Warrior's Moon

made it clear she’d lessened herself in their eyes. And the one person she’d loved and trusted above all others had betrayed her completely.

Perhaps if theirs had been a new love affair, Shona would not have questioned her own worth so strongly. But she and Caelis had grown together in the same clan.

She’d fallen in love with him at such a young age, she could barely remember a time when just the sight of him did not make her heart take on a faster beat.

But he’d hidden this amazing side to himself from her that whole time. And her father, who had known of the Chrechte, had as well.

To discover the two people she had let into her heart, who were not her own children, in the last six years had also hidden this secret from her hurt so deeply, the wound resided in her soul.

All the people in her life she would have thought would consider her worth the confidence had judged her lacking.

Except her son. Shona would never fault her son for hiding from her the nature that despite his dreams would have been more mystery than comprehensible to the five-year-old boy.

But her friends were adults, her parents had had the wisdom of age and Caelis had been her beloved. Young yes, but not a child.

Not even as young as Thomas was now.

All three of them—Caelis, Audrey and Thomas—kept casting her sidelong glances. Looking for what, she did not know. She had naught to give them.

No words of wisdom, or even condemnation. Surely they were not seeking some kind of absolution?

They’d all proven beyond doubt that her regard meant less to them than their other concerns, whatever those particular concerns might be.

Ignoring the glances and even first Audrey’s and then Caelis’s attempt to take her hand, Shona walked through the great hall in a fog of pain that dulled everything around her.

There were places saved for all of them at the laird’s table and Caelis led them there through the noisy and boisterous soldiers.

“Is that the English lady?” someone called out. “She’s too pretty to be Sassenach.”

“Put her in clan colors and she’ll be pretty enough,” another said.

Normally such comments would cause her to blush hotly and mayhap even laugh. Today, they swirled around her with no more substance than the mist.

Laughter followed, until it was abruptly cut off and she looked to where Caelis stood, a low growl rumbling in his chest, his countenance like thunder. “Shona is mine,” he snarled.

One soldier, close enough to Shona to touch—only because they had paused near the bench where he sat —paled and jumped back, nearly falling off the bench to put distance between himself and her.

“You’re making a spectacle of yourself,” she hissed. “Stop.”

And suddenly that embarrassment she’d thought she was too preoccupied by emotional hurt to feel? It was right there, climbing up Shona’s cheeks and making her eyes sting, it was so acute.

“I am making the truth known.”

Did she truly need to spell it out for him? “You are embarrassing me.”

“It shames you to be acknowledged as my mate?” he demanded, sounding thoroughly offended.

She wanted to shout at him, to demand by what right did he have to be offended, even if that had been the case. Which it was not.

But the only thing she could imagine making the current situation even more untenable would be to allow this exchange to degenerate into a public row.

“I’m embarrassed to be the center of attention.” If that was not a good enough explanation for him, she feared she did not have the wherewithal to maintain civility. And ’twould not be Caelis bothered by that fact, she was sure.

She’d spent a little over five years as a baroness, having it drilled into her by her husband and parents that she must comport herself with decorum at all times.

The Scottish lass who grew up in the southernmost part of the Highlands would have laughed at the strictures she’d not only endured but embraced in the last five years. That lass had hidden deep in Shona’s heart when shame was cast upon her by her well-loved parents at the realization that Shona carried Caelis’s child.

Caelis glared at the soldiers closest to her and then turned that frown on Shona, though his features softened somewhat when his arresting blue eyes fell on her. “You are my mate.”

“I have never once denied it.” Which was more than he could say.

“Caelis!” the Sinclair laird bellowed. “Get you and yours over here. I’m hungry and Abigail has said I will wait to eat until my guests are seated.”

Lady Sinclair frowned. “I did not know how much bellowing I missed when I was deaf. It almost makes me wish for the days gone by.”

“You don’t mean it.” The laird lifted a now crying infant from her mother’s arms and cuddled the wee babe close. “There now, sweet girl. All is well. Your father’s voice isn’t sufficient reason for all this fuss, now is it?”

“It is when he uses it at such volume,” Lady Sinclair said with asperity.

But the infant quieted, gurgling up at her father.

Shona did not understand why Caelis did not sit immediately when they reached the head table, but then she noted the arrested expression on her former beloved’s face.

He watched the laird and the babe with such a look of naked longing, Shona’s heart was touched even through her fog of pain.

Whatever she might believe of the words he’d shared the night before, she could not doubt that Caelis would always treasure Eadan.

Shona allowed Caelis to tuck her into a seat across the table from Lady Sinclair and did not duck away when he leaned close. She felt sure whatever he meant to say, she did not want the others overhearing.

Sure enough, he whispered in an emotion laden voice, “I missed Eadan’s and Marjory’s babyhoods, but I will be there for the next one.”

Chapter 10

Rejoice the gifts given through the sacred stones as blessings, not birthrights.

—CAHIR TRADITION

He took his own seat on the bench beside her, putting Eadan to his right and leaving the spot to her left open for Audrey and Marjory. Thomas rounded the table and took a seat across from Eadan beside the laird’s sons.

In no mental condition to deal with Caelis’s certainty that they would be a family, Shona simply ignored him. “Good morning, Lady Sinclair. Your daughter is beautiful.”

“Thank you.” The Sinclair lady looked fondly at the babe in her husband’s arms and then let that gaze move to encompass all her children, including Ciara, who was seated to her left. “I am a very blessed woman.”

“You are indeed.”

Lady Sinclair’s smile was near blinding in its happy intensity. “Did you sleep well, Lady Heronshire?”

Discovering a bit of that Scottish lass still dwelling in her deepest heart, Shona felt the stiffness of the address and didn’t like it besides. “Please, call me Shona.”

“And you must call me Abigail. To be honest, one of the things I miss least about England is the stuffy habit of lord-and lady-ing everyone.”

“Your clan calls you lady.”

“It sounds different coming from them.”

Shona was shocked that in her current state she could find the mundane amusing, but she heard herself