Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 3: Heather and entitlement
He smelled like woodsmoke and leather and something she couldn’t name — a clean outdoor smell, heather perhaps, and beneath it the faint undercurrent of whisky, and both of these things were extremely irritating because she was supposed to be furious with him and she could not be properly furious with someone whose presence was, in the involuntary animal way that had nothing to do with reason, not entirely unpleasant.
She was behind him on the horse. This had been established through a negotiation that she had lost, which was an outcome she was not accustomed to. She had pointed out, with considerable logic, that she was a perfectly competent horsewoman, that Rosalind was among the horses being led in their party, and that there was absolutely no reason she could not ride her own animal with a reasonable guard on either side. He had listened to all of this with the expression of a man who had already decided what was happening and was allowing her to speak for the sake of her own dignity.
Then he had said: “Ye’ll ride with me. The terrain gets rough and ye dinnae know it.”
Which was, she would not admit aloud, not entirely unreasonable.
She sat behind him with her hands resting on her own knees rather than around his waist, which would have been the natural position and which she had absolutely no intention of voluntarily adopting. The saddle was uncomfortable for double-riding and she was in a nightgown under her cloak and the morning was cold in the way of northern mornings that were beginning to understand that winter still had a claim on things. The landscape through which they rode was nothing like the soft managed countryside of the English estates she’d known — it was raw and wide and strange, the moorland giving way to rougher ground as they pushed north, the sky enormous above them in a way she had never quite experienced before.
She would not think about how much she liked it.
She would absolutely not think about that.
“Ye’re very quiet,” he said, after an hour of riding.
“I’m plotting.”
“Good thing I left yer hands free, then.”
She felt the shape of his amusement even with his back to her — not a laugh, not even a smile that she could see, but some shift in the set of his shoulders that communicated humor regardless. “You smell like heather and whisky,” she said.
“Aye.” Completely untroubled by this.
“It’s not a compliment.”
“I didnae think it was.” A pause. “Ye smell like lavender and entitlement.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. The gall of the man was truly extraordinary.
“Entitlement,” she repeated. “Entitlement. I have been kidnapped from my fiancé’s estate in the middle of the night and carried across a border on horseback in my nightgown, and I am the one with entitlement?”
“Ye are the one,” he said, “who, when confronted with twenty armed Highlanders in a dark stable, stepped forward and told them who she was and what the meaning of it was.” He guided the horse around a boulder with the easy authority of someone who knows his terrain. “That’s entitlement. Or courage. Can’t always tell the difference.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Courage,” she said, with precision.
“Aye. I thought so too.”
She did not know what to do with that, coming from him, so she chose to ignore it. “Where are we going?”
“My clan’s territory. The northern Highlands.”
“How far?”
“Another day’s hard riding.”
“And what happens when we get there?”
The silence that followed was of the kind that contained a great deal of thinking. She was beginning to read his silences — they were different from the silences of English gentlemen, which were mostly performance, space held to allow other people to be impressed. His silences were working silences, the quiet of a mind processing a genuine problem with genuine focus.
“I dinnae fully know yet,” he said. “But ye’ll be safe.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It keeps being true.”
She wanted to argue with this. She found she couldn’t, quite, because in the twelve hours since he had thrown her over his shoulder she had not been harmed. She had not been threatened. She had been treated with a roughness that was practical rather than cruel — the roughness of a man who is used to people who can manage things, who has not fully accounted for the difference between his clansmen and a twenty-three-year-old Englishwoman in her nightgown. But not cruel. She kept returning to that.
“Why do you hate the English?” she said.
A longer silence. She felt him consider whether to answer. “History,” he said finally. “Raids. Losses.” The words were short, contained, each one a closed door.
“My family had nothing to do with whatever—”
“I ken that. Now.” He adjusted his grip on the reins. “The night was dark. Ye were in a place ye shouldnae have been.”
“I am well aware of where I should and shouldn’t have been.”
“Then we’re agreed.”
She pressed her lips together. They rode on in silence for a while — the kind of silence that was not comfortable but was not entirely hostile either, some new and uncharted territory that had no previous name in her experience. The landscape was becoming more dramatic as they rode north, the hills steeper, the sky wilder, and she found herself watching it with the particular attention she usually reserved for things that moved her, which she was not going to think about.
“The horse,” she said.
“Rosalind?”
“She’s well?”
“Aye. Yer man’s leading her.” A pause. “She’s a fine animal. Well-trained.”
“I trained her myself. Mostly.”
Something shifted in him again — the shoulder thing, the almost-humor. “Of course ye did.”
“Is that amusing?”
“It’s — consistent,” he said. “With the rest of ye.”
She didn’t know what the rest of her looked like from his perspective, and she was not going to ask. She was going to arrive at his clan’s territory with her dignity intact and her mind fully focused on the problem of returning to England, and she was not going to be charmed by a man who had kidnapped her, regardless of whether he smelled like heather and spoke about her courage without apparently intending to.
She was definitely not going to be charmed.
“MacKinnon,” she said.
“Aye.”
“When we arrive wherever we’re going. I want proper clothes. Not — I can’t continue to negotiate in a nightgown.”
She heard it clearly this time — a definite, brief sound of laughter, suppressed immediately, but there. “Aye,” he said, and his voice was different, fractionally warmer. “I’ll see to it.”
“Thank you,” she said, stiffly.
“Ye’re welcome,” he said, equally stiffly, but not equally — there was something in it that wasn’t stiff at all, and she recognized it with the dismay of someone discovering an inconvenient truth: he was not what she had expected. She had expected barbarity, cruelty, the cartoonish Scottish raider of English nursery warnings. She had found something considerably more complicated.
That was, she thought, going to be a problem.
The horse moved steadily north and the wind came off the hills with the clean cold bite of a place that had never heard of Whitmore Manor or Edward Whitmore or the neat, managed world of English nobility, and for one unguarded moment she breathed it in and thought: *This country is extraordinary.*
Then she caught herself and thought about Edward, and England, and the wedding that was now presumably in considerable disarray, and she went back to plotting.
She was, she reminded herself, a prisoner.
Even if the landscape was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
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