TemptationinTartan by Suz deMello

soon
enough to reach out and grab his hand. “What troubles you, husband?” she asked.
    “Nothing. I’ll be right back.” His tone was evasive, even
dismissive. He’d never spoken to her in that manner before.
    “You get up night after night. Something’s wrong.”
    He sat down heavily and the bed creaked. “I am sometimes wakeful
and go to talk with the guards or walk the wall.” He kissed her forehead, cheek
and chin—a bit hastily, she thought—before he left.
    She lay back in the cooling bed linen. P’raps he referred to
the upper castle walk but she wasn’t sure she believed him. That was new, also.
New and unsettling. She hadn’t had any reason ever to doubt Kieran’s word. She
didn’t now, not really. She couldn’t accuse him of lying to her.
    But she knew something was amiss.

Chapter Nine
     
    The next night she awoke alone, Lydia got up and looked for
Kieran, wondering what errand would take him from their bed—an errand that he
concealed from her. If she saw him in the courtyard or walking the wall, well
and good, she’d go back to bed and rest with an easy mind. If not…
    Clad only in a nightgown with a plaid thrown over her
shoulders for warmth, she slid her feet into a pair of mules and went down to
the lower hall. No Kieran. Outside. no Kieran in the courtyard, which was lit
softly by torches nearing the end of their fuel. Guards huddled in a cluster
across at the Garrison Tower, playing some sort of dice game while they kept
watch, but her husband was not among them.
    But above and toward the sea, she heard the faint creak of
hinges. She looked up to see Kieran step out of a door in the side of the
crumbling old keep. Shoulders slumped, he slouched along the upper walkway in
her direction and was joined by the castellan, Euan.
    Kier’s gait was utterly different from his usual confident
stride. Her curiosity building, she reentered their tower and climbed several
flights of stairs, went through a storeroom and emerged on the same walkway,
staying in the shadow of a battlement.
    She was familiar with the way because she also frequently
walked the wall for the view or to watch the birds in the moat. No graceful
swans as swam the ponds in Surrey, though. These were raucous seabirds of
several breeds she couldn’t identify, fighting over whatever edible bits found
their way into the moat.
    And she could look for hours at the sea below, crashing with
mighty waves against the cliff and the castle’s walls, watch the clan’s
fishermen pulling their light craft up onto their cove’s small, rocky beach
before unloading their catch, smile at their children paddling in the shallows,
collecting whelks and shellfish, listen to the cries of gannets and gulls as
they floated above.
    But she usually walked during the day, most often in the
warm afternoons, when the sun occasionally peeked out to light a glittering
blue-gray ocean. Now stars gleamed overhead and a waning moon cast shadows made
angular and awkward by the crenellated parapet. The night was still but for a
slight breeze off the water, which brought snatches of conversation to her
ears.
    “Did ye find anything tonight?” Euan asked. Or so she
thought. The men were a distance away and spoke in a patois of English and
Gaelic.
    “Nay, just dust and rats.” Lydia heard frustration in her
husband’s voice. “I dinnae know if I want to find him or not, ye ken?”
    “Aye, I ken.”
    “I worry that one day I will end up the same way, alone but
for the rats and mice.”
    Her heart ached to hear the pain and uncertainty in her
husband’s voice, though she didn’t understand the reason. The same way as what?
    “Ye are your own man and in control of your fate.” Euan
sounded calm and certain. “But have ye told Lady Lydia? About him, about us?”
    Him? Who was “he”? Who was “us”? The clan, the family, or
just Euan and Kier?
    “Are ye mad?” her husband answered Euan. “She was affrighted
enough on the way here.”
    “Aye, I