Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 03] (2 page)

The glaring silence spreading across the dais end of the cavernous great hall answered her question. Her belly clenching, she glanced up at the high, vaulted ceiling, blew out a nervous breath.

Faith, the quiet loomed so deafening she could hear every hiss and crackle of the pitch-pine torches lighting the hall, the low-rumbling snores of Donall’s hounds sleeping near the hearth fire, and even the wash of the night sea against the rocks far below Baldoon’s massive curtain walls.

Almost imperceptibly, she shook her head and looked back at her brothers, not surprised to detect faint flickers of guilt flitting across both their handsome faces.

“I mislike being cozened,” she said with all the serene dignity she could muster. Taking her seat, she helped herself to a blessedly welcome sip of finest Gascon wine. “Nor will I allow it. Not so long as I have a single breath in my body.”

“God’s mercy, lass, it ill becomes you to play so stubborn.” Donall eyed her from his laird’s chair, a great oaken monstrosity, its back and arms carved with mythical sea beasts. He raked a hand through his raven hair, the same blue-black shade as Amicia’s own.

“Nay, Magnus knows naught of the union,” he admitted, holding her gaze. “But he will hear of it upon his arrival on MacKinnons’ Isle. He’s been gone some years, competing in tourneys, as you likely ken, but he is expected home within a fortnight and his father is certain he will welcome the match.”

Amicia stifled a most unladylike snort.

She
did
rake her brothers and everyone else at the table with a challenging stare. “Old Laird MacKinnon will be desirous of the filled coffers you’ll send along as my dowry. All ken he burns to rebuild the galley fleet they lost to a storm a year or so ago.”

“That is as may be, but he also loves his son and would see him well-matched and at peace,” Donall countered. “And I would be glad of the marriage, too. Our late father and old MacKinnon were once good friends. Wedding you to Magnus would seal our truce with the MacKinnons once and for all time.”

Amicia’s heart skipped a beat, and a tiny spark of excitement ignited within her breast. She glanced aside, half-afraid all the desperate hope in her entire world must be standing in her eyes. None of the previous betrothal offers had sounded near as solid, as well deliberated, as this one.

None save the relentless endeavors of a chinless apparition of a lordling whose name she’d long forgotten.

Ne’er would she forget Magnus MacKinnon’s name.

Truth to tell, it’d been engraved on her heart since girlhood, and sailed through the cold and empty dark of countless lonely nights now that she was a woman.

Pushing aside every warning bit of her good sense, she scrounged deep for the courage she needed to
believe.
To trust that, like her brothers, she, too, could find happiness.

A purpose in life beyond slinking about her childhood home, useless and pitied.

Welcome, aye, but not truly belonging.

A wildly exhilarating giddiness began spinning inside her, a dangerously seductive sense of
rightness.
Lifting her chin before she lost her nerve, she sought Donall’s eye. “The old laird believes Magnus will want me?”

She had to know.

“On that I give you my oath,” Donall said without a moment’s hesitation.

Amicia’s heart caught upon the words, her suspicions and wariness falling away as if banished by a gust of the sweetest summer wind.

“Old MacKinnon even sent you his own late wife’s sapphire ring to seal the pact,” Iain spoke up. He dug in the leather purse hanging from his waist belt, then plunked a heavy gold ring on the table. “Sore-battered by ill fortune as the MacKinnons have been in recent times, you’ll ken he wouldn’t have parted with such a fine bauble unless he truly wished to see you wed his son.”

“’Tis been long in coming, but you needn’t suffer doubts this time.” Iain’s wife, Madeline, gave her a warm smile.

Amicia nodded her thanks, her throat suddenly uncommonly thick.
Hot,
too. As were her eyes. Blinking furiously, for she loathed tears and e’er sought to avoid shedding them, she snatched the ring off the table and curled her fingers around its comforting solidness.

Wee and cold against her palm, it meant the whole of the world to her.

“So-o-o, what say you now?” Donall leaned back in his chair, folded his arms.

Tightening her hold on the little piece of shining hope already warming in her hand, Amicia gave voice to the last of her doubt. “Tell me first why there must be a proxy wedding if Magnus is expected to arrive on MacKinnons’ Isle within the next fourteen days?”

