Aye, my lord.”

  “And you’re to come back if you run into too many guards. I’ll not have you hurt. Are you listening?” he asked.

  The lad nodded his head hard enough to give himself a neck ache.

  “You have half an hour to get in and out. Return with her whereabouts and I’ll buy you the biggest meat pie in all of Berwick on the morrow.” Food still held as the best motivation for the lad.

  “A lamb one? Could I have a lamb meat pie?” The lad’s eyes we
re as big as the gems on Connor’s sire’s famous sword.

  “Aye, if they have one. A lamb meat pie. Now go.”

  Thorn grinned at him as he started up the side of the wall with ease. Connor was surprised at how easily he found footholds. The lad slipped out of sight, and a few moments later, Connor let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. The lack of noise indicated Thorn had not been caught.

  Connor’s mind kept turning as he waited for news of Sela. She’d want to know why he’d followed her to the keep. He’d tell her that he needed information on the Dubh men, he decided. That much was true. His greater motivation was to help her—and to find out exactly what she feared.

  He hadn’t been waiting long when a noise from the top of the wall caught him. He hid in the small group of trees, surprised to see it was Thorn returning already.

  The lad waited until he was next to him before blurting out, “I found her. I know where she is.”

  Chapter Four

  Sela followed Guy into a chamber filled with many of the men in charge of this operation. Some she knew, some she did not.

  Silence greeted her.

  The group of men turned to stare at her. Hord, Dee, and Guy were all present, along with her only friend, Vern, and a few others. Dee pointed to a chair and said, “Sit, Sela.”

  She did as instructed, doing her best to ignore Hord, whose gaze was so unsettling it scrambled her thoughts.

  The bastard’s twisted grin always upset her.

  “We have three big shipments arriving,” Dee said. “One will be here in two days, the other two will be here the day after that. All of the shipments will be leaving the harbor five days from the morrow at the end of the day. Your job will be to care for the cargo until the ships go out of port. If this goes as planned, we’ll have enough coin to slow our operation down, focus more on our whorehouses and fighting wagers again.”

  His words knifed into her. Although she felt stricken, she forced herself to look unmoved. “Will they be lasses or lads?” she asked, her voice unwavering. Her gaze shot to Vern, who looked equally disturbed by the news. She knew he would have left the Channel long ago were it not for her—and Guy and Dee’s reputation for murdering anyone who did not agree with them.

  “Mostly lasses between the ages of twelve and twenty, so it shouldn’t be a difficult situation for you to manage them with the assistance of several guards. You will be given an allotment of food for them. The last day the food will be laced with a sleep potion so there will be no problem getting them on the boat that night, though that could change. We haven’t decided whether to put them asleep before or after they board the ship. It depends on the number of men and crates we will have. If there are enough of them, we’ll not put them in crates. That information will be forthcoming when we have the true number of the cargo. Questions?”

  “How many?”

  “Between seventy-five and one hundred.”

  Sela almost fell off her chair. The mere thought made her want to weep. It was bad enough that they’d tried to send away her girls in Inverness—but one hundred lasses and lads?

  “Do you not think the task could prove difficult with a group that large?” she asked Dee, refusing to look at anyone else.

  “We will bind those who are troublesome,” he said. “You must keep them inside the building and make sure they receive their rations.”

  “What happens if you don’t lace their food with sleep potion the last day?” one of the men asked. He looked as if he hadn’t had a bath in several moons.

  “The alternative is to take them to a berth south of the port where they’ll load themselves, Guy said.

  “But witnesses will see them board, aye?” Hord asked. “Is that not a problem?”

  “That location is far enough away for us to not to have to worry about witnesses.” Guy scratched his beard, his usual indication of impatience. He then cast a long, weighing glance at the men assembled in front of him. “And I will remind all of you that we cannot have another instance like what happened at the other buildings in our possession. The guards at that location chose to imbibe rather than keep watch, and they paid for that mistake with their lives. This is a large operation and we must exercise the utmost caution.”

  “We cannot afford to lose any more of our captives or our guards,” Dee said. “Do your jobs. You’ll have plenty of days to drink yourself into oblivion once this is over. For those of you who choose not to work your hardest, we can easily find ways to make you work harder.” He glanced from man to man, but most refused to look him in the eye. They’d clearly lost many men at the other holding.

  Had the Grant warriors taken them out?

  Although she was hesitant to engage in the discussion, Sela forced herself to ask a question. “Which building?”

  She doubted she’d have the opportunity to use the information, but if she could do anything to stop this madness from unfolding, she would. If she saw Connor Grant again, what would he do with that information? Could he put a stop to the loading of the lasses on the ships, just as they’d done in Inverness?

