Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3)(21)

“When my father became chieftain,” he began, “he decided to change the old traditions. No longer would the next chieftain be chosen by deliberation among the brothers, uncles, or cousins of the late leader. From now on, our clan would pass the rod of leadership as the English do—to the firstborn son—and in that way keep the lands undivided and strong.”

She mused on this for a moment. “Then your father—”

“—declared me his heir.”

Heir to the chieftaincy of Loch Fyfe, as well as the three septs of the clan—the MacEgans, the Ewings, and the MacGilchrists. Thousands of souls and tens of thousands of Highland acres.

Her gaze fluttered away. She buried her fingers in her skirts, worrying the wool of her kirtle as if ashamed of the rough weave. Oh, he’d put a gulf between them, but Lachlan was beginning to wonder if even the width of a sea could stop him from wanting to slide his fingers into her hair and draw her face toward his.

Seamus’s voice suddenly carried on the wind. The boy stood by the dolmen stones shouting out a question about a ship in the bay.

She waved at the boy. “There’ll be no peace on Inishmaan until I give that boy my attention,” she murmured.

In a pensive silence, they strode up the final stretch to the height. Walking by her side, he fell into brooding. It always pained him to think he’d been stabbed by one of his own people. If the men of his clan would just see sense—if they would give up their own greed for power—then they would understand that it was in their best interests to follow his father’s lead.

Suddenly he realized that Cairenn was no longer walking beside him. She’d stopped just inside the ring of the embedded stones that dotted the ground around the dolmen.

The color had drained from her face.

He strode back to her. “Lass, what ails you?”

“Nothing.” She spoke in a breathy way that made him conscious of the lie. “I…just…need a moment to catch my breath.”

She placed her hand on his chest. At her touch, every muscle in his body came alive.

“Cairenn.”

“A pain in the head, no more.” Her fingers curled against him, seizing a fistful of his tunic as if she were trying to stay upright. “It will pass.”

He stood as still as a dolmen stone as the scent of this woman—rich earth and wildflowers—seeped into his mind. He breathed the fragrance deep and it was like he was taking her inside him, all of her, her softness and her warmth and her wild, sweeping imagination.

He slipped his hand over hers. At his touch, she lifted her face and threw her sea-green gaze at him like a grappling-hook into his heart.

“Lachlan,” she said, as if she were calling him from afar.

“I’m here.”

“But you’re not,” she said, her brows knotting as she pressed against him. “You’re not.”

He couldn’t help himself. He wrapped his arms around her. He whispered senseless words into her hair as he gazed past the thatched roofs of the distant farmhouses, to the gray sea and the hazy horizon, breathing in the sharp smell of the sea and rocking her to the sound of birds cawing and waves rolling in on the strand far below. He thought about the grim darkness of his own home and the smell of blood on his sword and angry men painted with woad and thatched roofs burning and wondered why he was in such a hurry to return to war when, everyone thinking him already dead, he might very easily make a place here amid peace.

He must have said something, for she looked up and fixed her startled green eyes upon him. He looked at her pale, lovely face and imagined her sitting in a house of wattle and daub that he’d built himself, spinning wool cut from his own sheep. It should be his cows she milked, his table she graced, his bed she warmed.

The oddest feeling came over him. It was as if he’d walked up this slope before, by the music of the surf below, feeling the warmth of the sun beating on the back of his head, following the bright blond head of the woman now pressed against him. It was an unearthly feeling, like the memory of something that had not yet happened but was already burned into his mind.

“Lachlan,” she said, his name on her lips pleading. “Don’t go.”

“I’m right here.”

“Stay,” she said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Stay here and be safe.”





CHAPTER EIGHT


Cairenn gripped his shirt as if it were a rope in a drowning sea. She struggled to read Lachlan’s thoughts as the power of the dolmen boosted her gift to painful levels, but all she could read, in this moment, was the expression on his face. After so much study, she could finally identify confusion when it rippled across his wide, beautiful brow.

Of course he was confused by her behavior. He could not hear what she heard, standing on this height so close to the thrumming vibrations of the dolmen stones. He could not feel the pulsing collective thoughts of the people of Galway, the fishmongers bartering for prices, the blacksmiths teaching their apprentices, the millstone workers worrying as the gears slowed. Lachlan could not hear the Portuguese sailors on the ships in the bay jockeying to be the first to visit the whores in the smoky brothels.

Nor could Lachlan hear the thoughts of the Derry men now rowing toward Inishmaan, or the frightful plans of her father sitting at the stern of the galley among them.

“You’re shaking.” A muscle flexed in Lachlan’s cheek. “I’m taking you home.”