With great effort, Duncan fought back his temper. “And the bairn?”
For the first time that morn, the old seneschal smiled. A fearsome sight as his gap-toothed grin was not for the faint-hearted.
“Speak, man.” Duncan scowled at him. “What is with the bairn?”
“The bairn, a fine and healthy what-she-told-me-but-made-me-promise-not-to-tell-you, will be born at Balkenzie,” Fergus declared, his chest swelling at being the bearer of such privy news.
“She saw the whole of the birthing with her gift,” he added, the sheen in his eyes revealing how pleased he was that Lady Linnet had trusted him with her secrets. “You will soon have a braw new bairn, laddie.”
Duncan’s shoulders sagged even as his heart swelled with joy. A braw and strapping babe, lad or lassie, was well worth the short boat ride across Loch Duich.
And certainly worth looking a fool for ignoring his own orders.
“Then, come, you old buzzard,” Duncan conceded defeat. “Let us not keep the lady waiting.
And so Duncan MacKenzie, dread laird of Eilean Creag, and his fool-grinning seneschal, made their way down to the stronghold’s jetty for the passage across the loch to Sir Marmaduke’s Balkenzie Castle.
But not before Duncan wiped his own silly grin from his face, and replaced it with a dark frown worthy of his formidable reputation.
Chapter 39
Sometime in the hushed stillness before dawn, Marmaduke woke to find a slender thigh, sleek, warm, and smooth, draped over his legs. His new wife’s head rested his shoulder, her unbound hair spilling free in glorious disarray, the silken strands caressing his chin – her scent, a hint of fine summer days, delicate and light, a gift to stir his senses.
And to set his pulse to racing.
Other parts of him stirred as well. Darker, more beastly urges, for still another part of her pressed against him. Unashamedly close, infinitely soft, and deliciously hot.
His lady wife’s feminine heat.
Remembrances of their land-blessing ceremony in the night, of then holding and stroking her, swept through him like a blaze of liquid fire.
Whatever traces of sleep still clung to him, took flight, scattered with startling ease by the searing sweetness of waking with her crushed so intimately against him.
But even as his blood roared, he took equal bliss in the simple stirring of her breath against his shoulder.
Both pleasures, the carnal and the tender bonding, blended to weave an inescapable cordon around his heart. Silken chains of passion and promise, tying his soul to her, and filling him with untold contentment.
A precious and rare joy he wasn’t ready to relinquish.
To that end, he slanted a look through the half-opened bed curtains. The coming morn hadn’t yet spread beyond the deep alcove of the window embrasure.
Equally pleasing, the rest of the room still lay in cold and silent darkness. Ample time remained of the early hour’s calm for him to relish her soft warmth wrapped so sweetly around him.
A comfort he’d savored throughout the small hours after he’d gathered her into his arms and carried her, sleeping, from the window seat.
And somewhere in the splendor of the night, something magical had happened. Perhaps a residual blessing from her cherished old gods?
He didn’t know.
Either way, the wonder of it closed a door on the hurts and regrets of days long past, and banished the emptiness of countless lonely nights.
A moment, a touch skin-to-skin, her supple length stretched out beside him, and all his demons had fled.
Or so he could almost believe.
Hope.
A wild and giddy joy he’d never thought to find again.
