Page 37 of Outlaw Ever After

“Ye wish, Gordon…”

Chuckling.

“…A young wife who brings her husband wealth.” Laird Graham? The bastard in his black doublet and Luther cross and carrying the baggage of three and ten bairns and two dead wives was here? “And her looks? ’Twill nay be hard for me to rally my marital rights.”

Fok . Alexander ground his molars.

His eyes trained upon the dais; the centerpiece blocked by ladies leaning over a scattering of crab apples.

“Do ye see a letter, sister?” an auburn-haired lady holding a babe said.

His mind brewed with illness, colliding with the feeling of conviction in his bones that he was exactly where he was supposed to be—

He pushed through the contestants posturing against each other, garnering looks from servants who were whispering in each other’s ears— Was that Aulay who’d just skidded to a halt? Arms loaded with wood for the kitchen fires and still as gangly and blond as he’d been as a lad? The hush rippled like a wave as people silenced to hear what everyone was silencing to hear, until the hall was still. He stopped beneath the dais, when a woman in pine green and Grant tartan draped over her shoulder, whose chestnut hair he’d know anywhere , lifted her head.

“A letter C .” Her soft words damned him.

“But whose name begins with C ?” a fetching blonde lamented, the same woman, he realized, he’d seen at Lughnasadh with that babe, glancing about the contestants.

Wide eyes the color of honied amber, striated with copper and framed with fanning lashes, abysses that damned a man’s soul, landed upon him .

A prickle raised gooseflesh upon his skin. Were those tricky fae toying with living souls, too? His?

“There’s naybody registered whose name starts with such,” the blond lady replied, and Christ, but the prickling sensation tingled now, buzzed like a hive in his chest, for she was staring at him as if she saw a Samhain ghost.

The crackling hearth seemed suddenly intrusive, like a pounding headache the morning after imbibing heartily.

Fate and destiny. Past and present. Worlds collided on competing orbits as the torchlight wavered on the draft. And then his eyes fell to her empty ring finger.

And the pain he’d lashed down within himself for three long bloody months, worrying that he’d never find her, the one woman he’d thought he might lay down his sword for, as he scoured the countryside, broke like a dam of anger and regret. He’d fretted for naught!

“Songbird…” He croaked the nickname with a smug jut of his chin.

Silence deafened.

The eyes of the woman who’d ruined him for any other widened. Those lush lips parted. Cheeks as smooth as moonlit silk flamed the powdery pink of the dog roses that had once fringed her in that greenwood like a halo made just for her. That pulse upon her neck, so slim, so delicious beneath his roving tongue, fluttered with secrets beneath her ear where he knew that fairy kiss he’d once devoured resided. He hated that he ached to look upon her.

Letter C. What she’d said rattled around the cavern of his mind like a pebble in an empty drum.

The air sucked from the chamber as hurt pleated her brow. His songbird, the elusive Margaret he’d searched for, was none other than the daughter of the man who’d beheaded his sire and sent it rolling to Alexander’s impressionable feet.

Her hand slid across her belly as if she was going to be sick.

“Peigi, ye look ill,” the auburn-haired woman said.

Seamus stepped forth with concern, eying her.

Aye, she was ill. She was looking at the eejit she’d fooled and thought she’d never have to see again. The spell popped.

Tears vaulted over her eyelids, streaming rivers down her face as the maddening quietude of the hall threatened to swallow him in a cesspit of lost dreams.

“Pegs, what’s wrong?” Seamus rumbled.

Then Seamus’s eyes turned on him…then back to her…then bore down on him again. “Is that him?” he whispered. “Is that the blackguard?”

“Mon Dieu,” she breathed disbelievingly, shaking her head.

Alex noticed too late Seamus flick his finger at someone else, at accoutrements flashing in his periphery, at a red kilt belonging to Kendrew MacGregor dashing to Seamus’s side, saying, “The man from Lughnasadh…”