“Ye took your time,” a voice sounded through the bushes.
Mary started, then her face flooded with surprise and joy. “Will!”
“At your service, madam.” Will helped her through the break in the hedge, growling in his bearlike voice. “The pair of ye could nae wait until we were safe before going at it, could ye? And me out here freezing in the damp.”
“Ye look dry to me, ” Mal observed as he took his brother’s offered hand and scrambled through to join them. Will’s coat, though dirty like Malcolm’s, had dried, and Will’s gloved hand was warm. “Find a place out of the night, did ye?”
Will shrugged, unabashed. “Aye, well, there was a lady in a house down the lane . . .”
Malcolm laughed out loud, not bothered for this moment about stealth. He clapped Will on the back and put his arm around Mary.
“Come on, love,” he said to Mary, kissing her cheek. “Ye’ll have t’ put up with him, but that’s the price ye pay with family.”
“It’s all right,” Mary answered, the happiness in her voice bolstering him. “I love every one of you.” She slid her arm through Will’s, and sank into Mal’s embrace, Mackenzies together. “Take me home, gentlemen.”
“Home” for now was a tall, narrow house in Paris, reached after an arduous journey, but was it was a journey Mary undertook with gladness. They’d traveled by back lanes to the coast in Lincolnshire, where Gair came for them in his ship.
Ewan was with Gair, the lad bursting into tears when he saw Mary. He’d been commissioned by the colonel, he told her, pointing at Malcolm, to find Gair and have him put in at Lincolnshire. Ewan had also brought a few treasures at Malcolm’s command—the painting of Mal’s mother, a bundle of Mary’s clothes, and a small cask of whisky. The whisky was something to sell to the Frenchies, Ewan explained, in case they needed money.
The voyage to France was rough, roundabout, and heart-pounding in places. Too many English frigates, both of the navy and those of the excise men, floated through the sea. They landed in a cove of a tiny place Mary never learned the name of, and traveled in easy stages to Paris.
The house they reached—belonging to the Mackenzies, Mal said—was already inhabited. Alec Mackenzie clattered down the stairs as they entered, a wee mite with curly red hair in the crook of his arm. Alec bounded down the rest of the way when he saw them, and Mal caught him, babe and all, in an exuberant embrace.
Mary had the treat of seeing her husband break down and cry. Mal held Alec, his closest brother, in a hug that threatened to break Alec’s bones and crush the baby. Mary rescued the child, bouncing little Jenny in her arms while Mal and Alec tried to occupy the same space at once.
Will rushed in from the street and joined the pile, the brothers laughing, crying, hugging, all of them jabbering at the same time.
The front doorway darkened, and the bulk of a man came inside. “What the devil is all the noise?” he shouted.
That voice broke a moment later when he saw Malcolm and Will. Mary stood aside with Alec, who was wiping his eyes, as the duke, moving in shock, went to Malcolm and gathered him close. They clung to each other, father and son, until the duke pulled back and put Malcolm’s face between his hands.
“I thought ye gone forever, runt,” he said. “Willie . . .”
“I’m hard t’ kill, Dad,” Mal said, stepping back as the duke drew Will to him. “I’m a brollachan, remember? I’ll always find a way to come back.”
The duke lifted his head and saw Mary. Alec had taken Jenny from her, and the baby looked on, fingers in her mouth, but in curiosity, not fear.
The duke took Mary’s hands. “Daughter,” he said. “Thank you for bringing him back t’ me.”
Mary dared to fold her arms around the duke’s large body, her heart full. “I am so very happy to see you, Father.”
“Well, now.” The duke’s usually brusque voice went soft.
More happiness was to be had when two visitors followed the duke inside. Audrey rushed to Mary, her extended abdomen reaching Mary first.
Mary held her sister, her tears coming as she once more felt Audrey’s slender arms around her. Jeremy wove in and out of the melee, shaking hands, thumping backs, looking embarrassed at this outpouring of emotion, but no less pleased.
Mal came to Mary as soon as her sister released her. “Here we are, then,” Malcolm said. “I brought the whisky. Anyone have a glass?”
