Page 18 of Outlaw Ever After (Highland Handfasts #3)
Guards opened the doors for him. Din from the hall blared.
He lumbered beneath the archway draped in corn dolls, carved turnips, and dried forget-me-nots.
Harvest smells floated on the air, the glow of firelight wavering yellow in the approaching doorway, beckoning him to a fate he felt swirling around him like a divination.
“Shake the apples, my lady!” ladies squealed with delight.
Apples clunked around a pot. “Dump them out!” Their voices echoed through the hall.
Rounding beneath heraldic banners wavering above, he entered the hall.
Guests filled the narrow space from wall to wall with chatter, brightly colored tunics or gowns.
Goblets clinked as a man scrawled his name upon a parchment at the registration table where the devil himself stood—Seamus Grant—lining his coffers with other people’s coin.
Staff flurried to and fro in a chorus of aprons and léines, when an old woman glanced his way absentmindedly, faltered to a stop, catching the empty goblets that began to tumble from her basin on her hip. She whipped back to him…
Was that Jossy
? Joslyn! The village midwife and the castle’s headwoman!
A grin split his face wide for the first time in three months.
Wanting to rush to her and sweep her around in his arms, he didn’t dare do so.
Her eyes widened as recognition dawned, before he tapped a finger surreptitiously over his lips.
She returned to her task, glancing his way as she tended to other guests.
He passed through the tourney contestants filling the trestle tables, imbibing endless flows of ale and eating from platters laden with roasted pig, pheasant, saffron-seasoned roots and legumes, piles of fresh blackberries ripened to juicy perfection.
Men preened, grasping wrists, pretending to be comrades, when they were about to become competitors.
He pushed through the bodies to glimpse the prize on the dais.
“…can nay believe she’s bringing so much to the table…” Lairds and nobles salivated, kilts of every color.
“…A boon for me when I win—”
“Ye wish, Gordon…”
Chuckling.
“…A young wife who brings her husband wealth.” Laird Graham? The bastard in his black doublet and Luther cross and carrying the baggage of three and ten bairns and two dead wives was here? “And her looks? ’Twill nay be hard for me to rally my marital rights.”
Fok
. Alexander ground his molars.
His eyes trained upon the dais; the centerpiece blocked by ladies leaning over a scattering of crab apples.
“Do ye see a letter, sister?” an auburn-haired lady holding a babe said.
His mind brewed with illness, colliding with the feeling of conviction in his bones that he was exactly where he was supposed to be—
He pushed through the contestants posturing against each other, garnering looks from servants who were whispering in each other’s ears— Was that Aulay
who’d just skidded to a halt? Arms loaded with wood for the kitchen fires and still as gangly and blond as he’d been as a lad?
The hush rippled like a wave as people silenced to hear what everyone was silencing to hear, until the hall was still.
He stopped beneath the dais, when a woman in pine green and Grant tartan draped over her shoulder, whose chestnut hair he’d know anywhere
, lifted her head.
“A letter C
.” Her soft words damned him.
“But whose name begins with C
?” a fetching blonde lamented, the same woman, he realized, he’d seen at Lughnasadh with that babe, glancing about the contestants.
Wide eyes the color of honied amber, striated with copper and framed with fanning lashes, abysses that damned a man’s soul, landed upon him
.
A prickle raised gooseflesh upon his skin. Were those tricky fae
toying with living
souls, too? His?
“There’s naybody registered whose name starts with such,” the blond lady replied, and Christ, but the prickling sensation tingled now, buzzed like a hive in his chest, for she was staring at him as if she saw a Samhain ghost.
The crackling hearth seemed suddenly intrusive, like a pounding headache the morning after imbibing heartily.
Fate and destiny. Past and present. Worlds collided on competing orbits as the torchlight wavered on the draft. And then his eyes fell to her empty
ring finger.
And the pain he’d lashed down within himself for three long bloody months, worrying that he’d never find her, the one
woman he’d thought he might lay down his sword for, as he scoured the countryside, broke like a dam of anger and regret. He’d fretted for naught!
“Songbird…” He croaked the nickname with a smug jut of his chin.
Silence deafened.
The eyes of the woman who’d ruined him for any other widened. Those lush lips parted. Cheeks as smooth as moonlit silk flamed the powdery pink of the dog roses that had once fringed her in that greenwood like a halo made just for her. That pulse upon her neck, so slim, so delicious
beneath his roving tongue, fluttered with secrets beneath her ear where he knew that fairy kiss he’d once devoured resided. He hated
that he ached to look upon her.
Letter C.
What she’d said rattled around the cavern of his mind like a pebble in an empty drum.
The air sucked from the chamber as hurt pleated her brow. His songbird, the elusive Margaret
he’d searched for, was none other than the daughter of the man who’d beheaded his sire and sent it rolling to Alexander’s impressionable feet.
Her hand slid across her belly as if she was going to be sick.
“Peigi, ye look ill,” the auburn-haired woman said.
Seamus stepped forth with concern, eying her.
Aye, she was ill. She was looking at the eejit she’d fooled and thought she’d never have to see again. The spell popped.
Tears vaulted over her eyelids, streaming rivers down her face as the maddening quietude of the hall threatened to swallow him in a cesspit of lost dreams.
“Pegs, what’s wrong?” Seamus rumbled.
Then Seamus’s eyes turned on him…then back to her…then bore down on him again. “Is that him?” he whispered. “Is that the blackguard?”
“Mon Dieu,” she breathed disbelievingly, shaking her head.
Alex noticed too late Seamus flick his finger at someone else, at accoutrements flashing in his periphery, at a red kilt belonging to Kendrew MacGregor dashing to Seamus’s side, saying, “The man from Lughnasadh…”
And then, Seamus’s deep rumble. “Detain him for questioning.”
Fok no.
It was Seamus, this time, who would be detained, and humiliated for his debt in front of all these guests. He smirked. He reached for his summons bearing the seal of the Lord High Treasurer—
“The cretin goes for his weapons!” shouted MacGregor.
What?
Grant guards swarmed around him.
He ripped free an arm. They grappled with him again
. But the Reaper never went down without taking his adversaries with him!