“Only because he is returning from Dupplin Moor,” Iain answered for his brother. “’Tis the old laird’s hope that having a bonnie new bride to greet him will sweeten his homecoming.”

“Come you, Amicia,” Donall urged, leaning forward to replenish her wine cup. “I swear to you for here and hereafter, I would not give you to MacKinnon did I not believe he will be good to you.”

Amicia drew a deep breath, straightened her back. She didn’t doubt Magnus MacKinnon would treat her well.

She wanted him to
want
her.

To love her with the same fierce intensity her brothers loved their wives.

Reaching for her wine, she tilted back her head and downed it in one great, throat-burning gulp. She looked around the table, half-expecting to see disapproving glances aimed her way, but saw only well-loved and expectant faces.

“Well, lass?” Donall reached across the table and nudged her arm. “Will you wed MacKinnon?”

Amicia looked down at the sapphire ring in her palm. It had the same deep blue color as Magnus MacKinnon’s laughing eyes. Dashing a fool trace of moisture from her own, she leveled her most earnest gaze on her brother and prayed to all the saints that her voice wouldn’t crack.

“Aye, I will, and gladly,” she said, her heart falling wider open with each spoken word.

And if by chance he didn’t want her, she would simply do everything in her power to make him.

Many days later, on the mist-cloaked Hebridean isle known as the MacKinnons’ own since time beyond mind, Magnus MacKinnon paced the rush-strewn floor of Coldstone Castle’s once-grand laird’s solar, sheerest disbelief coursing through him.

Crackling tension, tight as a hundred drawn bowstrings, filled the sparsely furnished chamber and even seemed to echo off its pathetically bare walls.

An even worse tension brewed inside Magnus.

His brows snapping together in a fierce scowl, he slid another dark look at his hand-wringing father. “I will not have her, do you hear me?” He seethed, pausing long enough in his pacing to yank shut a crooked-hanging window shutter. “Saints, but I’d forgotten how draughty this pile of stones can be!”

“But, Magnus, she is a fine lass,” his father beseeched him. “Mayhap the fairest in all the Isles.”

Magnus swung back around, and immediately wished he hadn’t because the old man had shuffled nearer to a hanging cresset lamp, and its softly flickering light picked out every line and hollow in his father’s worry-fraught face.

Magnus’s frown deepened.

“It matters not a whit to me how bonnie she is,” he snapped, and meant it.

The saints knew he’d had scarce time for wenching in recent years. And now, since the horrors of Dupplin Moor, he had even less time and inclination for such frivols.

In especial,
wifely
frivols.

Setting his jaw and feeling for all the world as if someone had affixed an iron-cast yoke about his neck, he strode across the room and reached for the latch of another window shutter. This one kept banging against the wall and the noise was grating sorely on his nerves.

Truth be told, he was tempted to stand there like a dull-witted fool and fasten and unfasten the shutters the whole wretched night through.

Anything to busy himself.

And help him ignore the sickening sensation that he’d been somehow turned inside out.

That the sun might not rise on the morrow.

His father appeared at his elbow, his watery eyes pleading. “The MacLeans—”

“—Are well-pursed and rightly so,” Magnus finished for him, turning his back on the tall, arch-topped window and its sad excuse for shuttering. “
They
ken how to hold on to their fortunes.”

“’Fore God, son, set aside your pride for once and use your head. Her dowry is needed, aye, I willna deny it. Welcome, too, but that isn’t the only consideration.” Clucking his tongue in clear dismay, his father set to lighting a brace of tallow candles, his age-spotted hands trembling.

Magnus glanced aside, ran an agitated hand through his hair. He would not be swayed by pity. And ne’er would he take a wife to fatten coffers he’d failed to fill.

Not Amicia MacLean.

Not any lass his stoop-shouldered da cared to parade before him.

And if they all came naked and bouncing their bonnie breasts beneath his nose!

The back of his neck hotter than if someone held a blazing torch against his nape, he strode across the room and snatched the dripping candle from his father’s unsteady fingers.

“Mayhap your father’s idea isn’t such a bad one,” Colin Grant broke in from where he rested on a bench near the hearth, his wounded leg stretched toward the restorative warmth of the low-burning peat fire. “I wouldn’t have minded going home to have my da tell me he’d procured a fine and comely lass to be my bride.”

