“I just heard you’re leaving at dawn, a summons from Earl Seoras—and there will be a feast! Shall I gather foodstuffs and other supplies? Will you be gone long? I’m sure he’ll expect that everyone invited contribute their part—”
“Tam, I’ll be with you straightaway. Go now, I’ll find you!”
The steward mopped his brow and bobbed his head, turning back the way he’d come. Gabriel saw that Grania had left him, too, the nurse not walking toward the garden but instead the great hall.
Her head bowed, her shoulders slumped as if what he’d revealed to her about Magdalene wasn’t a cause for happiness, but misery.
Mayhap she was thinking about the family curse, which was never far from Gabriel’s mind and chilled him, too. He could not bear to consider losing the woman he loved…
Magdalene.
His heartbeat quickening, Gabriel thrust away as best he could the weight of the curse as well as the many duties awaiting him, and strode toward the garden.
Laughter floated to him, not girlish at all, and he knew at once it was Magdalene.
A bright sound he hadn’t heard since he had stood guard as a young warrior in the MacDougall fortress—as if, like then, she didn’t have a care in the world.
Was she trying simply to cheer his nieces after everything they had heard from Seoras’s messenger? Or mayhap it was something more…a change of heart, his prayers answered?
Another burst of laughter from Magdalene made Gabriel slow his step and turn back toward the stable…for it was enough right now, just to hear it.
Later, when he saw her face-to-face, the two of them finally alone, they would have a chance to talk before dawn came all too swiftly…
Chapter 18
“Och, you’ll wear a hole in these fine rugs,” Magdalene said to herself, pacing back and forth across the bedchamber.
Yet what else could she do? She had never felt so nervous, so breathless!
Surely Gabriel had attended to all the preparations that could be done before they left at dawn—for it had been Grania who had told her of his plan when the nurse had come to the garden to fetch the girls.
Her demeanor not any friendlier than it had been from the start, mayhap even less so, though Magdalene could not fathom why.
She’d not done anything to Grania other than to elicit her disapproval for her antics with Rhona and Keira, the hour spent with them in the garden a much needed balm to her racing thoughts. Even now, the same ones tumbled over and over in her mind as Magdalene paused at the fireplace to stare blindly into the flames.
She would be accompanying Gabriel to the fortress she hadn’t seen in four years—such an unhappy place when she had left it and the last time she’d seen her father. Donal had wept as the nuns from Dumbarton coaxed her into the wagon, Magdalene swiping at imaginary butterflies and laughing like the mad fool she had pretended to be.
Now Seoras was the earl there, and he was expecting Mad Maggie. Yet did it matter to him whether she was a lunatic or sane? He would have used her as a pawn either way, but why had he chosen Gabriel as her husband?
She had thought him cut from the same log as Seoras, but he wasn’t like her brother at all. Fearsome-looking at first, Magdalene remembered so vividly when she’d laid eyes upon him, a dark-haired giant whom she had believed to be ruthless and cruel—for how could he not be with Seoras as his overlord?
Yet Gabriel had proved himself to be anything but the brutish monster she’d feared—and now he was soon to join her, wasn’t he? The hour was late, Magdalene was certain past midnight.
Her last glimpse of him had been through the door left ajar in the garden, her heart racing as he drew closer, only to stop and turn away. The girls had seen him, too, their faces crestfallen until she had grabbed their hands and begun to race with them along a winding path flanked by scraggly, untended rosebushes until they were flushed and laughing again.
Magdalene had laughed, too, and collapsed with them onto the ground in a tangle of arms and legs and sweet kisses on her cheek, Rhona and Keira hugging her tightly. She loved the girls, she couldn’t deny it, her change of heart going so much deeper than she could have ever imagined.
Yet now war loomed, bloodshed and death—och, it made her shudder just to think of it! She was not ignorant of the deadly feud between the Comyns and the Bruces, for she had heard about it from the mouth of Robert the Bruce himself!
What would Gabriel think if he knew that his sworn enemy had saved her life and that of every nun at the convent last year—and that she’d secretly been a champion of King Robert’s claim to the throne from that very day? How could a man as honorable as Gabriel not take a stand himself for a rightful crowned ruler and fight instead for a brute like her brother?
“Ah, God, all of this is impossible—impossible!” Magdalene spun around from the fire and gasped, her heart in her throat.
Gabriel stood in the doorway, watching her. She had been so lost in her thoughts that she hadn’t even heard him open the door!
She could only stare at him, wide-eyed, as he stared back at her. His gaze drifted from her face to her bare feet, Magdalene gasping again that she wore only her nightgown, her robe draped over a nearby chair. She had left it there in exasperation, all of her pacing making her feel overwarm and flushed—
“What’s impossible, Maggie?”