Soon they stood in the drawing room, lifting tumblers full of amber liquid that matched the Mackenzie men’s eyes, lemonade for the ladies, milk for Jenny. They drank to Duncan, to Angus, and to Magnus, then to the fallen Highlanders, and all they’d lost.
“T’ the Mackenzies,” Mal said, his voice a little slurred after all the toasting. “And what the future might bring for them.”
They raised glasses again.
“To Malcolm and Mary,” Alec said. He bounced Jenny, who gave them all a wide, milky smile. “May their love ever grow, and may they fill the house with many wee bairns.”
“Aye,” Will said. “We love the bairns.” He chucked Jenny under the chin, and she gurgled, already charming.
“Ye won’t have t’ wait long.” Mal slid his hand to Mary’s abdomen. “We’ve already begun.”
After a moment of silence, the room filled again with laughter, congratulations, Scots voices rumbling.
Sunshine warmed the room, as did Malcolm’s arm around Mary. They might be far from their homes, from Mary’s beginnings in Lincolnshire, and Mal’s at Kilmorgan. But Mal and Mary were together, surrounded by family, surrounded by love.
And that, more than anything, meant home.
Mal and Mary lay together in bed that night, celebrating once more in their own private way. Mary held her husband close. “I love you, Malcolm Mackenzie.”
“I love you, sweet Mary.” Malcolm rested his hand between her breasts, over her heart. “There it is, your fire. I always knew ye had it.”
“You set it free,” Mary said. “Thank you, Mal.”
He smiled at her, the sinful grin that had first melted her in the shadowy hall in Edinburgh, when no one in the world had known where they were. No one again knew where they lay tonight, no one but family, and that was as it should be.
“Ah, Mary, ye are so very welcome,” Mal said. “I told ye that I’d always come for ye, remember? That ye’d never be rid of me that easy.”
“I know you will,” Mary said. “My fearsome brollachan.”
“But ye never have to fear me, love.” Mal touched her cheek. “Not you.”
“And I don’t. I love you, Malcolm, with all my heart.”
“And I you, me wicked lass.”
They ceased speaking then, receding into the place without words, where they gave each other love, and knew nothing but that.
Epilogue
TWO YEARS LATER
Malcolm Mackenzie gazed over the bare ground that had once held the markings of a foundation and his pile of quarried stones. The ground had been scarred over, the stones gone. Whether Cumberland’s men had scattered them or local Highlanders had taken them to shore up their own houses, Mal didn’t know. Nor did he care. Let those who needed them use them.
Mary, in her practical Highland skirt and bodice, a little boy slung to her back in peasant fashion, joined him. She was breathless, her face flushed.
“That’s all the baggage settled in the distillery,” she said. “I think. Will didn’t have to give us quite so much furniture.”
“He has an obsession for it,” Malcolm said. “He acquires it to impress ladies or soften those he’s spying on, then doesn’t know what to do with it.”
“I daresay it will come in handy.”
Mal nodded. He drew Mary to him, but kept studying the view—the empty land that rose to hills, the wall of mountains hidden in clouds.
“Bittersweet,” Mary said.
“Eh?” Malcolm turned to kiss the top of his son’s head. Little Angus was asleep, his amber eyes squeezed closed, his red
-gold hair protected by a small cap.
Malcolm had thought his ability to love had reached its capacity until he’d beheld the wee lad in Mary’s arms after a long night of worry. The little one had done something to him.
Mal’s burning need to take care of all those around him had only escalated. He’d never be rid of it, he thought. Ah, well. It is me lot.
“Bittersweet, I said,” Mary repeated. “Coming home, but finding it so changed.”
“Aye, it would be, wouldn’t it?”
Mal didn’t like to talk about it—the emptiness of the Highlands, the large houses deserted or filled with ambitious Englishmen, smaller farmers gone, land fallow. The wearing of kilts had been banned, so had the playing of pipes and speaking Erse. The Highlanders were crushed, so many clansmen either killed by the Butcher or taken away to be hanged.
