“I’m not leaving you. I promise I won’t.”
He shifted off of her but kept her pinned against him. Her head rested in the crook of his arm and her leg was flung on his warm thigh. She played with the thick curly hair on his chest, until he laughed and stilled her hand with his.
There was a noise outside and he paused for a moment, an awkward moment because his hand was just moving downward over her bottom.
A crash cut through the still night air, followed by some Gaelic curses. A man on the dock began to sing.
“Damn those MacDonalds,” Calum groaned and leaned his forehead on the pillow.
“What are they doing?”
“Serenading us. Like a shivaree, lass.”
They listened quietly to the off-key singing:
“There’s a marriage game called ‘Ten toes,’
It’s played all over town.
The girls play with ten toes up,
The boys with ten toes down.”
They sang the bawdy verse for a few minutes, stomping up and down the dock, singing the refrain over and over and laughing.
Finally it grew quiet outside. When the singing was surely gone, and the man had stomped off elsewhere, Amy looked at Calum and began to giggle. “Ten toes up?”
“Aye, one can never say the Scots don’t have a sense of humor.”
Then he grabbed her, rolled her over on top of him, and shifted so her legs fell in between his.
“What are you doing?”
He smiled up at her. “I’m going to teach you how to play the marriage game.”
“I already know how. You just taught me.”
“Aye, lass.” He laughed and kissed her nose. “But not with ten toes down.”
Chapter Forty-Six
It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate at all times and situations. They presented him with the words, “And this too shall pass away.”
—Abraham Lincoln
Georgina flopped back into a chair in the main room in Eachann’s half of the house. It appeared to her as if this was once a reception or drawing room. She looked around. No artist could draw this mess. It was beyond the imagination.
She raised a limp hand to her pounding forehead. “My life is over.”
Eachann’s children had been home for a week. It had been the longest week of her life. She had tried to be friendly with them. She had tried very hard to be friendly. They wouldn’t let her.
They fought and argued and played tricks on her. They hid when she called them and pretended she wasn’t in the room when she tried to talk to them. She found sand in all her clothes and they greased the doorknobs in her room and the inside of the bathing room. No two children could wreak the havoc they had.
They weren’t human. They couldn’t be.
But then why was she surprised? Their father wasn’t human either. No one but David was human in this godforsaken place and he’d been gone to the other side of the island for two days, fishing and trapping lobster with Fergus.
Her shoulders sagged back into the overstuffed chair and a puff of dust clouded around her. She sneezed, then rubbed her pounding temples.
