by Rosanna Leo
The man at the door was drop-dead gorgeous and somehow familiar. Short, fiery red hair. Brooding, blue eyes. And a cheeky grin.
He approached them, one red eyebrow sky high. When he reached the table, he extended his hand toward Maggie. Despite her better judgment, because she really didn’t need to make the acquaintance of yet another devastatingly beautiful man, she took it.
“Well, well,” he said, still grinning. “And are you the lovely lass who’s finally going to make an honest man of my brother here?”
By all that was holy. One of the six brothers. As if the world needed another Calan.
Chapter 10
As much as he very much wanted to get rid of his brother and continue what he’d started with Maggie, Calan launched himself out of the booth. But even though he wanted to swat Angus for his tragic sense of timing, he was happy to see his older brother. They embraced and Angus punched him in the shoulder.
“What did you do that for, daft bugger?”
Angus smiled at him as if he were touched. “A redhead, eh? And a pretty one, too.”
Maggie blushed from tip to toe.
“Don’t mind me, love,” Angus drawled. “I’ve been trying to convince my brother of the natural superiority of gingers for years.” And then he ran his hand through his own flame-tinged locks.
“We could share your opinions with sweet, black-haired Elsie,” Calan teased back. “I’m sure she’d just love to know how much you appreciate a ginger woman.”
Angus made a face of mock terror. “By Odin’s sagging gonads, don’t say a word to her. The poor dear’s about to burst, and none too thrilled with me right now, that’s for certain. I don’t think she’ll ever forgive me for impregnating her!”
Elsie. Calan uttered a silent blessing for the woman. It couldn’t be easy, falling in love with a sex-crazed selkie man, as they all were, and then becoming pregnant with a child that was more animal than human. It did give one pause. He put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “How is she?”
Angus nodded, serious now. “Nervous. Scared to death, actually. Ma’s trying to keep her comfortable, but Elsie won’t see sense. We’ve told her it would be best to, how shall I say, have an aquatic birth.” He darted an uneasy look at Maggie.
“You can say whatever you’d like in front of Maggie. She knows the truth about us,” Calan offered, putting his arm around her, and pretending to ignore the shell-shocked expression on her face. “Even though she hasn’t quite accepted it yet.”
Angus smiled, relieved. “Oh, right, then. Well, my darling wife won’t have any of it. She’s bound and determined to have this pup on dry land. I’ve got the whole family holed up with her at Breannan’s house. It’s the most central. But she’d really like to see you, Calan. I need you to come home with me.”
Home. Upon hearing the word, he turned to Maggie. Funny how he thought of her when thinking of home. “But we’re in the middle of something, Angus. We’re … looking for something.”
Angus rolled his eyes. “Right. You did appear to be looking for something when I came in but I daresay you can find it at Breannan’s house as well. He does have spare bedrooms.” His brother stared at him for a moment, and Calan made a mental note not to share the vulgar expletives currently peppering Angus’s brainwaves.
“Uh, where are my manners?” Calan stammered, trying to change the topic. “Maggie Collins, this is my oldest, and most annoying, brother. Angus.”
“Charmed.” Angus took her hand, bowed, and kissed it.
In response, Calan swatted him over the head. “Hands off.”
Maggie started to giggle. Despite himself, and his sudden urge to throttle his enchanting brother, he started to laugh too. And it was so good to see her smile, he forgot
any misplaced animosity.
“Even though there’s absolutely no physical resemblance between the two of you,” Maggie commented, “I can totally tell you’re brothers.”
Angus laughed in a deep booming voice. “Ah, well, that’s because little Calan here takes after our wee mother. Whereas I take after Da. He, too, had the good fortune to be ginger.” He winked at her, and then turned to Calan. “Look, I’m sorry I interrupted … whatever I interrupted. But are you coming? I really don’t want to be the one to tell Elsie if you’re not.”
Calan turned to Maggie. Fuck. What now? I can’t leave her now.
“Uh, Maggie,” he began.
