Caoimhe's breath caught.
She didn't know what to make of that.
“I, er...must have worried you when I didn't come back tonight. I'm sorry. It was...well, it was an eventful new year, don't you think?”
Her casual tone brought the atmosphere back down a little. Away from the scary heat of desire, of possession. Caoimhe didn't know if it was cowardice or need that had her moving things back towards friendly banter.
“It was certainly the most.. exciting Samhain’s that I've had,” Niall offered.
Caoimhe smiled. “Every Hallows' is eventful with my family,” she told him.
As Niall stood, taking a washcloth in hand and moving to crouch beside the tub, Caoimhe's nervous sensitivities had her beginning to chatter.
“My, er...my sisters always loved Samhain. With all the traditions and everything…”
Surprised into silence, Caoimhe watched as Niall wet the cloth but only turned to brush at her face. The fabric moved gently across her temple, where she had been knocked out, brushing at the blood and sand that had matted in her hair and stuck to her skin. He didn't try to touch her anywhere else.
Only tended to her with sweet gentility.
“What sort of traditions?” he asked her, rinsing the cloth and moving it back to her face.
“You know, the usual ones. The name of your lover in a teacup and the standing in a barn doorway thing. Or the mirror one, with the apple.”
Niall's face was equal parts amused and unsure.
“I have no idea what you're talking about.” Clearly, as a young and handsome man, Niall had never felt the need to rely on spells and pagan games to tell him his future. “What's the mirror thing?”
Caoimhe laughed and shook her head. “It's all silliness.”
She took the cloth from his hand and washed down her arms and legs until all roughness had been removed to float to the bottom of the tub.
“But supposedly, if a young lady stands before a mirror on Samhain and bites into an apple while looking at her reflection, the shape of her true love appears.”
“In the apple?” Niall asked, clearly assuming this superstition to be pure nonsense.
“In the mirror!” Caoimhe laughed. “Like a ghostly vision just above the shoulder. Like he's behind you.”
There was a moment of pause as Caoimhe washed her toes and Niall suddenly rose from her side. He walked to the bed, where a fruit bowl always rested on the little silver tray. Then he turned to her with an apple in hand and a smile on his face.
It was the same smile he had held when he’d forced her onto a horse for the first time.
And it had Caoimhe’s heart pounding.
“Oooh, no,” she said with a raised finger, shaking her head. Her hands dripped water into the bath.
Niall glanced at the full-length mirror of silver in the corner of the room.
Caoimhe laughed.
“But why?” she challenged. “It's nonsense. And I'm already married.”
Niall said nothing, only raising a brow and holding out the apple again. Caoimhe's face twisted in amusement as she tried to taunt him back.
“Fine. But have you considered what you'll do if the ghost of my true love is a short, fat, bald man with beady eyes?” she asked, deliberately picking everything that Niall was not.
“Have you?”
Disbelieving in her own silliness, Caoimhe placed her hands on the sides of the tub and pushed up to her feet. She was pleasantly surprised by a little retaliation in the look on Niall's face as she stood before him, naked and gleaming. Draining her hair of water and stepping out onto the hearth rug, she was vindicated by the way his eyes followed every movement, every glistening swell and line.
She held out her hand for the apple.
“Do you...er...do you not wish for a robe first?” Niall asked, his stare firmly fixed upon the line that led down to her navel. He blinked and tried to correct his gaze, only to have it trapped by her breasts.
“No,” Caoimhe determined, finally feeling some sense of power in her own nudity. “The tradition does not work if the lady is clothed.”
“Of course it doesn't,” Niall growled, before tossing the apple to her with a little bounce of his hand. Caoimhe watched him over her shoulder as she moved towards the mirror. She could see his attention in the reflection, how his eyes followed the sway of her hips. And she didn’t dislike the salaciousness in his gaze.
Maybe he was right. Maybe she was a little scary, after all.
Standing before her own image and trying not to lose courage in the face of her own nakedness, Caoimhe raised the apple to her lips and cleanly bit into its flesh.
Almost immediately, Niall moved to stand behind her, his image now hovering exactly where it should, his lips finding the curve of her neck.
Caoimhe giggled.
“How did I know you were going to do that?” she asked him. She had meant the words to sound scolding, but instead, they were breathless under his touch.
The beard that Niall had steadily grown since their marriage was a little rough upon her skin, and heat bloomed everywhere it rubbed.
“Because, you love me.”
The words were pressed against her skin, but she heard them all the same.
The truth of them pounded in her heart.
“Aye,” she promised him, turning in his arms, seeking his kiss. “That I do.”
This time, their lovemaking was true.
There was no pain, no awkward tension. There was no rush. Niall held her as if she were precious. She honored him as if he were mighty. After a night of such delirium, Caoimhe had no strength left to be coy. She touched her man with all the possession that she wished for and surrendered her body with all the love that she felt.
