Wild Highland Magic (The Celtic Legends Series Book 3)(23)

As her father coaxed Lachlan up the path, she felt a weight of sadness and wondered if it was Lachlan’s or just her own. Her arms ached to open to the grieving man but that was foolishness. Her father would never approve of her making so intimate a gesture.

“Lachlan,” Da said, as they reached the bend in the path where she and Seamus stood. “I need a word with my daughter. You and I shall speak more on this later. Seamus, go tend to your cows, it’s nearly milking time.”

Dutifully, Seamus set up the hill toward the pastures above. Lachlan kept walking up the path, his gaze drawn inward where she couldn’t see.

Her father hadn’t yet said a word to her, but through his thoughts he communicated everything that had happened in Galway. She saw that he’d spent many nights in smoky seaside alehouses, sitting near the Derry men to listen to their drunken talk. She saw her father buy many a drink and venture many a question about where they’d come from.

I’ve got a daughter in Wales, her lands besieged. Are the English causing trouble in the Highlands as well? Trouble there is, a man had said, but it’s clan against clan and sept against sept. The Campbells fighting the Macdonalds, and the MacEgans fighting among themselves. The chieftain of Loch Fyfe found dead at the bottom of a cliff, only a week after his son disappeared off a ship in the North Sea.

Cairenn shivered with the impact of the news. “Father,” she whispered, “it’s too dangerous for Lachlan to leave.”

A muscle flickered in his cheek. “So it’s Lachlan now?”

She tried very hard not to blush. “He’ll return to a place where people want him dead.”

“That’s his decision. I can’t force a man who doesn’t want to stay.”

And Lachlan wouldn’t stay, that much she knew. With his father dead, she was sure that duty would tighten a fisted grip around his heart.

Her mother’s prophecy reverberated in her mind.

Death.

“Please, Father,” she said, her mind racing. “You must convince him he’s not strong enough to leave.”

Da murmured, “So that is the way of it then.”

She saw her own face through her father’s eyes, a rictus of desperation, yearning, and something else she dared not name. She heard the thought in her da’s mind, but she shook her head against it.

“Your mother warned me,” he said. “But like all fathers I held tight to the hope that you’d give your heart to someone close—”

“Father, please,” she interrupted, unhinged by the word heart. “I ask for your help for his sake, not mine.”

“I can’t help him any longer. But perhaps you can.” Da gestured over his shoulder toward the galley moored just outside the reef. “I know the Derry men’s words, but not their hearts.”

“You wish me to read them.” Hope surged up in her so strong that it blotted out all other thought. “But the subject of Lachlan must be the front of their minds if I’m—”

“They’ll be in the alehouse soon enough, and so will I. I’ll see that the subject comes up again.”

She nodded, greedily. She would know if any of those men held secrets, if any of those men had bad intent. She would know, and she would tell her father, and he would convince Lachlan to stay.

A tingling awareness swept over her. She stretched her mind to the Derry man now in the alehouse, and even farther to the men working in the anchored galley. Before she touched those minds, her father stepped close to capture her wandering attention.

“Read those men true, daughter.” His face was full of warning. “Even if it means Lachlan will leave on the morning tide.”

***


Hours later Cairenn entered the sickroom to find Lachlan pacing before the hearth. He lifted his head and set his midnight-blue gaze upon her. A quiver rippled through her. Not because she couldn’t read his thoughts—those were as fathomless as ever—but because, perhaps for the first time, she could read his face.

Grief was not easy to bury. It sat in the crimped skin around his eyes, in the furrows deepening on his brow, in the bright steady light of warning in his eyes. Warning for what, she could only guess. Grief made men act oddly. Women wept, but men spit sparks.

She swallowed her unease and headed to the table scattered with bottles and unguents and linens. “My father has sent me to remove your bandages.”

“Just give me a knife,” he said, setting to pacing again, “and I’ll cut off the bandages myself.”

“Then you’ll pull the scab right off and it’ll be worse than before.” She busied herself searching for a clay pot with the right unguent. “And how are you going to put salve on your own back?”

“Why didn’t your father come himself?”

“He’s detained at the waterfront, drinking with the O’Neills.”

“Still?”

“Do you think he can know those men’s minds so quickly?”

“He can never know them, not at all.”

Yes, he can, Lachlan. She let her hair fall across her brow so Lachlan couldn’t read the bright thought on her face. Because Da has me, and I have a gift.

You can have me, too.

She squeezed away the thought before she blushed, then she rounded the table and approached. Her heart rose in her throat as he stopped his pacing. She paused close enough to feel the intensity of his presence, a warm and subtle vibration of the air between them. As the silence stretched, a tingling uncertainty weakened her knees as a flush crept up her neck.