She looked at him for a moment, her face serious and a little sad, and then she pulled away from his embrace. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. You need to go. Family’s important.”
And as she said that, her face crumpled. Not on the outside, but he saw the inner crumple in her eyes, despite the falsely brave smile. Here she stood, a woman who’d lost everything, who’d lost her family, and she was giving him the opportunity to be with his. Knowing full well that she was also giving him the chance to get rid of her.
He just knew that if she’d been in possession of the pelt, she would have taken this opportunity to return it to him. She was as good as offering him his freedom. And he couldn’t have wanted it less.
He wanted her.
And he certainly didn’t want to leave her alone against the threat of burglars and snipers, crazed waitresses, and good-for-fuck-all Matthews.
He reached for her trembling hands. Suddenly, it was really important that she be with him when he went to Breannan’s home. He wanted her to meet his insane family, wanted her to like them. He could see it now. His mother would dote on her. His father would tell her tales of the sea until he was blue in the face. They would love her. “Maggie. Come with me.”
Her eyes widened. “But I have to find the skin.”
“The skin can wait. Just a little while.” He pulled her closer to him, not stopping until her body was flush against his. As it should be. He resisted kissing her in front of his brother, even though she smelled so good! “Please. I want you to come with me.”
He watched as the varied emotions flitted through her eyes. Doubt, temptation, fear of embarking on an adventure that might end up breaking her heart. “I don’t know. Meeting the family already? It seems a bit premature.”
He grinned, trying to take her uncertainty away. “You’ll be able to witness the birth of a little selkie. How many humans can say that?”
She looked back and forth between him and Angus, but Angus kindly stepped back, unwilling to interfere.
“But won’t I be intruding? It’s your family, not mine. And at such an important moment,” she argued, looking ready to bail on the whole plan.
“Maggie. Please.”
For the life of him, Calan would never forget the look on her face then. A change, a twinkle in her eye that said she was willing to take a leap with him, a little leap of faith. The warmth in her smile seared him to the core. And when he glimpsed the way her gaze caressed him with intimacy, with a certain deep something, he grew more excited than
he’d ever been.
“Okay, Calan.” She smiled. “Take me to your brother’s house.”
* * * *
Calan parked his motorcycle in front of a brown stone cottage on the same stretch of beach Nora had lived near. At the same time, Angus parked his own bike. The Kirk men did seem to have a strange appreciation for Harleys. Maggie couldn’t help wondering if the mother and father rode them too. With a baby coming, Angus would certainly need to trade it in for something more sensible.
Or would they all just swim off into the sunset, selkie-style? Oh, brother.
The entire time they’d ridden, the voice in Maggie’s head had kept muttering, “You need to turn around and finally run away from this crazy man and his apparently equally crazy brother.”
She’d kept expecting the two men to turn around, point at her and desert her somewhere along the way, laughing at her gullibility. But they hadn’t. And now they were just walking to the house, talking quietly amongst themselves. Every so often lapsing into a language that seemed archaic,
but lovely with its lilting inflections. And she heard them mention what seemed to be other names. Exotic, almost foreign-sounding names. Edan. Drummond. Machar. One that sounded like Jamie. And the previously mentioned Breannan. The other brothers.
She couldn’t even begin to imagine what they must be like. If the two Kirk brothers before her were any indication, their house must be drenched in male pheromones.
They reached the door to the house. This was it. This was where the farce must surely end. The woman inside this house was supposed to give birth to a selkie baby, or so the men said. It was one thing for two individuals to lie about it, but certainly the whole family wouldn’t be in on the joke. Maggie cringed and waited.
But Calan turned to her and smiled, a smile so wide and genuine her heart skipped a few beats. He pulled her into an embrace while Angus did a shoddy job of averting his eyes. He kissed her softly on the lips and whispered, “I’m so happy you’re here with me. I can’t help it. I am.”
Feeling her body quake the way it always did with his touch, she admitted, “I still don’t know what I’m going to see in there.”
