A Promise of Love by Karen Ranney Page A

knew that she was bleeding freely. With each thrust, some part of her soul was injured along with her body.
    But that was not enough for them. Her humiliation and shame were not what they wanted.They wanted more.
    She did not fight as they unbound her feet, and turned her over. She was a body without will, a lump of flesh that screamed silently, nerve endings tortured, a receptacle of pain. Only when they violated her again, destroying her innocence totally, were they assuaged and spent.
     
    Judith’s first waking thought was that she was alone, that the nightmare which had left her trembling and spent was only the stuff of memories. It was not real. Not anymore. Anthony was dead and his brother far away. She was safe in this burnt out castle. And that was the most fitting irony of all, wasn’t it? That her father had unwittingly sent her to a sanctuary.
    And Sophie MacLeod had offered an incredible bargain.
    That the Scots found it necessary to honor such a bizarre ritual as her courtyard marriage was odd in itself; honor not having been a commodity highly revered in her past experience. Her father thought it only a word used by weaklings, but then, he routinely cheated and lied if it meant reaping more profit. Nor had either of her previous husbands seemed overly endowed with what might be called character.
    Judith sat on the edge of the sagging mattress, noted that her hands still trembled. The nightmare hadn’t come in months, but she was not unduly surprised it had visited her last night. This place summoned ghosts and memories, this desolate castle with its burnt walls and its constant smell of soot.
    She stood, looking out the window and the view of dawn which beckoned. The scene itself was an oddity, so different from her first view of Tynan, so changed from somber night. It was as if nature had arranged a sampler for her taste, a teasing bit of topography to stir the eye. A gray angle of mountain sat far in the distance, its color dark mist topped by white, like foaming milk upon a slab of chocolate. Tall pines thrust from a promontory to her left to soar to the sky, their branches so thick, the covering so solid, it was as if the earth were bearded in green. The cliff fell to a sea which boiled up and crashed against huge boulders, then subsided into the gentle rock lined cove surrounding Tynan on three sides. The slash of color was brilliant on this fine morning in the Highlands. Deep cerulean blues from both the sky and the sea, emerald from the forests, white from the flecked waves and far off snows, gray from the shadowed mountains and deep waves.
    Judith closed her eyes and sniffed. The tang of the air was so different from London; it did not come from emptied chamber pots, her neighbors' cooking, or the stench from the Thames. It was clean and crisp, a hint of ocean salt and recently turned earth. Nature's scent, not man's.
    Three months was a relatively short time when her marriage to Anthony had lasted an interminable four years. Three months was nothing, really, especially if it promised safety and freedom at the end of it. Three months would carry her to autumn, when the roads should still be passable. But she wouldn’t go back to England. She would start a new life, begin again some place new and as fresh as this dawn morning.
    Judith would have washed with cold water and enjoyed it, had she remembered to fill the ewer the night before. She'd been too eager to escape the kitchen table to concern herself with that chore. Now, she simply sighed, dressed in the same dress she had carefully removed last night, scraping her hair back into a serviceable bun. She squared her shoulders, drew a deep breath and opened the door leading to the hall.
    And nearly collided with the object of her thoughts.
    The MacLeod stopped, looked her over without comment, a sweeping inspection that carried with it neither derision nor approval. It was a totally expressionless examination, as if she'd not been there at all, and