Page 70 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

“Aye.”

The carriage rolled to a stop, and the door swung open before the driver had even fully set the brake. Liam MacDougal climbed down first.

“Magnus.” Liam clasped his forearm, grinning. “Congratulations on yer upcoming nuptials. Ye look terrible.”

“I’ve had a busy week.”

“Aye, I heard. Fire, was it?” Liam’s grin didn’t fade. “Well, ye’ll have company for the worst of it now, at least.”

Before Magnus could ask what he meant by that, a second door swung open on the far side, and Katherine MacDougal emerged with a hatbox under each arm.

“Elspeth!” Her voice carried clean across the courtyard, pitched for an audience considerably further away than the woman it was aimed at. “Elspeth, where are ye? I’ve brought everything.”

Elspeth appeared in the doorway of the keep, and whatever greeting she’d meant to offer died somewhere in her throat as she took in the carriage properly for the first time.

“Katherine. What is all this?”

“This,” Katherine said, already directing two of Magnus’s men toward the trunks, “is everything a woman requires for a proper handfasting. Ye daenae think I’d let ye marry in whatever ye happened to have on hand, did ye?”

Magnus watched the trunks come off the carriage one after another, and kept watching, because stopping seemed to invite the possibility that there might be more of them than he’d already counted, which turned out to be the correct instinct because there were.

Six trunks. Two hatboxes. A crate that rattled suspiciously of glass bottles. Bolts of fabric wrapped in oilcloth against the damp. Three potted plants, roots bound in sacking, that a groundskeeper carried past him with visible confusion as to where such things were meant to live. Candles. What appeared to be an entire second wardrobe. And, near the very bottom of the pile, two matching cases that a stablehand set down with a grunt disproportionate to their size.

Magnus stared at those longest. “Katherine.”

“Aye?”

“Why does one woman require two cases of shoes?”

Katherine looked up from where she was directing the placement of a hatbox, unbothered by the question. “To let her beauty shine.”

Magnus frowned. “Can beauty nae shine in one pair?”

“Magnus Wallace.” Katherine had already produced a ribbon from somewhere and was holding it beneath Elspeth’s chin, tilting her head this way and that. “Ye’ve lived among goats and sheep for too long.”

“The goats never required six trunks.”

“The goats,” Katherine said, “have never had to stand up in front of an entire clan and be married.”

Liam had come to stand beside him by then and clapped a hand on his shoulder. It felt more like genuine sympathy than a greeting.

“Me condolences,” he said.

“For what?”

“Ye’ll see.” Liam’s grin widened, and he nodded toward the growing pile of trunks with the look of a man thoroughly enjoying someone else’s coming misfortune.

Magnus did not have to wait long to see. Katherine had produced, from somewhere within the second wardrobe’s worth of boxes, a hat that could only be described as an act of open hostility toward the head it was meant to sit upon. It was wide-brimmed, feathered, dyed a shade of purple that existed nowhere in nature that Magnus had ever encountered in twenty-nine years of living close to it.

“Try it,” Katherine urged, already reaching to set it atop Elspeth’s head.

“I willnae.”

“Elspeth.”

“I will throw it in the loch, Katherine, I swear it on everything I hold dear.”

“Ye’ll do no such thing; it cost a small fortune.”