Page 69 of Highland Fire

“You mean, I can speak to Fiona with your blessing?”

“So eager,” Rand murmured. “Yes, you may speak to Fiona, but only after we have dispensed with settlements and so on. First, however, you’ll join me in a wee dram?”

Thirty minutes later, Rand watched from his library window as Fiona and Daroch met on the front lawns and entered into a rapturous embrace.

He had just admitted a sometime smuggler and grave-robber into the ranks of the family.

He shook his head, wondering if he were mad, or perhaps if there was more of his mother in him than he had ever suspected.

As his glance lingered, the couple on the lawns broke apart, and their words reached him through the open window.

“I love you,” they said in unison. Rand turned away, then climbed the stairs to the bedchamber he shared with Caitlin.

As had become her custom in the last week or two, she was taking an afternoon nap, resting fully clothed beneath the top coverlet. Her dark eyelashes made fans along the sweep of her cheeks. They fluttered as he approached the bed, but her eyes did not open.

“ Mo gaol orist ,” he murmured.

“Hush. Go back to sleep.”

She turned slightly, and Rand edged one hip on the bed, staring down at his wife with a hunger he was careful to conceal when she was watching him.

She was four months along and more lovely to him than any woman he had ever known.

No doubt the poets would tell him it was his love for her that made him think so.

Love. He was still uncomfortable with that word.

He had wanted to give her time to get over her lost love.

Her condition had afforded him the perfect pretext to keep his distance.

He might have suggested that they sleep in separate chambers, as many couples did when the wife became pregnant.

Once or twice, the words had slipped onto his tongue.

But he could not utter them. He could not deprive himself of the feel of her, the scent of her, and the little sobbing cries of arousal she made when he came into her.

If he could not posses her heart, he would have as much of her as she would allow.

Had she noticed the difference in him? he wondered.

A blind man must see it, and Caitlin saw more than most. He was forbearing of all her little foibles; sensitive to all her moods.

As for his restraint, the saints in heaven must be lauding his praises.

He didn’t know what more she could ask of him.

He’d sunk thousands of pounds, tens of thousands, into her little domain.

His factor had looked at him askance, but was obliged to keep his thoughts to himself.

His brothers were under no such obligation.

A walking charity, they called him, to pour his capital into a venture from which there would be no return for a least a hundred years. They had relished tormenting him.

That was before they had listened to Caitlin.

She had made converts of them all. They were investing in people, she had told them, in posterity.

It was not immediate profit that should guide their endeavors, but the improvement in men’s lives.

With all their advantages, all their experience, the English Randals had it in their power to do something really worthwhile for future generations of the Clan Randal.

God, he had heard recruiting officers spout much the same rhetoric! And it worked! His brothers were no more immune to his wife’s blandishments than hopeful young men with dreams of heroism attending to the words of a veteran soldier. They were no more immune than he.

She had worked such a change in him that he hardly recognized himself.

He was Iain, Lord Randal, chieftain of a great and noble clan.

He cared about posterity and future generations of clan Randal.

But sometimes, just sometimes, he wished Caitlin would look a little closer to home.

If she wanted to improve men’s lives, she had a husband who wouldn’t be averse to a little improvement in his lot.

No man had ever done as much as he to win the woman he loved.

He couldn’t go on like this for much longer. He was ready to explode.

The marriage of Fiona and Daroch was what the natives called a braw affair. Rand gave the bride away. Highland dress for the gentlemen was, naturally, de rigueur . Kilts, in all the bonnie tartans of Deeside, were in splendid profusion, and none more than of the clans Randal and Gordon.

The English Randals were there in force. The dowager was quite taken with the spectacle of her sons in kilts. There were a few obscene comments when they beheld the sporrans their chief had procured for them, but the dowager hardly noticed. When it suited her, she could turn as deaf as a door.

Fiona, in her borrowed wedding gown, her cousin’s, brought gasps of admiration from the assembled guests.

She scarcely thought of her own appearance.

Her eyes were trained on the darkly handsome laird with the finely etched features who waited to claim her.

When she placed her trembling fingers in his, and he smiled at her, all her apprehensions melted away.

