Page 43 of A Highland Healer Captured (Scottish Daddies #3)
Hamish came to her as the hall began to hush, eyes bright behind their usual weather. He raised her hand and kissed the knuckles without bluster.
“Ye look like yer mother,” he said, which Skylar knew was his way of telling her she looked beautiful and terrifying.
“Then ye’d best stand straight,” Skylar said, “so I daenae scold ye for slouchin’.”
Hamish barked a laugh, then sobered. “Ye sure?”
“Aye,” she said, and because some things were simpler than even she made them. “I love him.”
Hamish nodded once, like a man sealing a bargain with himself. “Then I’ll see ye down the aisle.”
The doors opened with a flourish.
Christ the hall does look like a forest…
The murmur folded into a hush so clean she could hear the wicks hiss.
Skylar’s heart knocked once, twice; she set her palm over it to keep it from leaping out and running ahead.
And then they walked. Hamish steady as a cairn at her side, Astrid already frowning at a chair leg that would never notice, Scarlett and Mabel ahead, the children strewing late petals with zeal, and occasionally throwing them at one another.
Zander stood waiting at the far end, in a dark plaid that made his shoulders look unfair and his mouth softer than she’d ever seen it.
The bandage beneath his linen shirt was hidden well, but she knew precisely where it lay and how her palm had pressed there last night.
The thought made her trip on absolutely nothing.
Hamish’s elbow saved her with a gentle correction. “Aisles bite,” he growled, deadpan. “Watch yerself.”
She arrived. The air around Zander changed—the way air changes near a blacksmith’s forge when the bellows start to work: warmer, more intent, the sense that something is about to be shaped.
“Ye came,” he said, absurd as always and exactly right.
“Ye asked nicely,” she returned, and the smile that cut across his beard was a private thing in a public room.
The vows were old and spare: promises set like stones, the kind that keep their shape because weather has tested them. Zander bound her palm to his with the braided ribbon, thistle and gold—sturdy and consequence twined—while Hamish looked down his nose as if he’d invented knots.
Astrid had the look of a general hearing troops speak the lines she’d drilled into them.
Scarlett dabbed at her eyes. Mabel smiled like a woman who had successfully kept one small boy from climbing a lectern.
Campbell stood with his palms braced on Ollie and Connor’s shoulders like ballast; Kian held baby Elise, who tugged at his tartan and squealed any time the piper breathed.
“Before clan and kin,” the elder intoned, “before God and good barley, be husband and wife, and keep one another whole.”
“Aye,” they said together, and the ribbon held.
The hall breathed again. The piper found a tune that lifted the beams; the first cheer cracked and then multiplied, a storm of joy breaking against stone.
Zander bent his head and kissed her with the restraint of a man who understood halls and mothers and how much mischief a piper could make out of a scandal; it was still enough to make her knees re-evaluate their job.
Grayson barreled into them a beat later, all elbows and grin. “I helped hang the barley,” he reported, proud as a squire with his first sword. “Mason says ye’ve married a menace.”
“I have,” Zander said gravely, eyes on Skylar. “The good kind.”
“Come,” Scarlett sang out, clapping to call bodies into their rightful places. “If we daenae move, me maither will rearrange the entire plan in her head.”
“I heard that,” Astrid sniffed, and then busied herself ensuring the first platters reached the elders and the children, in that order, as God intended.
The feast rolled like a tide. Platters changed hands the way gossip does; tankards thumped; someone told the story of Marcus’s end with exactly enough gore to satisfy the men and scandalize the children.
Skylar ate without tasting, so full of the sight and sound of them all that food could only be another kind of joy.
Ariella slipped into the seat beside her partway through, sliding a hand into Skylar’s under the table. “Ye look well,” Ari said, chin tilted in an old defiance that had thawed to strength.
“So do ye,” Skylar said, squeezing back. “Hungry as a colt still?”
“Starvin’,” Ariella admitted, then winced when Astrid caught her eye and gave the universal mother-signal to chew properly. Ari pulled a face and obeyed, then dropped her voice. “There’s talk.”
“There always is,” Skylar said lightly. “What kind?”
“The kind with a name,” Ariella murmured. “A man’s. Promises made when I was fevered, as if my yes would come easier when I didnae ken me own name.” Her mouth flattened. “But we’ll speak later. Today is yers.”
Skylar would have pressed, but Zander tugged her up with a wicked glint and the piper struck the first reel of the ceilidh.
The hall surged to its feet. Kian whooped; Campbell pretended dignity and failed delightfully; Hamish swore he’d only watch and then was in the line three tunes later; Astrid pretended she had no idea how to strip the willow and then out-danced men half her age.
Skylar and Zander turned, met, turned again, hands catching and letting go, the kind of dance that teaches you when to hold and when to release.
Grayson darted in and out between sets, cackling; Mason let Connor stand on his boots to manage the steps; Ollie tried to steal the piper’s hat and got a wink for his trouble.
Baby Elise slept through precisely nothing.
Between figures, Zander drew Skylar to the edge of the whirl and set his forehead to hers. “Are ye happy, wife?” he asked, the simple kind of question that counts the most.
“Aye,” she said, and the word settled in her chest like something planted that knew it would grow.
They danced until the rushes were crushed sweet and the candles leaned low. They ate honey-cakes that Astrid pretended not to have worried over and drank ale that Hamish pretended not to have sampled first.
At some point Scarlett dragged Skylar to the long table, snapped a sprig of ivy, and tucked it into her braid. “For luck,” she pronounced. “And because ye’ll need something green to look at when the men get daft.”
“Ye marry one ,” Mabel said, bouncing Elise on her hip like she was her own, “ye marry his entire cohort.”
“We’re standing right here,” Kian and Campbell protested cheerfully, stealing a honey-cake from Connor and replacing it immediately when Connor scowled.
Later, when the ceilidh tilted toward the soft songs and the older folk drifted to the edges, Ariella found Skylar again, eyes steady. “What did ye mean, Ari?” Skylar pressed.
“Only that I’ll nae be led by the nose,” Ariella said under the music. “If they think to press me, they’ll find their fingers bitten.”
Skylar smiled, pride and worry mixing. “Good. We’ll plan.”
“Tomorrow,” Ariella said, and kissed her cheek. “Dance tonight.”
So she did.
She danced with Zander, with Hamish, with Grayson perched on her shoes, with Mason who bowed with ridiculous flourish and nearly toppled them both, with Campbell who took his turn with priestly decorum, with Kian who spun her until Astrid glared him into releasing her.
When the final tune unspooled and the candles guttered to blue, Zander took her hand and led her through the quieter corridors, past the stillroom door he’d promised to keep open, past the solar where a boy’s dice lay waiting, into a future that looked like ordinary days and work worth doing and a love sturdy enough to survive Dunlop women and Strathcairn weather.
Behind them, the hall emptied—Mabel gathering children, Scarlett humming to a sleeping baby, Hamish laughing at his wife. Mason watching in the shadows, and Ariella stood in the doorway watching the night, chin up, eyes bright, the hint of a battle of her own already gathering on the horizon.
Skylar glanced back once and then let the sight go, choosing instead to look at the man beside her, whose hand fit hers as if they’d practiced their whole lives.
“Ready?” he asked.
“For what?” Skylar asked playfully.
“For forever,” Zander said, his lips planting a kiss on her temple before she turned her face up to his.
“Aye, me love. I’m ready for our forever,” she said, and meant it.
The End?