  “You’ll find out in due time.”

  Sela played with the folds in her gown. “When may I receive my boon?” She held her breath and said a quick prayer.

  “When this is finished in five days,” Dee replied. “If it’s successful.”

  She caught Hord tipping his head to Guy, who then asked, “Are you having problems with one of the Grants? I’ve heard he is in town. How do you know the man?”

  “I met him in Inverness. He is part of that Band we’ve heard about. The Highlanders who fought our people near the port in Inverness.” She kept her back as straight as possible, not wanting to let the bastard Hord know how he affected her.

  “Get rid of him,” Guy said to the others.

  Hord asked, “Why don’t we kill the fool and throw him out to sea?”

  Her gut clenched at the thought of them killing Connor. She hardly knew him, so why did she respond in such a way?

  The answer came to her more quickly than she would have thought. He was the only truly honorable man she’d met since losing her parents. And even though the two men looked nothing alike, something about him reminded her of her sire.

  The filthy man scoffed at Hord. “Are you out of your mind? Don’t you know who you’re dealing with? Connor Grant is Alex’s son, and he’s bigger than his sire. You won’t take him down easily.”

  Another grinned and said, “My men took him down.”

  “Aye, I heard,” Guy said. “But he still walks, and how many men did you lose? He’s a formidable enemy, and we won’t deal with him unless we’re forced to.”

  Hord chuckled. “You have no backbone. Send him out to sea. I don’t know why you don’t get rid of him where he’ll not be found.”

  Dee stood up, his eyes blazing. “Because he’s from Clan Grant, you fool. Unless you care to call five hundred savage warriors down on us before the shipment, I’d leave him be. After the shipment is gone, do with him as you like. But do not kill him before that. We have enough men to handle Clan Ramsay, but not the Grants. I’m warning you, Hord, control yourself.”

  Hord grumbled for a time, but he didn’t say anything else.

  “That is all, Sela. Go to your chamber. We’ll retrieve you on the day after the morrow as soon as the shipment arrives.”

  She wished to spit in his face. To yell. To scream. To run and run and run.

  But she could not. They had the one and only piece of leverage that could keep her here.

  She was powerless.

  She nodded and left the solar, Vern trailing along behind her. “Do not worry. I will keep him at bay for now.”

  “Many thanks to you, Vern. I appreciate it. I need that boon.” In this world of chaos, dirty deeds, coins, and cruelty, it was the only thing that kept her going. It was the last bit of goodness left to her.

  “Do as you’re told and all will be well.”

  She turned to face her friend as
she reached her chamber. “My thanks for your help, Vern.” The older man had become a protector for her, and for that, she was grateful.

  He said, “Aye, you can rely on me.”

  Nodding, she entered the chamber and closed the door behind her. She leaned against the door for a moment, thinking about all that had happened, then pushed away from it and fell onto the bed, fully clothed. A dark-haired handsome Highlander dominated her thoughts.

  By the saints above, she’d almost laughed hysterically when Connor had thrown Hord through the air. The fierce Highlander’s defense of her “honor” had absolutely stunned her.

  When had she ever had honor?

  Five years ago, she’d lived a normal life. She’d been part of a loving family, but Dee and Guy had brought a group of men to her family’s hut on the outskirts of Edinburgh. They’d restrained her father while they killed her mother in front of him, only to put a knife in his heart, too. She’d hidden in the corner and watched it all. They’d taken her away with them, and her life had been horrific ever since.

  In the beginning, she’d wondered why they’d chosen her. Dee had told her the truth once. Guy had seen her white hair from afar and decided he had to have her. He’d offered to buy her, but her sire had refused. Apparently, they hadn’t liked being turned away, so they’d returned to get what they wanted. Her sire had attempted to protect his family—he’d attacked the intruders so brutally Guy had thirsted for vengeance once he gained the upper hand.

  How she missed her sweet mama Dyna with her pale blonde hair and her dancing blue eyes. She was a Norsewoman, so tall she could look Papa in the eye. The two had loved to dance in their small abode, Mama Dyna giggling shamelessly in delight.

  There was no dancing anymore, and no singing either.

  She forced herself to replay those memories every day so she’d never forget them. It was the most precious thing she had these days, well, other than the most precious thing of all.

  As she lay there, alone in her bed, she found herself thinking of what it would be like to have a different life. To live in a small cottage in a forest with a big strong man who would cherish her and fight for her honor like Connor Grant had done. They’d love each other, raise their bairns together, and no one would ever, ever bother them.