Meghan: A Sweet Scottish Medieval Romance Read Free

hard floor and to stand alone behind invisible doors... watching other children at play.
    Although, in truth, why should he have cared if the other children were outside playing and laughing? Thanks to his mother, he’d been able to study with the Archbishop of Canterbury and that had been no trifling thing. He’d had every reason to be grateful and no reason at all to yearn for something so negligible as dirty knees or silly games.
    “Curse it all,” he exclaimed, lifting up his pen and rapping the quill’s end upon the wooden table. “We’re going to show these Scots that we can feud with the best of them.”
    And enjoy it every bit as much.
    That’s what it was going to take to win their alliance, he surmised.
    Or not.
    Either way, he would relish the sport.
    Though at first he’d been taken unawares by their unanticipated raids, some part of him reveled in this honest form of warfare, where one’s enemy stood up to be counted, and one’s friends openly declared they’d as soon pluck out your eyes if they could profit from them. There was something particularly heartening in that unrelenting honesty.
    Aye, he was perfectly pleased to play their games.
    “These savages will not run us off this land,” he vowed. “You’re a witless fool,” he reprimanded Baldwin, but he knew his eyes didn’t quite conceal the smile he hid. “I should take the price of those beasts out of your hide, you realize?”
    Color returned to the tips of Baldwin’s ears. “I wouldn’t fault you for it, Lyon,” he said, but neither did his smile vanish either. “So what would you have me do?”
    “What else?” Piers grinned. “We steal the beasts back—and a few more for good measure.”
    Baldwin smirked. “If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d think you were enjoying this.”
    Lyon lifted a brow. “And you would be right,” he returned, rising from his seat and taking his sword from where he’d placed it upon the table before him. He slid it into his scabbard and winked good-naturedly at Baldwin. “Now, let’s go teach these Scots how to commit a proper thieving.”

Chapter 2
    I t was a raven , no mistaking it.
    Its blue-black wings pummeled the air in obvious distress though it made not a peep as it flailed about the rafters searching for escape. Within the silence of the chapel its flight for freedom—like a soul fighting to be set free—was a struggle that stirred Meghan Brodie’s heart.
    She had cast open the shutters to the bright summer day and the poor bird flew inside as though it had been anticipating her appearance at the window. It startled her, certainly, but Meghan wasn’t the least bit superstitious, else she might have considered this an evil omen.
    Certainly, her Grammie Fia, would have claimed it to be so.
    The last time she recalled a bird flying into their home—and it had been a sparrow that time, not even a wicked raven as this was—her dear grandmother had taken great pains to make it fly out the same way it had flown in, so that it might take with it whatever curse it had brought into their home. Else, old Fia had explained, the sparrow would die and the one who’d let it in would remain cursed for all eternity. In her quest to set the sparrow free, her grammie had blocked off every window and every door except for the one the bird flew in through, and then had stood speaking to the creature for hours, until she’d managed to coax it into her hand with breadcrumbs. And then, with blessings for peace and love, she had cast it back out the door.
    Meghan hadn’t believed a word of it, of course. She’d thought her grandmother incredibly silly, while her brothers had simply thought her mad—as everyone else did. Superstition was, in Meghan’s opinion, merely a way of explaining away circumstances one could not comprehend. Nothing more. When it came to such notions she was truly quite unromantic. Her mind couldn’t embrace the mystical, although her grandmother’s tales had