Her Highland Guardian by Ava Sinclair

Author:Ava Sinclair [Sinclair, Ava]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stormy Night Publications
Published: 2015-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight: The Matron’s Correction

On her second night in Alastair McDonald’s care, Mary Malone dreamt of her father.

It was a variation of the dream she’d had so many times. She was graduating from the university, and from the stage she could see him at the back of the large hall. His bespectacled face looked satisfied, and her heart soared to think she’d made him proud.

After she’d received her diploma, she waited impatiently while the hundred or so other students had received theirs and before winding her way to the crowd to where he was. His face had split into a rare smile as she approached, and she felt her heart lighten in her chest as he opened his arms.

But then, just as she’d stepped into his embrace, Maurice Malone had turned to dust. Mary opened her eyes in the dark; the pain in her chest the same as when she’d had the dream in her old life.

In reality, Maurice Malone had not attended his daughter’s graduation. Instead, he’d shown his parental care through the kind of empty indulgences that earned the jealousy of friends like Celeste. Mary’s parents spared no expense in giving her the best of everything—especially if it meant they could do what so many wealthy parents did and outsource the actual raising of their child while reaping the benefits of bragging about successful offspring.

Mary had entered special boarding preschool at age two. After that, she’d moved up through other academic boarding situations. She always had the best of everything. She was not a rebellious child, having nothing to rebel against. Everything was as she wanted it; her parents saw to that so long as it kept her on the path to independent adulthood.

Just before her graduation, she got a Holo-Card from her father, informing her that he and her mother would be taking part in an Orbi-Tour of Saturn, and were sorry to be missing her graduation but had put an extra fifty thousand pounds in her account to celebrate the occasion.

It had been nearly a year since she’d seen them and Mary had cried herself to sleep the night before getting her diploma.

You’re as much an orphan as any bairn could be…

Alastair McDonald wasn’t much older than she was, and yet he had spoken openly of giving her the kind of guidance and direction that was rare in her world, and nonexistent among children of the upper class. As Mary lay in the dark, the idea of being taught, being trained in aspects of simple survival and social order—of having consequences—awakened and intrigued a part of her that had fallen into some sort of evolutionary dormancy. She’d heard of the need to parent; much was written now that so many babies were grown in artificial wombs. But the need to be a child? Was there even a word for that?

After she’d emerged from the little room earlier that morning, Alastair had told her she’d want for nothing in his care, that he would protect her and provide for her.

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