At once, sharp-edged guilt sliced through Magnus, cutting clear to the bone. Colin, a friend he’d made on the tourney circuit and who’d fought beside him on the blood-drenched banks of the River Earn, didn’t have a home or family to return to.

The Disinheriteds and their Sassunach supporters had burned the Grants’ stronghold to the ground . . . and Colin’s kinfolk with it.

Naught remained but a pile of soot and ash.

That, and Colin’s unflagging determination to rebuild it as soon as he’d recovered his strength. But even if he could, which Magnus doubted for Colin’s coffers were as empty as his own, Colin’s loved ones were forever lost.

They couldn’t be replaced by all the coin in the land.

“’Tis well glad I am to be home, Da, make no mistake,” Magnus said, deftly touching the candle’s flame to the remaining unlit wicks . . . without spilling melting tallow all o’er the table and onto the floor rushes. “But I see you’ve gone a mite addlepated in my absence. I do not
want
a wife.”

“I pray you to reconsider,” his father said, his tone almost imploring. He tried to clutch Magnus’s sleeve, but Magnus jerked back his arm.

“There is naught to think over,” he declared, laying a definitive note of finality onto each word. “I’ll have none of it.”

Resuming his pacing, Magnus tried not to see Colin’s sad gaze following his every angry step.

Nay, Colin’s
reproachful
gaze.

He also strove not to notice the chamber’s sparseness, tried not to remember how splendidly outfitted it’d been in his youth . . . or think about how much of its former glory he could have restored had the fortune he’d amassed over the last three years not been stolen from its hiding place whilst he’d fought a vain battle against the English on Dupplin Moor.

He slid a look at his father as he marched past Colin, and hated to see the old man’s misery. But it couldn’t be helped. With time and hard work, he’d set things aright again.

He’d also rebuild his da’s proud fleet of galleys . . . even if he had to work his fingers to the bone and scrape the very sides and bottom of his strongbox to make it happen.

“You need heirs. I . . . I am not well, son.”

His father’s voice brought him to an abrupt stop.

Magnus swore beneath his breath, squeezed shut his eyes. “I will take a wife and sire bairns
after
I’ve regained our fortunes,” he said, thick-voiced. “You have my oath on it.”

“Well you say it, but I . . . I fear—”

“You fear what?” Magnus’s eyes flew wide. He wheeled toward the old man, found him hovering on the solar’s threshold, his rheumy gaze darting between Magnus and the gloom-chased corridor yawning beyond the solar’s half-open door.

Gloomy and shadow-ridden because the once-great Clan MacKinnon could no longer afford to keep their stronghold’s many passageways adequately illuminated.

A sorry state made all the more glaring by the light, hesitant footfalls nearing from the distance.

His father blanched at the sound and crossed himself. “Oooh, sweet Mother Mary preserve me,” the old man wheezed and pressed a quavering hand against his chest.

Magnus shot a glance at Colin, but his friend only shrugged his wide-set shoulders. Whipping back to face his father, he was alarmed to note that his da’s face had gone an even starker shade of white.

“What is it?” Magnus demanded, the icy wash of ill ease sluicing down his back, making his words come out much more harsh than he’d meant. “Are you taken sick?”

Purest dread, nay,
panic,
flashed across the old man’s stricken face. “Aye, ’tis sick I am,” he said, raising his voice as if to overspeak the fast approaching footsteps. “But not near so much as I’m about to be.”

Magnus cocked a brow. Something was sorely amiss and he had a sinking feeling it had to do with his father’s determination to marry him to the MacLean heiress.

Almost certain of it, Magnus folded his arms and fixed the older man with a stern stare. “Does your
illness
have aught to do with my refusal to wed the MacLean lass?”

A sharp intake of breath from just beyond the doorway answered him.

A
feminine
gasp.

And an utterly shocked one.

But not as shocked as Magnus himself when the most stunning creature he’d e’er seen stepped out of the vaulted corridor’s gloom.

’Twas her.

Amicia MacLean.

He hadn’t seen her in years, but no one else could be so breathtakingly lovely.

Even as a young lass, the promise of her budding beauty had undone him. Saints, her presence at an archery contest had once distracted him so thoroughly, his arrow had missed its target by several paces.