The Gathering Storm (The Jacobite Chronicles Book 3)(17)

She turned away from the targe to look at him. He didn't seem sad, but then his father had been dead for eight years. He did seem uneasy though, hovering by the door as though seeking an opportunity to leave. She thought this strange. After all, this was his house; she was the one who should feel awkward. And then she realised.

"Do you have another pressing appointment then, or are you thinking of staying a while?" she asked.

The corners of his mouth lifted slightly, and he took two steps into the room.

"Did you think I wouldn't like it?" she asked softly, taking his hand.

"Well, it's no' quite what ye're used to," he said.

"Nothing about my life since I've been married to you is what I was used to," she pointed out. "That's why I love it so much. It's a fine house, Alex. It's well built, warm, dry and comfortable. It's better than I expected it would be, to be honest, after all your stories about sleeping in the bracken and suchlike. I was expecting a couple of poles tied together with a blanket thrown over them at best."

The upturned corners became a wide smile.

"I wanted ye to be prepared, so ye wouldna be too disappointed," he said.

"It worked," she affirmed. "I'm not. It's lovely, Alex. But I still haven't examined the most interesting piece of furniture in the place."

"What's that?" he asked. He thought she'd seen everything there was to see.

"This," she murmured, moving closer.

There was a brief pause in the conversation, during which MacGregor, disgusted at what his master and mistress were doing, uncurled himself and leapt down from the chair, stalking haughtily and unnoticed from the room.

"Please tell me," Beth said from the floor a few minutes later, her voice somewhat muffled by her skirts, which had just been tossed unceremoniously over her head, "that the whole clan are not about to descend on the house with the welcome feast." She pushed at the material with her one unoccupied hand, freeing her face and looking into her husband's eyes, which seemed almost black at the moment, the pupils wide with arousal.                       
       
           



       

"No," he mumbled, not really caring at the moment if a full regiment of redcoats was about to ride through the room. "They're giving us some time alone together. And if they did come in, at least they'd know ye're more than capable of fulfilling one of the duties of a wife, anyway."

She meant to ask him what he meant by that odd comment, but became somewhat distracted by subsequent events, and later forgot all about it.





CHAPTER FOUR


The men returned home from driving the cattle to market two days later, but upon realising that the chieftain and his new wife were intending to stay for several weeks, it was decided to celebrate both his recent marriage and his return together, at a feast to be held in a couple of weeks.

"That'll give ye the time to settle in a wee bit, and get acquainted wi' people," Alex explained to Beth as they sat by the fire on the evening of the men's return. There had been many ribcracking hugs and much good-humoured railing of the chieftain by his men, who they said they had feared was becoming seduced by the pampered English lifestyle, he'd been away for so long.

The reception his wife had received was less familiar; that was to be expected, as she was an unknown quantity, and a Sasannach too. Alex had watched his clansmen carefully as they greeted her, and was, on the whole, satisfied. They had been welcoming, warm even, obviously appreciating her beauty and open friendly greetings of them. Alex had known she would not hesitate to accept the embraces of travel-stained men who smelled somewhat less than pleasant to say the least, after several days of herding cattle across the hills. He also knew that she would have coped well with any good-humoured ribbing, although there was none.

He could do nothing about the concerns he saw in their eyes regarding her size, slender build and apparent unsuitability to the rigours of the Highland life. He had not chosen her for her ability to perform heavy manual labour or give birth to twenty children with ease; he had chosen her for her independent free spirit, her intelligence and trustworthiness, because he could not bear to see that spirit stifled, and because he loved her. Most of all because he loved her.

He was of course aware that she was small and slight; how could he not be, when he towered over her? In an English drawing room, however, her fragility was not incongruous with the surroundings, and her spirit detracted from her physique. But here, as he saw her in conversation with the other women of the clan whilst they prepared a communal meal for the homecoming men, he realised for the first time just how pale and delicate she appeared when compared to the robust tanned MacGregor clanswomen, and started to have misgivings of his own as to how well she would cope with the lifestyle.

He looked at her now sitting opposite him, brow creased in concentration as she attempted to knit a pair of stockings.

"Ye're holding the wool wrong," he said. "Here, gie it tae me." He took the needles from her and demonstrated, looping the wool over his index finger and letting it trail across his palm. "You see, this way the tension stays even." He knitted a row quickly, then showed her the stitches, loose and even on the bone needle, unlike hers, which had been so tight she had to stop at regular intervals to force them along the needle. He handed the work back to her, and she sighed. "Ye dinna have to learn everything at once," he said. "The clan'll no' reject ye if ye canna knit a pair of stockings. I can knit my own, anyway. Most of the men can."

"I know that," she replied. "But we're only here for a few weeks and I want to learn as much as I can in that time. And anyway, I can knit. Or I could. My mother taught me when I was a child. I'm just out of practice. I didn't like it much, because it involved sitting still and I wasn't very good at that then." She looked up in time to see him grinning, and smiled back. "Well, yes, I'm still not very good at it, but at least I'm trying." She put the uneven piece of work to one side. "I'll use that to practice on until I get it right."

Before she could lean back or find something else to do he grasped her wrist and hooked her deftly from her chair onto his knee. Angus and Duncan were out, and he was glad she'd stopped knitting. He knew what clan life was like; he would not have a lot of time alone with his wife, and when he did get her to himself he wanted all her attention. It was childish, but he didn't care. She settled comfortably into him, her head resting against his shoulder.

"I'm looking forward to the wedding feast," she said. "Are the men annoyed that you got married away from the clan, without asking them?"                       
       
           



       

"No," Alex replied. He was their chieftain. They would not expect him to ask their permission to marry, as they would ask his. "They consider it an honour that the prince was a witness to our wedding. They'll enjoy the celebration anyway. It isna necessary to have the ceremony first. And it saves the trouble of locating a priest to perform it. I was thinking," he continued, tracing the line of her cheek with one long finger, "of sending to Glencoe, to see if any of the MacDonalds would care to come. Would ye like that?"

She sat up.

"Are you serious?" she said, her eyes alight.

"Aye. I was going tae do it as a surprise, but wasna sure if ye'd welcome it, so I thought I'd ask ye first."

"I'd love it!" she said. "My grandmother had a couple of sisters and a brother who had children. They'd be my cousins, I suppose. I know my grandmother didn't have any more. She didn't remarry after my grandfather died in prison after the massacre, and my mother was her only surviving child. She had six others, but they all died young, one way or another. Of course," she said, smiling up at Alex, "I suppose, technically speaking, the whole clan are my family."

More than technically speaking, thought Alex. Although they would consider the MacGregors to have first claim on her now that she was married, in the event of any problems she could turn to her MacDonald family for help. Not just technically, but in actuality. And Highland life was so precarious, particularly for the proscribed MacGregors …

He wrapped his arm around her suddenly, protectively, and pulled her into him, inadvertently crushing her face against his body. She gave a small chirp of protest and pulled back a little, then kissed the hollow at the base of his neck, inhaling the unique warm masculine scent of him, smiling as he made a deep, inarticulate sound in his throat that she knew was the precursor to other things. She was very happy. The clan had not rejected her. He would not have to choose between them.



She continued to be very happy for a couple of days. She thoroughly enjoyed being able to abandon hoops and elaborate hairstyles in favour of comfortable woollen and cotton dresses and simple braids. She was enjoying caring for three men too, much preferring the honest labour of housekeeping and the company of jovial, down-to-earth people to that of looking merely decorative and trying to appear interested in trivial chatter in the company of malicious gossips.