Together, they fell to the sheets of the bed they shared, a tangle of limbs and sensual eagerness. Niall's tongue claimed the moisture from her skin and Caoimhe's fingertips traced each line of his muscles.
Their kisses differed and their tongues clung. Sometimes Niall claimed her mouth with a force so strong that Caoimhe feared she would disappear into his shape. Sometimes he kissed her with such tenderness, she wanted to cry.
He touched her, revered her, and molded her body into a languid heat of desire that, by the time they were each breathless and wanton, she could only beg to become his.
In their joining, they each discovered the shift in the other. The crackling fire was the only witness to a union of more than just bodies. They moved together, steady and sure, and reaching for a completion that they could gift to one another. That they could share.
Soft gentleness turned to tender loving. And the steady rhythm of tenderness broke into the long and heavy strokes of passion. As their bodies strove for something beyond themselves, Niall linked his fingers with hers and Caoimhe would not break their kiss.
As physical ecstasy overrode all else and both parties stilled and shook with the power of their own release, Caoimhe's name was on her husband's lips, and she cried the most truthful of vows to love him forever.
Four weeks later, everything had changed on the Aberlynn estate.
Where Caoimhe had once feared running into canines laying on rugs, she now chased them down corridors with the wild abandon of a schoolgirl. Where Niall had been a stranger to his servants, a monster of the upper floors, he was now occasionally found wandering the kitchens or seeing to the gardens of vegetables behind old Herman's house.
Once, Caoimhe had even caught him with a smudge of white flour on his nose.
Hallways that had once been eerily silent were now always echoing with noise and laughter. With her parents' home not designed for so many at once, Caoimhe had insisted that Heather and her children stay at the estate, for the time being. With all the new chambers reopened and returned to their original splendor, there was plenty of room.
And with rooms came servants to tend to them.
Despite his reservations over Fiona and her son, Niall had accepted his wife's determination
to see the world with a more optimistic eye. And with all her nagging on the subject, he had eventually capitulated to taking on more staff in order to have Aberlynn returned to its former glory.
The discussion was not the only argument between the lord and lady Brodie, but never were they not reunited in their chambers each night, their affections clear and renewed in one another's arms.
It seemed perfectly selfish and entirely contrary, to her, that she should linger on the tiniest off-stitch in the brilliant and beautiful embroidery that was her new life.
But, try as she might to ignore it, the sneaky and cruel little voice in the back of her head liked to constantly remind her that Niall had yet to say that he loved her.
In all the ways that mattered, Caoimhe could convince herself that it was true. The way in which he held her was too passionate to only be physical. The look in his eye when she caught him watching her across the dinner table was surely something more than simple care? How he worried when she wandered and how he brushed her hair back behind her ear. Or kissed her when he rose each morning, as if he never wanted to leave their bed.
Surely, he loved her?
Rising early one morning to the sound of an aggressive little owl, Caoimhe had taken her dreams and her horrid little thoughts out onto one of the balconies on the west side of the castle. From there, she could see the sea stretching out to the right and the main road that led up across the lands to the south on the left. The blue and the green coming together like the tartan that hung from the flagpole above her head.
Wrapped in a thick blanket to ward off the winter chill, Caoimhe watched as her breath plumed in little puffs of white before her gaze was caught by a series of carts headed in the direction of Fraemlynn.
Caoimhe jumped when arms came around her middle, warm and strong. But she relaxed the moment that Niall's voice was whispering in her ear.
“What are you doing, wife of mine?” he asked. His arms were powerful and drew her back against his chest; a safe nest from the rest of the world.
“Just looking,” Caoimhe answered, her head finding a soft spot to rest on his shoulder. “There are carts headed to Fraemlynn. A birthday or something?”
“No. It'll be Michaelmas decorations and trees,” Niall said, distracted by the smell of her hair.
Caoimhe frowned.
“This early? You sure it's not Malcolm's birthday or his wife’s?”
“Fiona always prepares for such things in huge advance. And Malcolm was born in September.”
Caoimhe paused for a moment, confused.
“When in September?”
With an annoyed exhale that his cousin and aunt were interrupting a quiet moment between them, Niall spun Caoimhe in his arms.
“Does it matter?” he asked, leaning down to tempt her with a kiss.
But Caoimhe was distracted.
“No, no, wait…” She raised her hands and Niall gave her a look that warned her of a waning patience.
“Fiona said that she knew she was pregnant with Malcolm because the smell of knotgrass on the heath made her sick,” she said.
Niall nodded. His lip twisted in annoyance over the event. The fact that they had heard hide nor hair of Fiona and Malcolm since Caoimhe had been taken did not lessen his burning ire against them. Unfortunately, there had been no real evidence to tie them to her kidnapping, else Niall would have seen them resting in jail already.
“But knotgrass only grows from May to November at the very latest.”
