“Conal, in the name of all that is holy, tell Adair the truth,” Duncan begged the laird. “Tell her that you love her, because it is obvious to everyone in the keep that you do. And she loves you, but she is as stubborn as you are and will not admit to it.”
“You cannot make him say what is not so, Duncan,for if I understand one thing about your brother it is that he is an honorable man. He does not love me.”
The laird stood tongue-tied. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to cry out that he did indeed love her. But before everyone in the keep? His men? The servants who had now come up from the kitchens? His brothers?
They would think him a fool, and he would not be made to appear as if he were. He stood silent.
Adair looked at him. She was angry, but still her eyes filled with tears. “Farewell, my lord,” she said, and turned to leave the hall.
“Conal! You can’t let her go,” Murdoc cried. “She is carrying your child!”
The laird of Cleit felt as if he had been hit a mon-strous blow in his belly. His chest felt tight and actually painful. Then his anger exploded as he stepped forward and grasped Adair’s arm in a hard grip. “You bitch! You would leave me, and not tell me you were carrying my child? Know that our bairn is the only thing that prevents me from strangling you where you stand, Adair.”
She slapped him as hard as she could with her other hand. “Our bairn? Nay, my lord.Yourbastard!” And when she went to slap him a second blow he grabbed the wrist of her hand in a terrible grip. “You are hurting me!” she cried.
“Holding you thus is the only thing now that keeps me from killing you,” he snarled. “Understand one thing, Adair. You are going nowhere. You are mine. You were from the moment we met, and you will always be.
I have asked you to wed me, and now you will, for my bairn will not be born without its name.”
“I will not wed you, Conal, and you cannot force me, for you do not love me. I was married the first time by proxy, and knew naught of it until I was faced by a pockmarked boy crowing his sovereignty over me. A second time for convenience. But if I marry again it will be for love and no other reason, for now I have nothing to offer a husband but my own love and loyalty. I am nomore the Countess of Stanton. I am no longer a landowner. I have only myself to give, and I will not give myself away to a man who cares so little for me that he cannot say he loves me, and mean it from his heart.”
“You are going nowhere,” he repeated in a tight voice. Then he dragged her from the hall, and upstairs to their bedchamber. Forcing her into the room, he closed the door behind her, and taking a key from his key ring, he locked the door. “We will discuss this further when I return from hunting,” he told her.
“There is nothing to discuss,” she yelled through the door as she heard him walking away and back down the stairs.
Back in the hall Conal Bruce turned to his brothers and his servants. “I have locked the recalcitrant wench in my bedchamber. Elsbeth, neither you nor the others are to go near that door while I am gone. Let Adair’s temper cool a bit. By evening I expect she will be more reasonable.”
“More likely her heart will be further hardened against you, my lord,” Elsbeth told him. “Why do you not just tell her you love her, and be done with it?”
“What makes you think I do?” he asked of her.
Elsbeth snorted derisively, while Flora and Grizel were both wearing knowing smiles upon their faces.
Behind him he heard his two brothers snickering, and he could sense the grins upon the faces of his men. “She will see reason eventually,” Conal Bruce said. “She does not want our child born on the wrong side of the blanket like she was.”
“She knew nothing of her true sire until she was six,”
Elsbeth reminded him. “She never felt bastard-born, for John Radcliffe loved her dearly. She was his daughter no matter who got her on her mother. She does not really understand the consequences of a bastard-born child, for she never had to, even in the royal nursery.”
“My bairn will not be born labeled bastard,” the lairdsaid. “She carries my child. I am willing to wed her. The priest will wed us, by proxy if necessary.”
But Adair continued to prove difficult. She would not even speak to Conal Bruce when he returned from hunting that day and released her from her prison.
She stamped down into the hall, ate her meal, and went into the kitchens. When the other servants had retired to their quarters in the attic, Conal Bruce sat grimly waiting in the hall for Adair to return. When she finally did she ignored him as she went about her duties for the evening. Then she prepared to return to the kitchens.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he demanded of her.
“I have concluded my duties for the day,” she said. “I am now going to bed.”
“You sleep with me, Adair,” he said fiercely.
“You did not say that bedding me would be part of my duties for the six groats a year I am to be paid,” she returned sweetly. “I must insist on at least ten groats if I am to fuck you on a regular basis. And you have not yet given me my coins for the year ahead,” Adair reminded him. She held out her hand, palm turned up.
“Then you plan to remain,” he countered, ignoring her demand for payment.
“Elsbeth has convinced me this evening that walking the many miles to Stanton might not be wise, given my condition. And then too I have considered seeing the look on your face when I birth your bastard. Especially if the child in my womb is a son. You do not have any other bastards, do you?” Adair asked him venomously.
Conal Bruce gritted his teeth. “Nay, I do not,” he said.
