“Beer,” Alina said.
“What?”Roark wasn’t sure he’d heard herright.
“Beer,” she repeated.“It’ll help the goatsproduce more milk.They should get a cup each every day.”
Roark translated for Fergus.
“Me da used to give ale to sows who werenamaking enow milk to feed their piglets,” Fergus said, grinning andnodding at Alina, who was doing her best to act like she didn’tunderstand a word he was saying.“I’m on it,” he told Roark.“Though cook’ll likely be asking you ’bout it later, making sureI’m not swindling the laird’s ale stores.”He tipped his cap tothem and headed out of the stables.
“You’ve earned yourself another admirer,”Roark told Alina.
“Another?”
“Aye, lass,” Roark said in his Green Islestongue.“Along with Ash and meself.”
Her cheeks flushed a becoming pink before sheturned her attention back to the foal who was still suckling away.The door creaked open and Roark looked up.
“Roger and Leif are here,” he warned Alina,and then stepped out of the pen to greet them.“Laird Roger,Leif.”
“We met Fergus on our way over,” Roger saidin the Northern tongue.“He said you ordered beer for thegoats.”
“I did,” Alina answered him.“It’ll help themproduce more milk for the foal, who, as you can see, has improvedgreatly.”
“I see.”Roger flicked a quick glance at thefoal and beaded his eyes on Alina.“I suppose it helps to havesomeone born and bred with the blood of a stable hand tending tothe foal.”
Alina ignored the slur to her parentage, atleast outwardly.“The dam, Etain, is doing better as well,” shereported.
“Humph.”Roger flicked his hand toward themare’s stall.“She’d better take to her next foal, else she’s of nouse to me.”
“She’s young, she’ll do better if you waitout her next breeding season,” Alina told him.“Let her recoverfrom this foal while watching and learning from experiencedbroodmares with their foals.”
“Is that what your stablemaster father taughtyou?”Roger said with a sneer.
“It is what Hamar taught me,” she said, andthen she turned her back to Roger and tended to Ash, who’d drainedhis horn.Roger turned and strode out of the stables with Leif onhis heels.
***
“Wait your turn, mama,” Roark told theyowling stable cat whose newborn kittens were sleeping in the boxhe’d made them in the vacant stall across from Ash and the goats.He dipped a bowl into the milk bucket and set it down for the cat,smiling as she lapped it up.He’d learned from Alina a nursingmother always needed extra food, and over the past three days, mamacat had learned Roark and Alina were easy touches.As had Smokey, agray and white newly weaned kid who’d been bullied by the othergoats and brought over to be a stable companion for Ash, and wasnow stuffing his nose into the pocket of Roark’s breeches, where hekept special treats like pieces of carrots or apple.“You areincorrigible,” he said, laughing as he pulled a carrot top out andgave it to the bleating kid.
He reached for Ash’s nursing horn to refillit and stopped.The foal had his head in the bucket of milk and wasdrinking on his own.“I don’t suppose you could keep this newaccomplishment a secret?”
“Keep what a secret?”Alina said, startlingRoark.She stood outside the gate and he stepped aside and motionedtoward the foal, who still had his head in the bucket, drinking hisfill.Alina beamed.“This is good news, it means he…oh.It means hedoesn’t need me here day and night feeding him.I have no reason tostay out here away from the manor house and the people in it.”Shemet Roark’s bittersweet gaze.“You and I can go back to sleeping inour own bedchambers.Alone.”
Staying out here with the horses, the goats,and the cats, practically living in the stables together for thepast four days, had been a reprieve neither of them wanted to end.“How long do you think we can hide this?”Roark asked.
She shrugged.“If Ash continues to nurse fromthe horn as well, Gare and Fergus may not notice for another threeor four days.Do you think they’d help keep it a secret if theyknew?”
“I think they’d want to, for your sake,”Roark told her.“For their own, they dare not.Roger wouldn’t takeit kindly if he found out they’d kept it from him.”
“They’ve been so kind to me,” she said.“Iwouldn’t want them in trouble.”
Roark sat down in the straw, leaned his backagainst the wall, and patted the space next to him.Alina sloucheddown beside him, petting mama cat as she bumped and purred, rubbingagainst her breeches.Breeches he knew she liked wearing, andwouldn’t be allowed to once back in the manor house.
He took her hand in his, twined his fingersthrough hers, and lifted her hand to his lips.He hadn’t kissed heron the mouth since the lake, though they’d spent the last fournights holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes, using themto say what they dared not speak or act on.
“We’ll keep it our secret as long aspossible,” he vowed.He tucked their hands in his lap, lookedaround, and grinned.“Horses, goats, and cats.”He chuckled.“I’llmiss our little world here when it’s gone.”
CHAPTER 7
