Page 44 of Kidnapped by a Rogue
“The last thing I want is a husband,” she said.
“That’s good,” Alex said.“Much to my mother’s frustration, Finn is dead set against taking a wife.”
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As Finn approached the gates of Huntly, he wondered if he would ever leave the castle again. Hopefully, Alex was wrong about trouble awaiting him, but Finn had not survived this long among his Gordon and Sinclair relations by ignoring warnings. He’d made Alex promise that if he did not return, Alex would arrange for Margaret and Ella to be taken safely to Edinburgh. He hoped his young cousin was up to the task.
The change in plan had made Margaret anxious, but she did not complain. She never did. On the chance he would not see her again, he had kissed Margaret’s hand as an excuse to touch her and to look into her soft brown eyes one last time.
Evidently, Moray was as anxious to see him as Alex claimed. The guards at the gate ushered him into the castle and straight into the private room behind the hall where he’d met with Moray before.
Moray was not a man easily rattled, but when he looked up from the parchment he was reading and saw Finn, tension rolled off him in thick waves.
“Where’s Lady Margaret?” Moray asked in lieu of a greeting as soon as the guards closed the door behind Finn.
Something was seriously amiss here. Though Finn had no notion what it was, he went with his instincts and decided to lie.
“I did try to kidnap her, Your Grace,” he said, spreading his hands out. “But I couldn’t get near the lass. She was too closely watched.”
“Praise God for that!” Moray said, and drained his cup, though he was neither particularly religious nor a drinker. “The odds were against you succeeding. Still, I feared you had.”
“And I feared you’d be disappointed,” Finn said as he accepted the cup of wine Moray poured for him. “What changed your mind about wanting a Douglas kidnapped?”
“As I told you before, the council decided to rotate custody of the king’s person among four magnates to avoid giving any one faction too much power,” Moray said. “Douglas was given the first three months.”
Finn waited to hear why Moray was telling him all this again.
“Douglas’s rotation is coming to an end.” Moray folded his long, elegant fingers on the table. “He’s refusing to relinquish the king to the next custodians.”
Finn sat up straighter. “Refusing? Can he do that?”
“He has the king in his possession, and my sources tell me he keeps a close guard on him at all times,” Moray said. “Douglas claims it’s his right as the king’s stepfather to be his sole custodian and that the king wishes this as well.”
“Does the king wish it?” Finn asked.
“After his mother filled the lad’s ears with venom about Douglas for the last three years? I sincerely doubt it,” Moray said. “I’m told, however, the king’s cage is a gilded one designed to divert a young man—with feasts, gambling and, of course, women.”
“I would think that would give us all the more reason to want leverage over Douglas to force him to return young Huntly,” Finn said.
“Archibald Douglas has won the battle, and the kingdom is in his hands now, which changes the calculation considerably,” Moray said. “For however long Douglas holds the king, it’s in young Huntly’s interest to remain in Douglas’s care as well.”
“Something tells me you’re not leaving him there for the feasts and the women.”
“Huntly will be the king’s constant companion throughout his ordeal—and the king will come to view this time when his stepfather keeps him under his thumb and rules in his name as an ordeal, despite the feasts and women,” Moray said. “No matter what Douglas does, the king will eventually become a man and rule, and the special bond between Huntly and the king will be of value to him, the Gordons, and their allies for many, many years to come.”
Finn was not surprised that such dramatic news of the king had traveled faster than he did among the nobility or that news of Margaret’s disappearance had not. The Douglases would want to keep Margaret’s disappearance quiet while they searched for her to avoid rumors that such a valuable marriage prize had run off with a lover.
“Tell me,” Finn said, tilting his head, “what would ye have done if I had succeeded and come here with Lady Margaret?”
“What do you think I’d do?” Moray asked.
“Put the blame on me and throw me in chains,” Finn said. “You’d have Douglas in your debt for rescuing his sister from a damned rogue you would say tried to exchange her for gold.”
Moray leaned back in his chair and smiled. “My mother saidyou were clever.”
“Ach, not as clever as all that,” Finn said. “If I had succeeded in kidnapping the lass, I would have walked right into the trap and ended up in your dungeon.”Or dead.
“I would have sincerely regretted having to do it,” Moray said as he refilled Finn’s cup. “My mother would have been rather angry with me. But what else could I do?”
