“We found a new brother last year,” said Kendra, a merciful distraction. He watched her move the amber bracelet back and forth on her wrist. “Jason had a run-in with a man who was revealed to be our half-brother, the son of our father before his marriage. But our brother turned out monstrous. A murderer, nothing like Niall.” She glanced up. “It was a horrible thing to accept.”
For a few moments he remained quiet, imagining. “That must have been very hard.”
“It was. Although I don’t expect accepting Niall and Hamish is easy, either.” The amber stones glimmered in the firelight as she slid them with a finger. “An instant family.”
“Niall felt like my brother right off. It’s hard to explain.” He focused on the bracelet, remembering when she first wore it on their wedding day. It had looked strange on her then, but tonight it seemed like it had belonged there all along. Just the way he felt with Niall. “But Hamish…” He met her gaze. “I feel nothing there. I hear what you’re telling me, and it makes sense, but I’m not sure I believe it.”
She took their goblets from the bedside table and handed him his. “Just think about it,” she said and drained her remaining sack posset.
The drink was cold now, he was sure. The rain coming down sounded cold, too, but she felt warm wedged beside him. He wondered how she managed to smell like sunshine on a blustery night like this.
“There’s no need to rush into acceptance,” she said softly.
“He could be dying.” Trick downed the last of his own drink. Cold, it was, but thick and bracing nonetheless.
“He could,” she conceded. “But he seems to be getting better.”
He took her cup and set them both on the table. “This may have just been a good day.”
“Morning will tell.” She yawned, then leaned over for a kiss, a kiss that tasted of the sweet, milky posset. With a soft smile, she lay down and curled tightly against him, like precious cargo carefully nestled in a ship’s hold.
She felt good there, a perfect fit. “It’s odd,” he said quietly, his breath fluttering the downy hairs on the nape of her neck. “They don’t know me, really, and yet they seemed to accept me from the first.”
“They’re family,” she said simply. “They love you, Trick. Unconditionally.”
And now she was family, too.
Unconditional love.
The idea was so alien to him that he thought about it far into the night as he watched her sleep.
FORTY-EIGHT
“FOR THE LAST time, you gaberlunzie, wake up!” Mrs. Ross poked Trick’s shoulder, and he moaned and rolled over. “Lord Niall is downstairs, pacing and waiting to take the two of you off somewhere, aye? So get your bones out of that bed.”
“I’ll make sure he gets up this time,” Kendra told her, sitting down to pull on a stocking. “If you’re nearly finished in here, could you send Jane up to fix my hair?”
“Aye. That I can do.” On her way out, the wiry woman gathered the empty goblets they’d left on the night table. “Did you enjoy this, then?” she asked with a kind smile.
“Very much.” Kendra silently scolded herself for thinking the sack posset might have been poisoned. Trick was right; though she sometimes had a brusque manner about her, the old nurse wouldn’t hurt a midge. “Do you know, Mrs. Ross, where that corner staircase leads?”
The woman swiped her dust cloth over the table—not that it helped very much. The dirt just flew up and settled right back down. “That turret comes from the dungeons, lass. And goes to the roof above.”
“Oh.” Just as Trick had said. Kendra glanced at her slumbering husband. He slept like the dead, like he’d spent another wakeful night before succumbing to exhaustion. She, on the other hand, had slept like a newborn babe, dreaming dreams that made her cheeks burn to remember them.
Mrs. Ross was watching her, a question in her faded blue eyes. Kendra put a cooling hand to her face. “Though Trick insisted it was surely the rain, I thought I heard footfalls on those steps last night.”
The woman’s gray head nodded sagely. “It’s been said to happen.”
“People go up on the roof?”
“Not people, lass.”
“Ghosts, then?” Kendra’s breath caught. “The ghosts of prisoners?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
Kendra blushed as the woman bent to retrieve yesterday’s clothes from the floor. Cavanaugh and Jane ought to be doing that—not that she and Trick should have left their garments on the floor in the first place. What could Mrs. Ross be thinking?
But apparently she was still thinking about the stairwell. “Other ghosts,” she clarified, shaking out Trick’s discarded kilt. “One in particular, a young servant girl who was said to have borne an illegitimate Duncraven son in this room some two hundred years past. Potential threats to the title, they were, and both swiftly put to the sword by an anonymous knight.”
Kendra swallowed. “Anonymous?”
“Well, you cannot very well tell who’s in a suit of armor now, aye? But legend says it was Lord Duncraven himself. A heartless man, to hear the tales.” She smoothed the folded tartan over one arm. “The girl still wanders the spiral staircase, searching for her bairn. Some say they’ve seen her in this room, watching at the foot of the bed where a cradle may have once rested.” Mrs. Ross draped the red fabric right where Kendra imagined the poor murdered girl might gaze. “But don’t you worry now, lass. She doesn’t do any harm.”
Was it the ill-fated servant girl she’d heard, then? Kendra wondered. Or had Mrs. Ross invented this story to cover her own wanderings? Or had Annag or Duncan been trodding the winding stone stairs?
Or had it only been the storm, mixed with her own imagination?
Her musings were interrupted when Mrs. Ross bustled over to Trick. “Wake up, lazybones.” She thwacked him with her dust cloth. “Lord Niall awaits.”
FORTY-NINE
HALFWAY downstairs, Trick’s feet dragged to
