Read Online Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 02] by Master of The Highland (html) - Free Book Online Page B

Madeline’s mounting resentment because for one cast-her-cares-to-the-wind moment she envied that woman.
Wanted to be she.
And so fervently her insides tightened with a winding, relentless ache, sheerest need spiraling from the top of her head to the tips of her toes and back again.
“You’ve gone pale, my lady, and you tremble.” Nella’s concerned voice rose above the sound of the burn’s rushing waters. “A plague on moldy relics and mumbling monks if sharing the air with such exalteds taxes you so.”
Madeline blinked, the pilgrim’s sway over her vanishing at once, his bonnie face fading from the shadows until only the hard thumping of her heart remained.
A bruised heart turned topsy-turvy, and the unsettling sense of something infinitely dear and precious spinning out of reach.
“I would not run from a whole phalanx of pasty-faced church worthies,” she huffed, dusting her skirts again, the true reason for her distress tucked securely in her heart. “Nor do moldering bones frighten me. Saintly or otherwise.”
Nella looked skeptical. “Then did the pain of some piteously cursed miracle seeker drive you to flee the cathedral?” She peered at Madeline from the shallows of the burn, her skirts hitched above the white-foaming water, her hazel eyes alight with keen interest. “Surely Madeline of Abercairn would not—”
“The Lady of Abercairn is no more,” Madeline said, examining her broken fingernails. “She was extirpated on the same blazing pyre that now holds my father’s ashes. His, and those of innocents whose sole crime was being too young to defend themselves against the killing swords of a turncoat Scotsman and the marauders who follow him.”
A wholly different kind of passion—dark and roiling—swept her. But its heat strengthened her, too, allowing her to straighten her back and lock away her grief. Her anger. Clenching her hands to tight fists, she bolted every hurting ounce of pain into the most inaccessible corner of her mind.
Her father’s honor, and her purpose, would be better served if delivered with a cooled temper and a steady hand.
She opened her mouth to remind Nella—and herself— of the purpose of their journey, but a loudly trilling curlew swooped out of nowhere, near clipping her head in its swift ascent to the rowans lining the abbey hill.
Almost a hedge, the red-berried trees flanked the buttressed wall of the Bishop’s Palace, while behind it, the cathedral’s bulk loomed proud and grand, its pointy spires piercing the sky, and soaring taller than the palace’s loftiest turrets.
Madeline’s gut clenched at the sight.
Had she truly burst through the palace gates, dodging the bishop’s own guardsmen, and giving poor Nella no choice but to tear after her? Had they really careened through orchards and herb gardens, sprinting past startled lay brothers, and clambering over walls and other obstacles like common riffraff?
Like beggary thieves?
Aye, they had, and the truth of it blasted heat onto her cheeks and lay like a cold, hard clump in the pit of her belly.
Shuddering, she leveled her most resolute look at Nella. “Do not speak of ‘the Lady of Abercairn’ again.”
Nella snorted, her brows shooting heavenward. “If the Lady of Abercairn is no more, then who was in such a fine ferment o’er a certain pinched-faced sacrist not so long ago?”
“Oh, bother!” Madeline blew out a gusty breath and eyed the swift-moving burn. A wade in its icy waters would cool more than her aching feet. “Certes, I am still . . . me,” she capitulated, struggling to yank off her right boot. “I fled because. . . .” she paused to catch her balance. “It . . . it was him again.”
Nella’s eyes rounded. “Your shadow man?”
“Aye.” The boot came free. “And more powerful than e’er before,” she added, pleased when her left boot slipped off without a fight. “Between his emotions welling inside me and the hawk-eyed sacrists crowding our every step, I could scarce draw breath.”
“In mercy’s name,” Nella breathed, tucking