“Oh, nothing too terrible,” he kidded. “Just my family.”
Angus put his hand on the doorknob. “Let’s go. My wee wife needs me.” With that, he entered the home of their brother Breannan.
Calan grabbed her hand and followed Angus inside, while she followed him, feeling a severe need to hide behind his massive back.
She couldn’t hide for long.
“Calan!”
The rapturous cry came from a petite, dark-haired lady standing among a throng of big, male bodies. Maggie stared. The woman looked just like Calan, a daintier, female version. They had the same, penetrating dark eyes and flowing brown hair. She was lovely, perfectly lovely.
The little woman threw herself at Calan. “My son. You’ve returned for the birth. Elsie will be so pleased. Poor thing’s in the back room. Angus, lovey, you’d better get in there. She’s been asking after you.”
Maggie watched Angus disappear into the back, a worried look on his handsome face.
The dark-haired woman then turned to Maggie and clapped her webbed hands in excitement. “Calan, you’ve brought your beautiful mate!”
A rousing cry went up as Calan’s whole family shouted in delirium. Maggie almost choked on her saliva. “Mate?”
There was no time for Calan to reply. Before either of them knew it, the men of the household picked them up and started to dance them around on their shoulders. Maggie thought she’d somehow fallen into an Orcadian-Jewish wedding. She was waiting for someone to stomp on a wineglass.
As they were bounced on the men’s shoulders, she shouted to Calan over the din. “They think I’m your mate?”
He grimaced and shouted back at her. “My family. A bit overexuberant.”
He let out a thunderous cry and the wild dancing stopped. “Now if you’d be so kind as to put Maggie and me down, I’ll do some introductions. Perhaps it would be best before anyone gets the wrong idea and starts placing orders for china patterns.”
There was a loud, disappointed-sounding “Oh,” and the couple was set down. Calan pulled her close. As he did, he leaned over and whispered, “Sorry about that.”
She grinned up at him. “It’s okay.”
It was really okay. More okay than she’d have realized. In fact, a shudder of delight had gone through Maggie’s body upon being mistaken for Calan’s mate. She found herself wishing she could go back to that moment.
Calan turned to his family members. “This,” he said, inclining his head toward her, “is Maggie Collins. A friend, not my mate.”
As she heard the words “not my mate,” Maggie felt the happiness in her gut fizzle as if someone had poked a sharp pin into it. In her mind’s eye, she could see that deflated happiness spin about the room like a balloon losing its air, twirling and twirling around and eventually settling to the floor with a wet plop.
She immediately pasted on a smile and tried not to look like an “eejit,” as her gran used to say.
“Maggie certainly looked like your mate when I first ran into you,” called Angus in jest from the other room. “You were doing things to her that I do to Elsie.”
At that, a female cry sounded from the bedroom and Angus quit joking. Maggie could hear him offering gentle words of encouragement to his pregnant wife, and it warmed her right through. She could almost see the couple in her mind’s eye, Angus smoothing Elsie’s hair with his hand, kissing the side of her face. Telling her he loved her.
The image pleased and disturbed her at the same time. Perhaps because of how much she wanted that scene for herself. For her and Calan.
Once again, he read her mind and put a hand on the small of her back. As he gazed at her, he rubbed his thumb over the bottom of her spine, sending delicious chills right up her back.
His parents approached her. His mother darted a warm look at him, and then smiled at her. “Welcome, Maggie, dear. I’m Fae and this is my husband Alun.”
Maggie looked up at the massive man before her. Redheaded, like Angus, and twice as hairy as any of them. He had a long mane that flowed down his back and a wild, red
beard. His blue eyes twinkled with the same flirty mischief that regularly shone from Calan’s eyes. He leaned down and gave Maggie a kiss on the top of her head and grinned. “You’re welcome here, lass. We haven’t seen Calan with a woman since Kyla, you know.”
“Da.” Calan’s eyes flashed in warning.
