At the squat wooden dock near the far end of Piper’s Cove, a coaster sat with its sail just being furled. But they didn’t ride toward the quay. Instead, they turned and rode swiftly up another circular trail, past a tall hemlock that stuck out from the rocks and hid the spot where the trail flattened and led toward a sprawling stone house.
From the cove the house below looked as if it were built right into the hillside. Along the rear entrances were a series of granite arches that scalloped the entire back of the house in a smooth sleek way that made the windows and doors look as if they had been cut out from one solid, mammoth piece of salmon-pink granite.
At the rear of the house, Eachann stopped. He was a tall brawny man with blond hair that gleamed gold in the sunlight and shoulders nearly as wide as the wingspread of an osprey. But he swung a long leg over the saddle with casual ease for one so large and slid to the ground.
For a moment his stallion tossed its head and pawed the ground as if it were still hungry for a run. But he clicked his tongue twice and the horse tossed its head once more, then stilled with an eerie acquiescence that for a brief second silenced everything around them but the distant rush of the sea.
For only the time it took a gull to scream, he stood as still as his horse, staring at the cove and at the coaster docked at the quay, then he disappeared into the deep dark shadow of a stone archway.
Chapter Five
Follow love and it will flee thee,
Flee love and it will follow thee.
—Old Scottish proverb
There were some things even Calum MacLachlan wouldn’t do for his name. Which was why he was hiding behind an island spruce in the forest that edged the north end of Piper’s Cove. The trees on the forest rim were covered with fat burls that bulged from the trunks like Rip Van Winkle’s bowling balls. They hid him well, yet he had a clear view of the dock.
He watched five women step from the boat deck and walk up the quay. The women stopped abruptly when Fergus MacLachlan shouted to them from the deck.
There was no doubt; these women were the latest batch of brides. That stubborn old devil wanted Calum married.
When it came to Fergus MacLachlan, a distant cousin and constant thorn in the side, Calum had no say in what the old man did. Fergus did what he wanted, claiming that age, experience, and a close kinship to the old laird, Calum’s father, had always awarded him the freedom to do what he thought best for “the spawn of his guid friend, the auld laird, MacLachlan of MacLachlan, God-bless-him-in-spite-of-his-fasheous-sons. The fact that Fergus had been a surrogate father and helped raise both Calum and his younger brother Eachann only added to Fergus’s zeal.
And for the past few years, his zeal was to see Calum, laird of the clan MacLachlan, married. The old man started his matchmaking slowly at first, but when Calum refused to take him seriously, canny old Fergus began to lure women to the island with promises of winning a husband who was a “braw mon of property.”
To Calum, marriage was like death. He knew he had to do it someday, but he was certainly in no hurry to experience it.
Calum adjusted his spectacles, stuck his head out from behind the tree, and really looked at the women.
He had the sudden urge to run like hell.
Immediately he hid again, wiped off his spectacles, and polished the glass lenses on his shirt. He held them up to the sunlight, then polished them again. A few minutes later he put the glasses back on and peered out from behind the tree.
The first woman was so old her shoulders had begun to stoop. The second he couldn’t see because the third woman’s red hair was in the way. In fact, her red hair was in the way of everything within three feet of her head. It took him a minute or so to notice that every few seconds she would twitch. He strained his neck out a little farther. Still he could only see three of the five women.
“There he is!” a woman shouted from behind him.
“Ya! Das ist him!”screeched another one.
Calum whipped around. The two missing women, the two with the most man-hungry expressions, stood back in the pine trees. He heard the others on the dock scream, “Wait for us!”
An instant later in a flurry of pine needles and sand, of wild red hair and even wilder and determined expressions, they were all charging straight at him from three different directions.
He turned and ran like holy hell.
Chapter Six
When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,
And maidens bleach their summer smocks,
The cuckoo then on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
Cuckoo...