But not all, Mal knew. People like Rabbie and Gair spoke the Scots language out of earshot of anyone English, keeping it alive. The sounds of pipes could be heard sometimes, faintly, in the hills. Kilts became blankets, the looms clacking away in secret spaces.
Highlanders would never entirely be defeated.
Mal’s own situation was an example. His family was believed dead, the title stripped from them. Until, that is, the Earl of Wilfort, a powerful man with the ear of the king, convinced those who made these decisions that the Kilmorgan title should be restored.
The youngest son, Malcolm, was alive and married to his daughter, Wilfort had explained, and in exile in France. Wilfort had come to know Mal Mackenzie well, and said that Malcolm had been as loyal as he could have been, under the circumstances. Mal’s character had also been vouched for by a dragoon captain, Robert Ellis, and a young lordling, Jeremy Drake, son of Viscount Bancroft.
Therefore, the arrest warrant for Malcolm was lifted, and he was eventually allowed back into Scotland without harm, the title of Duke of Kilmorgan restored.
Alec, Will, and their father elected to stay in France and be considered dead back home. The old duke said he wouldn’t be able to bear Scotland now—without his wife, his home, without Duncan and Angus.
Alec had already begun a life in Paris, becoming a drawing master to the offspring of the King of France. The strangeness of a wild Scotsman who could draw and paint was an oddity that fascinated Alec’s new clients.
And Will . . . was Will. He told Malcolm that being dead gave him a great freedom to do anything he liked. He’d already been back to Scotland and England many times in the last two years, with the authorities none the wiser.
Malcolm, who’d never, ever in his life wanted to be duke, learned to take it without fuss. Mal had a family to look after now, and he’d carry on the name. No price was too high to maintain his father’s and brothers’ freedom.
Besides, Mary liked Kilmorgan.
“I suppose we start all over again,” Mary said now, readjusting Angus’s weight on her shoulder.
“Aye. But it’s better that way, eh? Our life in France gave me many new ideas for the house, for the gardens. We can use whatever stones are whole and strong from the old castle to start building the new.”
Mary looked skeptically up the hill, where the ruins of Kilmorgan Castle perched on the top. “That will take a lot of carrying.”
“No matter. As I told ye a long time ago, the lads around here need work and paying. We’ll have it begun in no time.” Malcolm waved at the expanse before them. “It will be grand, Mary. An elegant palace beloved by generations to come.”
“You’re very sure of yourself,” his wife said in her dry way.
“Of course I am.” Mal thumped his hands to his chest. “It’s me. Malcolm Mackenzie.” He grinned and took her hand. “Ah, Mary. We’re going to change the world.”
Mary’s smile filled up the empty spaces inside him, banishing the bitter to replace it with only the sweet. Malcolm drew her close, kissing the lips that were as soft as the English roses that grew outside her country home.
Mary kissed him back and touched his face, love in her eyes. “We’d best get started, then,” she said.
Dear Reader:
I hope you enjoyed this look into the past of my favorite Scottish family! When I was writing the first books of the Mackenzies series, particularly The Duke’s Perfect Wife and The Wicked Deeds of Daniel Mackenzie, I became intrigued by the ancestor the Mackenzies referred to as “Old Malcolm.”
According to the tales, Malcolm was the youngest of five Mackenzie sons of the mid-eighteenth century Duke of Kilmorgan. He was a brave fighter who’d been the only one of the family to survive the battle of Culloden during the 1745 uprising (or so the nineteenth-century brothers believe). Malcolm was also responsible for building the huge Mackenzie house in the north of Scotland to replace the original castle at Kilmorgan.
The more Malcolm and his wife, Lady Mary, walked through my imagination, the more I wanted to delve into their story. Malcolm was regarded as a formidable warrior who’d had a passionate and loving marriage with Mary, his very proper English lady wife. I wondered what Old Malcolm had been like as young Malcolm and how he and Mary came together, and I began to explore the tale of the two lovers.
What grew was much more than I expected. I fell in love with Mal and his brothers—Alec, Angus, Will, and Duncan, and even the belligerent old duke grew on me. What the 1880s Mackenzies know about their illustrious ancestor is only the tip of a far larger story.