Okay, this is worse than the whole “not my mate” thing. Way worse. Who’s Kyla? She swallowed the horrible punching sensation in her gut. Sure, she’d known Calan had had other women, lots of women, but had never heard a name applied to any of them other than the heart-broken Annette. He’d never mentioned this Kyla. God, even her name sounded beautiful and exotic. And from Calan’s reaction to hearing her name, she must have really meant something to him.
Maggie dug deep into her soul for a shred of composure as she faced Calan’s father. “Thank you, Mr. Kirk.”
The big man elbowed her gently. “Alun. I insist. Mr. Kirk sounds like someone off of that god-awful telly show about the aliens. The one with the green women.”
Despite herself, Maggie laughed. Man, his whole freaking family was too charming.
Suddenly, she was confronted by a wall of large men. She felt Calan’s arm wind around her in a possessive grip. He eyed the other men with one eyebrow cocked. “Maggie, I’d like to introduce you to my other brothers. At least, I think I’d like to do so. They’re such randy buggers, I may live to regret the decision.” He nodded toward the man on their left. “That’s Breannan, the man of this house.”
“A pleasure,” Breannan drawled, kissing her hand.
Maggie stared at him. He was a slightly smaller version of Calan, only slightly, but with short brown hair, and just as gorgeous. “Um, nice to meet you.”
“Next to him is Jamie,” Calan continued, indicating a hard-bodied strawberry blond.
“When you’re ready for a real man, Miss Maggie,” Jamie joked, “just call my name.”
Calan took a moment to whack his brother, making them all laugh. He composed himself, and then pointed a thumb at the next brother, a startlingly attractive man with black hair and blacker eyes. “That’s Machar.”
Machar shook her hand, holding it for a moment. “You can call me ‘Mack.’ My friends all do.”
“She’s not your friend yet, Machar,” Calan threatened in a good-humored tone. “Onward and upward then. Next we have Drummond.”
Maggie grinned at the brunette with the buzz cut and shook his strong hand. “It’s a pleasure.”
Drummond smiled back through shiny blue eyes. “The pleasure’s all mine, believe me.”
Maggie felt her cheeks glow as Calan impatiently introduced the last of the brothers, another tall redhead with long hair like their father. “And finally, completing this peanut gallery, we have Edan.”
“Don’t listen to h
im, Maggie love,” Edan said in a deep, resonating voice that shivered her timbers. “Our boy Calan has always been the jealous sort. He has good reason with such fine specimens as brothers.”
“I’ll give you a fine specimen, you peedie piss weasel,” Calan muttered.
Maggie couldn’t help laughing at him, as they all did. Poor man! He really did look
flustered in front of his brothers, and who could blame him? As sexy as Calan was, it must be hard to be the baby brother of all those other sexy, flirty men. No wonder he never brought women home.
Other than Kyla.
Maggie stopped laughing at the thought. Who was she?
She didn’t have time to ask. From the back room, a shattered cry erupted. Elsie. The woman in labor.
Calan’s mother inserted herself in front of her huge sons. “I’m sorry to rush the introductions, Maggie dear, but Elsie needs me. A selkie labor can be a long, drawn-out affair. Poor Elsie has suffered with the contractions for two days now.”
Two days? God help her.
Fae continued. “We’ve told her time and again that it would be best to birth underwater, but she’s got a notion that the babe won’t be able to swim. Imagine! A selkie babe unable to swim.”
Maggie stared at the woman. Either the whole family was delusional over this selkie thing, or they were all drinking the same Kool-Aid. For a second, Maggie decided to chalk it up to Scottish eccentricity. It was the only explanation she could stomach.
But then again … maybe this selkie thing could be real.
Fae nodded at Calan. “Elsie needs you, my love. We’re hoping your special talent will calm the poor lass.”
With that, the family dispersed into the back room.
Maggie turned to Calan. “Are you a midwife or something?”
“Funny. Do I look like one?” He smiled. “No. But I do have a bit of a bond with Elsie. And she has an appreciation for my singing voice.”
