Eachann strolled through the doorway in his usual careless fashion. “All taken care of,” he said, as if handling women were as easy as breathing.
Calum was lying atop the desk with his arms spread out like a cormorant and his hands clamped to the desk edges so his chest held down his paperwork. He looked up, his spectacles perched on the edge of his nose. His younger brother looked as if he had just done something as easy as take an exhilarating ride through the meadows.
Calum straightened, pushed his glasses back up his nose, and scooped up the papers into his arms. He began to restack them into neat and precise piles while his brother sprawled into his favorite chair again as if nothing was wrong with the world. He supposed that for Eachann, handling those women was that easy.
It wasn’t that easy for Calum. Women scared the hell out of him. He and Eachann were opposites, but their differences never made Calum feel uncomfortable. With women, Calum felt as if he were in another world, one he didn’t understand, one that didn’t make any sense at all.
Women were just too complicated for him, the way they would say one thing and do another. He never knew what to believe: what they said, or what they did... or worse yet, what they never said and what they wanted you to know you should do. They were completely illogical, and whenever he was around them he became irritable and crusty, the same way he reacted to Fergus’s matchmaking.
He finished tidying up, then stared pointedly at his brother’s muddy boots. “There are boot jacks by all the doors.”
“I know. I keep having to step over the blasted things. Damn nuisance if you ask me.” Eachann picked up a walnut from the bowl by the chair and cracked it with his huge hand. He picked out the nut meat and let the shells fall on the table and chair. A second later, clop... clop... clop, and his horse moseyed back into the room.
Calum gave up. He shoved his glasses back up his nose with a stiff finger and shuffled the stacks around his desk until they were aligned and in alphabetical order, then he looked back at Eachann who was dusted with walnut shells. “Where are the women?”
“In the kitchen.”
“The kitchen?Why the kitchen?”
“Women belong in the kitchen.” Eachann cracked another nut. “Besides, I told them your favorite foods were doughnuts and blueberry pie.”
“Yourfavorite foods are doughnuts and blueberry pie.
Eachann grinned. “I know.”
“I want to get rid of those women and you’ve got them cooking pies?”
Eachann shrugged and tossed a piece of nut in the air and caught it with his open mouth. “I was hungry.’“ He looked at Calum. “Stop your worrying. They’re too busy trying to impress you with their recipes to be following you around. Besides, I locked the kitchen door.”
“Where’s Fergus?”
Eachann used a piece of walnut shell to point at the open doorway.
Calum looked, but the doorway was empty. He waited to the sound of cracking nuts and the annoying patter of walnut shells on his clean carpet. Finally he called out, “Fergus!”
Nothing.
“Fergus MacLachlan, I know you’re bloody well out there!”
Nothing.
“Get in here, old man.”
“I’m coming... I’m coming...” A tall old man with shoulder-length hair as white as seafoam came walking through the open door. He scowled at the room in general from a craggy time-and sea-weathered face. “Do ye ken I canna hear ye? Ye’re bellowing like a foghorn. Ye need tae respect yer elders, laddie.” He squinted at the stallion, then his gaze shifted to Eachann, who pointed toward Calum. Fergus planted his hammy fists on his hips, turned, and scowled at a bust of Robert the Bruce that stood on a mahogany column pedestal near Calum’s desk. “I dinna be deaf, dumb and blind, ye ken.”
“I’m over here,” Calum said dryly.
Fergus turned again and squinted at him. He didn’t say anything, but his whiskered chin jutted out like a mule.
“I told you no more women.”
“Aye, that ye did, laddie, that ye did.”
“Take them back, old man.”
Fergus only stood there as if he had grown roots.
“I’m going to tell you this once more. Do not bring women to this island. In fact, you won’t be going ashore again.”
