“I’m allowed to be emotional. I helped, ye ken. In a general, spiritual sense.” She squeezed her hands. “Marcus said I had no involvement whatsoever, and I told him that supportin’ the general atmosphere of love in the region absolutely counts.”
Marcus Reid appeared in the doorway behind her. Large, dark, with the particular quality of a man who took up more space than his actual dimensions required.
He looked at Ava with the direct, unhurried assessment of a man accustomed to sizing people up quickly.
"So we finally meet the soon-to-be Lady Ava Macgregor. Ye look well," he said.
"Aye indeed, Laird Maclennan. And I finally meet ye and the lady Maclennan."
"I can see why Noah would fall hard for ye. " He said it without warmth but also without malice — simply as a statement of observed fact. "Marcus. Laird MacLennan is so formal."
"Then ye must both call me Ava." She held his gaze.
Something shifted almost imperceptibly in his expression. Not a smile exactly, but the suggestion that a smile was somewhere in the vicinity.
He paused. “Annabeth told me to say ye look beautiful. I’m sayin’ ye look well because that’s true, and also I daenae say beautiful to women who arenae me wife.”
“I told him he could say bonnie,” Annabeth said cheerfully. “He refused on principle.”
“Bonnie is also for me wife.”
“He’s very possessive,” Annabeth told Ava, as if reporting a mildly interesting weather phenomenon. “It’s one of his better qualities.”
She turned to look at Ava more carefully. “Are ye ready? Truly?”
“I think so.” Ava looked at her own hands, steadier now. “I’ve been ready for longer than I let meself ken.”
Esther slipped off the window seat and came to stand beside Ava without a word. She took her hand. Ava looked down at her. "Ye look nice," Esther said.
"Thank ye, sweetheart."
"Uncle Noah will be waiting downstairs," she added, with the air of someone reporting useful intelligence.
Annabeth’s expression softened. “Isn’t she so sweet?” She lingered on Esther fro a moment, before turning back to Ava.
“Aye,” she said. “That’s how it works, usually.”
She glanced at Marcus. “Ye daenae see it comin’ and then all of a sudden ye look around, and it’s already happened, and ye wonder how ye ever thought it wasnae goin’ to.”
“The man is still terrifyin’,” Marcus said. “I say that with respect.”
“He’s nae,” Ava stopped. “He’s a little terrifyin’.”
“Aye,” Marcus said, with the grim satisfaction of a man whose assessment has been confirmed. “He is. Good match.”
The great hall had been dressed for it.
Greenery along the stone walls—pine, ivy, and rowan berries, bright red against the dark. Candles everywhere— in iron sconces, along long tables, and in the chandelier overhead—casting warm gold light across the gathered clan. They lined the walls, filled the benches, and stood three deep at the back because the MacGregor clan had turned out in full.
There was a quality to the gathered crowd that Ava had not expected, not merely curiosity or duty but something that felt, unmistakably, like goodwill.
She walked in with Caitlin at her side. Esther walked on her other side, her chin up, her dark hair ribboned, holding Ava's hand.
Noah was waiting at the front of the hall, beside the elder who would conduct the ceremony.
He was dressed in his formal plaid, with the MacGregor tartan draped over his shoulder, a dark coat, and a clan brooch at his chest. He looked exactly as he was: a Laird, every bit of him, the kind of man who had been managing something important for so long that authority had become part of his very structure.
And then he looked up and saw her, and something in his face changed. Not softened. That wasn’t the word. Settled. The way a man’s face settles when something he has been waiting for has finally arrived.
