“Tell me about yerselves,” Mariota said to Anders, but her gaze dropped before she added, “How is it being one of twins?”
So, she wasn’t sure who she was dealing with.
While Anders strove to answer her, Stellan had the opportunity to just look at her. To study her profile, as she faced forward, looking out over the hall at the people of his clan. He wondered what she was thinking, but the light from the hearth fire and torches along the walls of the great hall lit her face and danced in her hair, distracting him. She listened to his twinwith interest, nodding, thoughtful, occasionally laughing at his quips, and Stellan found himself getting more entranced with every smile she turned on his brother. Some of them spilled past Anders to him.
When she looked past Anders and asked him how they bore fostering apart, he found himself tongue-tied before her yet again. His brother’s throat-clearing broke Stellan out of the prison of his rapture. He shrugged and thought for a moment. “It was an adjustment neither of us expected to have to make. It pained us both,” he added with a glance at his twin, who nodded. He didn’t like thinking about those years, but his words earned him a sympathetic frown, and Mariota put a hand on Anders’ arm. In such close proximity to his twin, Stellan felt her palm burning through the sleeve of his ownleine.
“I’m so sorry,” she told him, turned to Anders and added, “for both of ye.”
“’Twas good for us, as it turned out,” Anders told her, knowing Stellan needed a moment.
“What?” Her surprised expression amused Stellan.
“It gave us a chance to grow as individuals,” Stellan told her, his voice gravelly with the need for her coursing through him. “To hone interests and skills each of us had that might have been subsumed in being together and doing the same things all the time. We didn’t enjoy the separation, but we learned from it.”
He forbore to mention how much Anders had learned from the lasses everywhere he went. He didn’t want to plant ideas in Mariota’s head, or in Anders’, for that matter, where she was concerned.
She hadn’t been told that the laird decreed Anders would take her home and likely betroth with her. That would tell her Anders wasn’t the heir. Stellan liked that idea less and less the more time he spent with her. As dinner progressed, they traded a lot of glances that to him felt more heated each time ithappened. But she also shared a trencher with Anders, a sight more intimate than Stellan liked.
Still, Stellan sensed nothing seductive in her interactions with Anders or in his twin’s reactions to her. He liked that, but it also worried him. She was the heir to another clan, and he to his, though his father didn’t know the twins had sworn an oath to rule together. Unless their clan went to war to subsume MacKay territory, he and Mariota could never marry. The Sutherland had to propose Anders for her. And Stellan knew two more things. His father would never initiate such a clan war over Stellan’s attraction to her, and if MacKay brought a war, there was no guarantee that Sutherland would win.
After dinner, Mariota pleaded exhaustion. “’Twas a full day. I beg leave to find my bed,” she said. Though the image of her in the bed in her chamber caused Stellan’s pulse to speed, he knew he dared not escort her. Stellan met Anders’ gaze and silently urged him to offer his escort. The twins needed their da to see them following his wishes. Stellan needed that most of all if he was to be able to spend any time with her.
“My lady?” Anders stood and offered his arm. She accepted with a disappointed glance Stellan’s way, and Anders escorted her from the great hall.
Stellan turned back to his father to ensure he knew which twin remained, but he stood.
“I’ve work to do. We’ll speak tomorrow. Nan, would ye like an escort to yer chamber?”
She sent Stellan a speculative look, then shook her head. “Thank ye, nay. I’m going to visit with my friends over there.” She nodded across the hall.
Sutherland grunted his agreement and took his leave.
Now that his father was gone, Nan gave Stellan one more chance at her company. “Care to join us?”
“Thank ye, nay,” he told her, preferring to wait for his twin.
She shrugged and left him alone at the high table.
He stood, too. But instead of leaving the hall, he took one of their accustomed seats by the great hall’s hearth and waited for Anders to join him. When he did, Stellan tipped his mug. “Slàinte, brother. What do ye think of our lass?”
Anders choked on the mouthful of ale he’d just taken in and sprayed it toward the fire, which leapt when the alcohol hit it. “Yer lass, ye mean,” he said when he could breathe. “I could feel the heat pouring off ye.”
There were times when the bond between them was damned inconvenient. “Da wants ye to return her to MacKay. What do ye think he means, save that he’s expecting ye will wed her— perhaps even while ye are there?”
“He may think so, but ye found her. Ye seem to like her. And I’ve been around enough lasses to divine that she likes ye. Though, enough? That remains to be seen. Ye should be the one to travel with her, to meet her da, even to marry the lass— though I dinna ken how. No’ me.”
“There’s one problem with that,” Stellan said, staring into the fire.
Anders flinched. “Aye, she’s her father’s heir. Her husband must rule MacKay with her. And ye are da’s heir, so he expects ye will rule here after him. I’m the expendable one.”
“Nay to me. Nay to the vow we made.”
Anders nodded, then grinned. “Do we switch? Ye go as me, and I stay as ye?”
“And when we are discovered?” Stellan couldn’t imagine the outcry that would result.
Anders shook his head. “If ye decide against the match, ye can leave her there, and come home. As long as ye manage to control yerself and dinna ruin the lass so ye are forced to marry her.”
