Read The Ghost (Highland Guard 12) for Free Online

, and dark plaids.
    Hell, he wasn’t ready for this. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be ready.
    His hand dropped to his side. After fighting alongside these men for seven years, he knew better. He was good, but single-handedly defeating nine warriors of the Highland Guard was beyond any one man’s skills.
    Alex had always known he might pay with his life one day for what he’d done, he just hadn’t anticipated it being so soon.
    A familiar voice broke through the silence. “I see you are still polishing that shiny armor of yours, Sir Alex.”

2

    A LEX BRACED HIMSELF for the condemnation and hatred, as he turned to face one of the most feared men in England, his former partner and hate-everything-English, Robbie Boyd.
    But nothing could have prepared him for the stab of guilt that plunged through his gut when he saw the look of betrayal in the eyes of the man whose friendship and respect he’d struggled for so long to earn. At times Alex thought he had, and at others, it felt like all he was doing was banging his head against that wall.
    You did what you had to do. He never trusted you anyway. You were never really a part of them . But the guilt coiling in his chest didn’t seem to think that was enough.
    “You didn’t get enough of rescuing fair maids in Scotland, so you had to stab us in the back and go to England instead?” Boyd said.
    Alex flinched. Though he’d anticipated the blow, it didn’t make it any easier to withstand.
    He didn’t miss the emphasis—or the sarcasm. Boyd’s wife was known as “The Fair Rosalin” after her illustrious ancestor “The Fair” Rosemund Clifford. When Alex had still been with the Guard, Rosalin had been taken hostage after a retaliatory raid in Norham to secure her brother’s agreement to a truce. To say that Alex had clashed with Boyd over the taking of the hostages (Rosalin’s nephew had been taken as well, although the boy had managed to escape) was putting it mildly.
    Making war on women and youths was bad enough, but when Alex guessed that Boyd had taken Rosalin to his bed, the dishonor done to her while in their care had seemed the final blow.
    Alex just couldn’t do it anymore. He could no longer be party to such dishonorable acts done in the name of war.
    Not just Boyd’s, but his own as well.
    Alex couldn’t forget how close he’d come to doing something for which he could never forgive himself—that little girl’s face in the flames was never too far from his mind. He’d reached her in time, thank God, and pulled her from the flames of the building to which he’d set fire in that same retaliatory raid in Norham. But that was the moment he knew something had to change. Holding the sobbing child in his arms whom he’d almost accidentally killed, something in him had snapped.
    This wasn’t right—no matter how just the ends—and he couldn’t do it anymore.
    He couldn’t set fire to one more barn, see one more town razed, or one more innocent harmed. There had to be another way than the “eye for an eye,” “you raze me, I’ll raze you more” mentality that had defined the war in the Borders for so long on both sides.
    In that child’s tear-stained, smoke-blackened face, Alex realized it was never going to end. Not like this. It had become a war of attrition that could and would go on for years, with Alex’s people in the Borders—and little girls like this—the ones who suffered.
    He knew he had to do something. Something drastic. Something that might make a difference. Something that actually had a chance of putting an end to the damned war.
    It had become painfully clear that that something wasn’t going to be fighting for Bruce with the Highland Guard. It wasn’t that Alex had never fully embraced the pirate style of warfare, which went against everything he had been taught was honorable as a knight, but it wasn’t getting them anywhere—not anymore. The skirmishes, ambushes, and raids that had given Bruce a foothold were never going