As I researched the historical details of the Jacobite uprising I learned much that I had not known before, and I grieved for the men who’d laid down their lives for Scotland and Charles. I placed Mal and Mary and their families into these events, watching how Mal and each of his brothers dealt with them.
The result was The Stolen Mackenzie Bride, which can be read as a standalone, or as an introduction to the world of the Mackenzies. More about the Mackenzie families and the books in their series can be found on my website www.jenniferashley.com.
Read on for a peek at A Mackenzie Clan Gathering, a new story featuring Ian Mackenzie and Beth.
Best wishes,
Jennifer Ashley
Look for White Tiger, the next book in Jennifer Ashley’s Shifters Unbound paranormal romance series
Coming Spring 2016
Turn the page for a preview of
A Mackenzie Clan Gathering
Available November 2015 from InterMix
SCOTLAND 1892
Something woke Ian Mackenzie deep in the night. He lay motionlessly, on his side, eyes open and staring at darkness.
A dozen years ago, awakening to total darkness would have sent Ian into a crazed panic, ending up with him on his feet, roaring at the top of his voice in English, Gaelic, and French. Servants would have rushed in, restoring lights some foolish footman had put out, finding Ian standing up beside his bed, swearing in rage and fear.
Now, he lay calmly, absorbing the soft quiet of the darkness.
The reason for his calm lay behind him on the bed—his Beth, curled against him in a nest of warmth.
Whatever change in the huge house had alerted Ian had been too subtle to wake Beth. She slept on, her breathing even, one hand soft against his bare back.
Ian’s mind rapidly churned through every possibility of what had dragged him from his dreams. His children—Jamie, Belle, and Megan—were fast asleep in their nursery. Ian knew whenever one of them was awake, knew it in his bones. They were shut behind the door of the large nursery at the end of the hall. Safe.
He let his senses expand to every tiny sound of the night. This was Scotland in the autumn, and winds flowed down the mountains to swirl around Kilmorgan with the shrieking of a dozen banshees.
The vast house itself, built a century and a half ago, was alive with noise. Creaking of pipes Hart had installed to bring running water to the bedchambers. The crackle of Daniel’s electrics experiments, the tinny sounds of the interior telephone system nephew Daniel had also created.
At the moment, all those noises, except the wind, were
silenced. All except the snick of a window somewhere in the darkness of the house.
Ian and Beth were the only residents at Kilmorgan Castle, the vast mansion that stood twenty miles north of Inverness. Hart, the Duke of Kilmorgan and master of the house, was in Edinburgh with Eleanor and his two children. His other brothers, Mac and Cameron, were at their respective country homes with their families, not due to Kilmorgan for a day or so.
Ian knew the exact location of each house of his brothers, and how long it would take the families to travel to Kilmorgan to celebrate Hart’s birthday next week. None of them could have arrived in the middle of this night without Ian knowing about it.
Kilmorgan was quite empty for now, except for Ian’s family, the skeleton staff needed to run the place, and three of the dogs.
Dogs . . . They were in the stables, guarding the prize racehorses. They weren’t barking or making a fuss.
But Ian knew, without understanding how he knew, that someone who shouldn’t be there was inside the house.
He slid out of bed, moving smoothly enough not to wake Beth. He stood a moment at the bedside, strong toes curling on the soft carpet, cool air brushing his bare skin. His valet, Curry, had dropped a nightshirt over Ian’s head when he’d headed to bed, but when Beth had joined him, the nightshirt had been quickly tossed away.
Ian moved past the shirt, a pale smudge on the carpet, to reach for the long folds of plaid Curry had laid across a chair to warm before the fire. Ian wrapped the kilt around his large frame, tucking the excess folds in around his waist. He then moved to the chest of drawers, opened the top one, and slid out a Webley pistol.
Ian never kept loaded guns in the house. Far too dangerous with children around. All shotguns were locked into cabinets in the steward’s house near the stables, and any personal handguns were kept unloaded, ammunition locked away in a separate place. Ian had made this a firm rule, and Hart agreed.