She froze.Her?Who was he talking about? She racked her brain, casting her mind back. Shock rocked through her when she remembered who she had shared that with. Effie. Effie, the same woman who had told her to ride out into the woods, where they had been waiting for her…
Of everything that had happened, that stung her the most deeply. Effie was the first person who had truly made her feel at home in the Keep, a person she had allowed into her chamber, a person who had braided her hair and helped her dress and spoken with her about the most intimate of subjects. And to know now that she had been using all of that to turn Ameliaover to the people she couldn’t stand… it made her sick to her stomach.
“See, she can hardly speak, she’s so looking forward to seeing her kin again,” the advisor continued, spinning her silence into something positive, though it was anything but.
“Aye, lass, you’ll soon be back with them,” Donald remarked, lowering himself to sit on the edge of the bed. The frame creaked loudly beneath his weight, the bed of what looked to be an old inn barely holding up underneath him. She scrabbled her knees to her chest, putting as much distance between the two of them as possible.
“Once we have dealt with the… formalities,” the advisor remarked, gesturing between the two of them.Formalities?Donald reached for her knee, and his cold touch made her shudder. He meant to defile her! Effie must have told them that nothing had happened between her and Arran, and they believed that she was still pure. Still pure, and waiting for the touch of this ancient man…
“We’ll dispose of Aitken, and be done with it.”
She parted her lips, a cry of horror on her tongue, but she could not come out with it. Dispose of him? What did they mean by that?
“Are you going to kill him?” she whispered. Donald, who seemed to take her shock for relief, nodded.
“Aye. You’ll finally be free from that sham of a marriage.”
She sank back onto the bed, her eyes wide. Donald rose to his feet, at least giving her a little grace for the time being.
“We should let Amelia get some rest,” the advisor suggested, as he backed towards the door. “We have guards on the door to make sure nobody will get in, should the Aitken boy come looking for her.”
Donald glanced down at her one last time. There was such lust in his eyes, it nearly made her ill, right then and there. Shehad never known what it meant for a man to look at her the way he did in that moment, but now, she understood. It felt like a twisted parody of the way that Arran made her feel, the way he touched her, his hands caressing every inch of her body as though she were a gift from the heavens. But Donald? Donald intended no such kindness to her.
“Wait till we get her to the Keep, Laird,” his advisor told him firmly. “In your marital bed.”
Donald flicked his tongue over his teeth with a lascivious glance, and she closed her eyes, wishing herself somewhere, anywhere else.
With that, the two of them made their way out of the room, leaving her alone in that small space, wondering what on Earth was going to become of her.
She grabbed the blanket laid out on the bed, and pulled it over herself, wrapping it around her shoulders to try and ward off the shivers that coursed through her whole body. Though she knew all too well that it wasn’t the cold that had caused them, it was terror. Fear. Dread. How could this have happened? She should never have listened to Effie, she should have stayed at the Keep, she should have waited for Arran to return, and then none of this would have happened.
Would he come for her? She didn’t know. Perhaps he would think she had simply fled from the Keep and let her leave. Perhaps he thought that all the closeness the two of them had shared in the time since they had first come together had been nothing more than a game she’d played to wait out her time, until she could flee. And even if he did come looking for her, what were the chances he’d be able to find her? He was a fine hunter and a good tracker, but there were limits to what he’d be able to do, even if he did finally find her. With guards on the door, as they had spoken about, perhaps it would have been safer for him to keep his distance.
Numbness flooded her body as the shock began to set in. Whatever they’d had, it was over. It would never be the same as it had been before. Donald would claim her, defile her in all the ways she had tried to avoid for so long, and Arran would never be able to so much as look her in the eye again. The small taste of freedom, of happiness, she had gotten at the Aitken Keep was well and truly over.
And what waited for her on the other side, she was loath to find out.
17
“Amelia!”
Arran’s voice bounced off the walls, circling about his head. He had arrived back from the hunt a few hours before, and, as he always did, he had retreated straight to their bedroom to check on her, only to find their marital bed empty, the covers tossed back and askew, and Amelia nowhere to be seen.
He had been pacing the Keep ever since, scouring it from top to bottom to try and locate her, but had, as of yet, found nothing that might have indicated where she had gone to. Every door he stepped through, he found himself praying she was on the other side, expecting to see her sweet smile as she lifted her gaze from a book and greeted him but there was nothing. No sign of where she had gone to, or when she might have been returning.
If she was returning at all.
A thought he could barely even entertain. He strode past the portrait of his mother, and, for a moment, he could have sworn that he felt her sharp eyes boring into him with a little more purpose than before. He refused to so much as glance over in her direction. He would not be abandoned, not again, not after everything he had shared with Amelia.
Finally, he came to a halt in the great hall, which, at that moment, seemed almost painfully empty. Most of the residents of the Keep were taking care of their daily tasks, and none of them would likely have noticed that Amelia was missing; Gregory, for his part, was dropping off some of the spoils of their hunt with a local family who had been struggling to make ends meet recently, and would not be back for another hour or so.
That left Arran alone to find her, which he had yet to succeed at. With every passing moment, he grew more and more concerned, racking his brain for any hint of where she might have vanished to. He interrogated in great detail the conversation they’d had before he had left that morning, for anything that might have indicated that she would want to flee, given the chance. But her sleepy smile, the warmth of her hand beneath his lips, all of it was as it had always been. Nothing was different.
Or, at least, nothing had seemed that way to him.
He heard footsteps passing outside the main hall, glanced around and, when he saw Effie, her maidservant, passing by, his heart leapt. She must have known something about where her lady had fled to.
“Effie!”
