Even now.
What Alec and I had was wild and wonderful, but it couldn’t last. My values, my people, they meant too much to me. They made me who I was and the same was true for him. One day, probably very soon, it would end and if my heart was broken from it, I’d not gotten into a war for the earth without thinking I’d take a few injuries.
Maybe even one that would kill me slowly.
At that maudlin moment, a soft knock came at the bedroom door, “Are you decent, girl?” Grandad had pulled himself away from the Lady Elspeth, or maybe one of the daggers her husband was looking at him had found its mark.
“No more than I usually am. Come on in.”
He had two glasses of champagne. The real ones. “One won’t hurt either of us, eh?” he said, handing me a coup, sitting next to me on the chest. “It’s good stuff, if you don’t have a bottle of Teelings.”
I took a sip. It tasted like nothing and bubbles to me. The nerves, I supposed, or the weird knot of sadness.
“If this were an actual wedding I’d tell you the truck was around the side of the house, filled with petrol and the keys in the ignition. And based on the look on your face I bet you’d take it.”
I leaned against him as I hadn’t since I was a girl. He was stillstrong as an oak, but his arm was thinner than it used to be, his shoulder bonier. “What a mess. I’m sorry, I should never have brought him here and caused this trouble.”
“Eh, I like a bit of trouble. Keeps me young.”
“But the far-”
“Fee, I love this farm. I’ve loved it since I was born here, in this house. There isn’t a day, even a bad one, that I haven’t felt my good fortune to have always had the life I wanted. Even when my Fiadh died, getting up to work the fields and look after the animals kept me going until my heart started up again.And I tell you now, I would burn every acre, every out building, this house that my great-grandfather built, to the fucking ground if it spared you one moment of sorrow. Now get the rest of that drink into you, we have a fake wedding to get going.”
“You know,” I said, careful not to sniffle, to keep from turning into a panda, “Da’s gonna be awfully sad when he finds out the truth. He’s that fond of Alec. Maybe we should have told him.”
“I love my boy, he’s better than all the rest of us balled up, but he has the sense of a turnip. Best to do as we’ve done.”
Alec…
When Fee walked down the flower-strewn path from the farmhouse to me, she was everything I never could have imagined I wanted. Beautiful, incandescent in that dress and yet, still very much Fee with that sly look in her hazel eyes.
Alastair stood beside me, no nudges or jokes, knowing the seriousness of this mission yet still caught in the moment with me. I wanted this to be real. I very much wanted the woman walking toward me to be my wife, and once a hugely grinning Martin gave her a hug and proudly presented her to me, I kissed her hands.
“You are everything I don’t deserve,”I whispered.
“Well, I know that,” she whispered back.
Father Barclay, a tall, stooped man who looked like an angular crow, cleared his throat with a weary expression on his weathered face, as if he’d been in this position many times before and wasn’t looking forward to it. “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here together…”
There were forty people witnessing the ceremony, every one of us battle-hardened, even Fee’s cohorts, and grimly prepared to kill everyone Lee Ville threw at us. In that moment though, everyone sighed as we spoke our vows, chuckling when Fee dropped my ring and there was a bit of a scramble to find it so she could slide it on my finger.
What was happening to me? When she said, “I do,” a huge grin spread across my face and I nearly kissed her then, impatiently inserting “I do,” almost before Father Barclay could ask for it. Another bit of laughter wafted through the audience of crime lords and eco-warriors.
“In the sight of God and these witnesses, I now pronounce you husband and wife,” he said, slapping the Bible shut with a poorly concealed sigh of relief and added, “You may-”
A flower arrangement by the front gate shattered, yellow and white petals spraying like a blizzard as the clear sound of a bullet rang out in the quiet across the clearing.
For just an instant before my brain switched into single-focus battle mode, there was fury that Lee Ville and those Sicilian fucks didn’t have the common decency to let me kiss my bride first.
Then a burst of gunfire shattered the moment and it was on. I yanked my jacket off and forced it over Fee’s arms.
“What-”
“The jacket is bulletproof; I have a Kevlar vest on. Grab the priest please.”
Fee seized a sputtering Father Barclay and nimbly rolled him under the raised dais, also reinforced against bullets. Alastair shoved one of Dmytro’s remodified Kalasnikovs in my hands.
“They’re closing in from the east and west,” he shouted over the gunfire, “they’re trying to trap us between the river and the road.”
