Page 98 of The Wolf Laird's Obsession
“Then it’s sweat.”
“Sorcha.”
She laughed and pulled back just enough to look at his face. The scar on his cheek, the grey of his eyes, the lines aroundhis mouth that had softened over the months they had been together. She reached up and traced the scar with her fingertip, the way she had done a hundred times before.
“I love ye,” she said. “I love ye, and I love Elspeth, and I love this baby, and I love this castle, and I love Morag even though she is terrifyin’, and I love Flora even though she talks too much, and I love?—”
Rowan kissed her.
It was soft and slow and nothing like the desperate, hungry kisses of their first months together.
“I love ye too,” he murmured against her mouth. “Now, stop cryin’ and let us go down. Elspeth will have found Morag by now, and she has been demandin' a spin all afternoon. I cannae do it without ye there to watch.”
“Ye want me to watch ye spin Elspeth?”
“I want ye to watch me be a faither.” He took her hand and led her toward the door. “I am very good at it.”
“I ken. I have seen ye.”
“Then ye ken why I need an audience.”
Sorcha laughed and let him pull her down the corridor, through the Great Hall, and out into the courtyard where the cool evening breeze brushed her face, and the world felt new.
Elspeth was already waiting for them, jumping up and down with impatience as she skipped back from the kitchens. “I told Morag! Now spin me, Da! Finally! I thought ye would never come!”
“I was busy.”
“Ye were kissing Ma. I saw ye.”
Rowan looked at Sorcha, his expression caught somewhere between embarrassment and pride. “She saw us.”
“I told ye she sees everythin’.”
“She does.” Rowan scooped Elspeth up and settled her on his shoulders, her small hands clutching his hair for balance. “Hold on, wee one.”
He took off across the grass, running faster than Sorcha would have thought possible with a child on his shoulders. Elspeth’s shrieks of laughter echoed off the stone walls and drifted up toward the sky.
Sorcha lowered herself onto the bench near the garden, the one Rowan had built for her when her belly had grown too big for her to sit comfortably on the ground, and watched them.
Rowan ran and spun and chased, his laughter ringing out free and unguarded, the sound of a man who had finally stopped being afraid. Elspeth clung to his hair and screamed with joy, her small body bouncing with every step he took.
This is what I almost lost. This is what I fought for. This is what I will spend the rest of me life protecting.
Rowan caught her watching and slowed, his chest heaving, his hair falling across his forehead. He crossed the grass toward her, Elspeth still perched on his shoulders, and stopped in front of the bench.
“Ye are starin’,” he said.
“I am admirin’.”
“Same thing.”
“It isnae.” Sorcha reached up and brushed a strand of hair from his forehead. “Ye are beautiful when ye laugh.”
Rowan’s eyes darkened, and she saw the heat there, the same heat that had been there since the first moment they met. “We will continue this conversation later.”
“I am countin’ on it.”
Elspeth tugged on his hair. “Da, spin me again.”
