Her Wicked Highlander: A Highland Knights Novella Read Free

her, take her to Beauly Castle, and then await further instruction.
    He hadn’t expected the woman to be a feisty ball of fire, so proud and stubborn that he’d finally had to bind her hands and essentially throw her upon his horse.
    And he hadn’t expected Beauly Castle’s front door to simply refuse to open.
    Damn it. Frustrated, he yanked the key from the rusty lock, raised his foot, and kicked the door—hard. His charge emitted a feminine gasp as the thick wood—clearly ages old and rotted with damp—buckled under the force of the blow.
    He turned to her and shrugged, then kicked it again. The wood splintered.
    Well, he reasoned, if the door was that rotted, then the Knights would need to replace it anyhow. Major Campbell had told him to let him know what work needed to be done in the castle, so that would be at the top of his list.
    Max reached in and managed to unlock the remnants of the door from the inside.
    “Come along.” He hadn’t let go of Aila MacKerrick’s forearm since he’d lifted her from the horse, and now he towed her along as he entered the dim entry hall. The place wasn’t nearly as tidy as he’d expected—the Knights had hired a woman from nearby Beauly Village to keep the interior of the castle from falling into complete disrepair. Evidently, the woman hadn’t taken her assignment too seriously.
    Long, dust-covered tables lined the walls in the entry hall, and each of the three walls had a door placed dead in its center. Max led Aila to the back door first and found it led to the dining room, and from there a storage room, larder, and kitchen, as well as stairs leading down, presumably to a basement.
    “What is this place?” Aila asked.
    Max stiffened, and tightened his hand around her arm in warning. It’d do no good for either of them if she bolted.
    “’Tis safe here,” he said gruffly. “That’s all you need to know.”
    She huffed at that, and he managed to remain stern, though a smile played at the edges of his lips. He liked how spirited she was. The unmarried ladies he’d encountered in the past several years had been insipid and dull. Aila was a fresh blast of clean Highland air, someone he’d known right away would keep him alert and not allow him to fade to nothing out of sheer boredom, as so many of the women he’d recently associated with tended to do.
    They went back into the entry hall, then down each corridor in turn, opening doors to ballrooms, drawing rooms, salons, studies, a library, and what felt like an endless number of other spaces. At the end of each corridor was a watchtower with a winding staircase. When they saw the first one, Aila looked up at the stairs, her bonny lips twisting.
    “Are you going to lock me at the top of the tower? Like Rapunzel?”
    He gave her a sidelong look. “Are you calling me a witch?”
    “I dinna ken. Are you one?”
    He chuckled. “Nay.”
    “Hm,” she said, scowling, “you canna trust a witch.”
    “True,” he conceded.
    Finally, they mounted the grand, curving staircase leading from a room just off the entry hall. On the first floor, they found a series of bedchambers, some small, some large, all dusty and unused. The second floor was a duplicate of the first.
    “It has to have been a hundred years since anyone lived in this place,” Aila commented.
    “You’re right, I think.”
    She narrowed her eyes at him. “Do you have permission to be here, or are you a trespasser here as you were on my lands?”
    He gazed at her for a long moment. She was a bonny lass, petite, with reddish-blond curls that extended past her narrow waist, generous hips and bosom. Her face was heart shaped and expressive, her eyes a snapping, intelligent green, her nose a shade too small, and her lips a shade too wide.
    He’d never been much of a man for big noses or thin lips.
    Looking at Aila MacKerrick reminded Max that he was a man. And that there was a certain part of his anatomy that had been in disuse for far too long.
    He