Niall frowned. He was unsure of exactly where she was going with this.
“So, Fiona was sick in May?”
Caoimhe shook her head.
“If Malcolm was born in the summer, Fiona would have known by May. She said that the knotgrass was what made her realize that she was due a baby. Which means, she had to have been made sick in November. There was no knotgrass in between.” Her expression turned intense. “Niall...Fiona just held a dinner to celebrate her anniversary with her late husband. She did not invite me, but she took great pains to know that it was happening, so that I would know that she had not invited me.”
“Which means that she was married in late November,” Niall finished.
“But knew that she was pregnant in early November.”
“Oh my God…”
They both looked at one another in complete bewilderment for a moment, unsure of the discovery that they had just made.
“So...all this time, Fiona has been trying to push those rumors onto me? And they were her secrets all along?”
Caoimhe smiled and shrugged.
“I think that most of our fears stem from our own vulnerabilities,” she said, offering Fiona far more benefit than she perhaps deserved. “I think sometimes we strike out and put those fears onto others. To force them from ourselves. To protect our own weaknesses. Maybe that's what Fiona was doing? Wanting everyone to look at your birth with suspicious eyes to turn them from herself?”
Niall was looking at her funny.
Caoimhe wasn't sure what she had been expecting, but perhaps a cheer or a laugh or something that would show his exhilaration at having erased the threat to his family name. He had only to threaten to expose Fiona, to tell her that he knew her secret, and surely she would back off and leave them to their own peace?
And yet, Niall could only watch her with an expression of still determination.
“Putting our own fears onto others…” he murmured, repeating her words back to her. “Like when you're hopelessly in love with someone. But instead of telling them and lowering your walls, you force them to be the one to admit to such feelings and try to build your marriage upon their words alone?”
Caoimhe went very still and very quiet. She could have said something. Could have lifted the feeling of awkwardness and helped him to the conclusion he was riding towards. Could have hoisted the sail for him and made the declaration on his behalf. But something in Caoimhe told her that he needed to do it himself.
“I love you.”
He spoke the words in a rush, as if he feared that they would hide back within the recesses of his heart if he didn't say them then and there.
Silence reigned until her husband was practically twitching with nervousness.
“Did you hear me? I said, I love you.”
“I heard you.”
Niall swallowed.
Caoimhe smiled.
“Are you only telling me this because I worked out the Malcolm thing?” she teased.
Niall barked something between a laugh and a sob. His hands held firm around her waist.
“No! I'm telling you it because I've been trying to tell you for four weeks! And because I'm tired of keeping secrets that don't need to be kept.”
Caoimhe’s breath caught in her chest.
“Me too,” she breathed. She took his hand from her waist and moved it to her front. There she rested it beneath the blanket against the flat smoothness of her belly.
Niall took a moment to comprehend what she was telling him. Took a second to feel the meaning in her gesture, to sense the life that now grew within her. His lips parted, his mouth tried to form words. She grinned at his complete discombobulation.
“I do believe, husband of mine, that you are speechless.” She giggled. “Tell me with a nod or shake of the head... Are you happy for this? Is this what you want for us?”
Niall's gaze found hers with a look that questioned her sanity. His palm flattened protectively against her middle, and the other stroked the side of her face.
“I love you,” he told her again.
“That's not an answer!” Caoimhe laughed.
“Yes, it is.”
And then he pulled her into his arms in order to prove it.
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Highlander’s Fateful Ride
Prologue
It was not the best weather for riding, but Broch’s and Bettina’s horses had been cooped up for five days because of heavy rain and had become so frustrated that they had started to try to kick down their stable doors. However, since the rain had cleared up, hopefully for the rest of the afternoon, Broch and Bettina had decided to take them out for some much-needed exercise.
Bettina’s mare was called Babby because she had raised the little horse from when she was a six-week-old foal ’til she was the lovely seven-year-old chestnut mare she was right now. They loved each other with all their hearts.
Broch’s stallion was bigger and sturdier, a grey stallion named Diablo, which Broch knew meant “devil.” Broch had named him when he was a rebellious lad of eighteen, but now, at twenty-seven, Broch had calmed down a little and so had twelve-year-old Diablo.
Before they left, Broch opened some rich red wine and gave a goblet to Bettina. His gray-green eyes were sparkling with fun.
“Not long now,” he whispered, pulling her close and nuzzling her neck with his firm lips. “Two weeks ’til the wedding.”
She smiled at him and gave him a soft kiss. “No, not long.” She ran her hand over the scratchy, stubbly skin of his cheek, loving its feel against her palm. The difference between men and women never ceased to amaze her.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked suspiciously, with narrowed eyes. “You look as though you are plotting something wicked!”
“No, I was just thinking how different we are,” she replied with a quiet laugh.
“I do not think you have any notion of the amount of that difference,” he said; his voice carried a hint of mischief in it.
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