Page 60 of Highlander's Betrayed Vixen
“Ye will be giving people improper ideas, looking as happy as all that.” Ciaran’s words to his wife might have sounded likechastisement, but his tone was naught but pride. “They’ll suspect that I’ve been doing something to put that look on your face.”
Eilidh scrunched that pert little nose of hers at him, but her smile didn’t fade a bit.
“We are newly married,” she said, as though he needed the reminder. “They will think what they will think. But I dinnae intend to hide my happiness for even a moment.”
They were dining as a family that morning, rather than in the Great Hall, and it made Ciaran feel strangely hopeful to think of himself as a member of the family. For so long, it had been just him and Aunt Kirsty as part of the clan’s original leading family, and he’d felt as though he needed to shoulder all his burdens alone.
No longer. Now he had his wife—and the brothers and sisters that her extended clan brought along with it.
The Laird’s parlor had been laid out with food, and the mood in the room was muted but cheerful. Ciaran and Eilidh had been able to hear the party going late into the night, and Mairi Buchanan, for one, looked as though she might be suffering the aftereffects of the combined wine and revelry. Ailsa was rocking her small son, looking down at him with a fond, weary expression that said that celebrating too much was not the reason forherlack of sleep.
Everyone murmured their felicitations anew to Ciaran and Eilidh, and they had just gone to take a seat beside Davina and Arran when Vaila and her husband hurried into the room, looking distressed.
Ewan and Graham both, with a laird’s sense of urgency, sat up in their seats at once, any traces of exhaustion gone.
“What is it?” Ewan demanded, his eyes on his captain’s face.
James’ expression was grim.
“We’ve just had word,” he announced. “Keep McPherson is no more. Gordon and his men… they burned it through the night.”
At Ciaran’s side, Arran went very still and very pale.
“Caden?” he asked, seeming as though he dreaded even mentioning his brother’s name in the wake of the reference to such a tragedy.
Vaila gave him a resigned look. “We don’t know,” she admitted. “Nobody knows if there were any survivors.”
Davina let out a shocked gasp, and Eilidh’s hand shot out to clutch at Ciaran’s arm.
Ciaran felt that old, familiar feeling of impending battle settle over him, along with the readiness that he always brought to such scenes of violence. His wedding celebration was at an end, it seemed. It was time for war once more.
But now, he had more to protect than he ever had before.
“We will get through this together,” he promised Eilidh, gazing resolutely into her shocked green eyes until she nodded, a little color returning to her cheeks. “No matter what.”
It was time to make good on his oath to defend his new family by marriage. It was time to finally show Gordon that his reign of terror had come to an end.
