Page 75 of Her Wedding to the Vicious Laird

“Aye. I did.” She drew his head down and put her mouth close to his ear so the crowded, laughing hall would not have it before he did. “I didnae want to say it today and take the shine off Kate’s good news. But ye may as well ken the why of it, afore ye put half yer own guests to the sword.” She felt him go utterly, breathlessly still against her. “I am with child, husband.”

He drew back and looked at her, and she watched as it moved across his face—the black temper fading away, replaced by something vast, stunned, and undefended.

It was the face of a man who had once sworn on his sister’s broken body never to want anything this badly, for fear that the wanting itself would break him. Now, he looked at the woman who had shattered that promise completely and made him so glad beyond words about the breaking.

“A bairn,” he said. Barely a sound at all.

“A bairn. Come spring.”

Ragnall Crawford, the Laird of Clan Cairn, who rarely laughed and never wept, pressed his forehead against his wife’s and made a soft, broken sound she felt more than heard. His large hand rose to gently and reverently rest on her belly, where their child was growing. Meanwhile, the loud golden hall continued cheering itself hoarse for another couple, paying no attention to them at all, which suited them both perfectly.

“I love ye,” he said against her mouth, fierce, like an oath sworn on steel, like a man who had learned the words too late and meant to make up for all the lost years of them at once. “I love ye, Olivia. Both of ye. God help me, the three of us.”

“I love ye too.” She was laughing now, and her cheeks were wet, and she did not care who saw. “Now, put yer murderin’ face away and dance with me, husband, before yer grandmaither reads the whole tale off the pair of us and tells the glen afore we’ve danced a single reel.”

Across the hall, over the rim of a cup she was not meant to have, Maisie was already grinning like a woman who had known everysecret in the room a full hour before it was spoken. Which, in the way of grandmothers, she very likely had.

The End?