“He has no reason to distrust me,” Margot said as she settled onto the old sidesaddle and Arran swung easily up onto his horse. “Whatever is between us has nothing to do with him.”

“Aye, perhaps that is true,” Arran agreed. “But he takes great exception to anyone who might want to harm me.”

“He thinks I mean to harm you?” she asked incredulously. Was he searching for some clue that proved she meant to physically harm her husband?

“A wee bit, aye. Enough of this now. We’ve work to do.”

Did Jock really think she’d been sent here for such nefarious reasons? Did he really think she was the condescending, heartbreaking murderess now?

But it struck Margot that while she was not a murderess, Jock was right in at least one respect—she had been sent here to find something with which to accuse her husband. Was that any less egregious?

Arran signaled and the hunting party moved out.

Everyone but Margot, that was. It took a word from Sweeney and a jerk of the pony’s bridle to get Margot’s horse to follow the others. The pony broke into a run after the other horses, bouncing Margot around so completely that she almost lost her seat before she’d cleared the castle walls.

Chapter Fourteen

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

MARGOT’S HORSEMANSHIP HAD not miraculously improved overnight as Arran had futilely hoped. He began to feel a wee bit guilty about her bringing up the rear as she was, her hat having bounced off her head somewhere along the way.

He was also annoyed by the amount of bickering between his two best hunting guides. The brothers were perhaps the best stag stalkers in all of Scotland but could scarcely abide one another. Their discord went back many years and was centered, naturally, on a lass. Arran didn’t know what had happened, precisely, or when, but it had become part of the legend of the two men. Now they were known as hunters without parallel, and for their constant strife.

Arran circled his horse around and held it back so that he wouldn’t hear the sniping and could walk alongside Margot’s pony. His two hunting dogs trotted alongside them, their noses to the ground, their tails high.

Margot smiled cheerfully at him as he pulled in beside her, but her cheeks were stained with the exertion of the effort to hold her seat, and her breath was short.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with this pony today. I had a much easier time of it yesterday when I rode down to the cove.”

There was nothing wrong with the pony. The fault lay completely in the hands of the rider. “The road down to the cove is flat and the distance shorter,” he said. “We’re moving upglen to Lochbraden on no road at all. It’s a harder course.”