Caitlin was wearing a gown in the Gordon tartan, her father’s tartan, and on the fourth finger of her right hand, she wore Daroch’s ring.

If she had wanted to proclaim her patrimony, and she did, she could hardly have chosen a more obvious way, unless she had sent a notice to the papers.

Those seeing her hardly blinked an eye. Had they not always known that the lass had the look of a Gordon?

They understood, none better, why that knowledge had been suppressed until the right moment had presented itself.

With the passing of Glenshiel and his brother, an era had come to a close. The old blood feud was finally over.

In the wee hours of the morning, after the bride and groom had left for their own home with the customary Highland escort, Rand gave the signal to the fiddlers for the commencement of a special entertainment he had arranged for his guests.

Patrick Gordon, the Bard of Aboyne, stepped forward, and a hush settled on the great hall of Strathcairn House.

“Why, what is this, Rand?” asked Caitlin.

He drew her hand into the crook of his arm. “You’ll see,” he said, and shook his head when she opened her lips to say more.

It was a hauntingly romantic tale of two star-crossed lovers, Robert Gordon o’ Daroch and the love of his life, Morag Randal.

It told of their secret marriage and of the terrible blood feud that kept them apart.

Though the bard was correct in the essentials of his story, some things were glossed over.

It was not part of Rand’s design to reveal the scandal of Donald Randal and the hatred that had warped his mind.

When the bard related the events that led to Daroch’s death and told of the secret his young wife had carried with her to the grave, there was not a dry eye in that great hall. Gordon reached for Randal and vice versa, and swore undying friendship or Scotland’s honor would be forever tarnished.

Caitlin swallowed her own tears. Her head was held high, and her hand was wrapped tightly around the crook of her husband’s arm.

All at once, the bard clapped his hands and stamped his foot, and the tempo of the music changed to something gay and rollicking.

The words that tripped from his tongue were in the Gaelic.

Rand sat up straighter. “What this?” he asked Caitlin.

Her eyes were sparkling, and her lips curved. “It’s the story of how Daroch’s lass brought the feud to an end.”

“Oh? And how did she do that?” His eyes were smiling too.

“She snared the chief of Clan Randal,” she answered saucily.

Rand sat back to enjoy the entertainment.

This was more in the style of a bothy ballad.

The assembled guests clapped their hands and stamped their feet in time to the music.

Before long, they were singing the refrain.

These were words that Rand recognized. “Mo gaol orist,” they sang, and he, too, sang with gusto.

When the ballad was ended, and the thunderous applause had died down, he observed, “That’s a peculiar refrain,” then looked again at the rosy blush which spread from his wife’s throat to her hairline. His eyebrows climbed.

Mumbling something indistinct, Caitlin made her excuses and slipped away.

“What is so peculiar about the refrain?” asked Peter, who sat on the other side of Rand.

Rand had to think for a minute. He’d heard those words from Caitlin countless times. “I must have misunderstood their significance,” he said absently. He was still thinking of Caitlin’s furious blush. “Do you happen to know what they mean?”

Peter chuckled. “You must be getting past it, Rand,” he said. “Think back to when you were a young man, a man about my age. What were the first words you familiarized yourself with before setting foot in a foreign country?

“What?”

Peter shook his head at this abysmal show of ignorance. “Sometimes I wonder if you were ever young.”

“Halfling, if you don’t tell me directly, I swear I shall break your neck.”

“I’ll give you a clue, shall I? Je t’aime, ich liebe dich, te amo …!” Before he had quite finished, he was left talking to thin air.

Caitlin bolted down the front steps and took off as though the hounds of hell were pursuing her.

With no clear idea of where she was going, she struck out along the first path she encountered.

Rand caught up with her before she got very far.

It was Bocain who led him to her. He caught her by the wrist and swung her to face him, then ducked as her fist came at him, missing his handsome nose with only an inch to spare.

Bocain looked from one to the other. She knew this game. It always ended the same way. Yawning, unheeding of her mistress’s furious curses, she sauntered back to the great hall, then burst into a gallop when she sighted the twins.