In the wake of her curt dismissal, Cullen stood and tried to stop her. “But why—”
Fergus cut him short with a thump of his arm against Cullen’s mid-section. “Yer aunt made herself perfectly clear. I heard her and I’m way older than you, ye wee bastard.”
Cullen stepped aside from Fergus’s warning, disbelief in his eyes.
The expression on the older man’s face softened a bit. “D’ye still drink good Highland whisky?”
Cullen’s eyes widened, and he gave Fergus an incredulous look.
Fergus clapped him on the shoulder and led the way down the back staircase to the lower level kitchen.
Once they were seated at Cook’s rough plank table with a loaf of crusty bread still warm from the oven, Fergus produced a dark brown glass bottle sealed with a cork stamped with the clan’s arms.
“Marriage, Fergus?” After Cullen had drunk several small glasses of the deep amber liquid, he was in the mood to argue his predicament. “I spend two weeks with a lad who’s actually a lass, and that’s my fault? That’s reason enough to spend the rest of my life with someone tall enough and scrawny enough to pass for something she’s not?” With each question, his voice rose higher.
Finally, Fergus laid a calm, but iron-grip of a hand over his arm once he’d stopped waving it about.
“Cullen, mo crideau, before you fash yourself into apoplexy, let me tell you a story.” The silver-haired clansman leaned back against the wall and stretched his long legs out beneath the table. Cook’s cat joined him on the bench and began to purr before sliding with sly stealth onto his lap. He adjusted the pleats on his kilt to accommodate the plump feline and pulled a pipe and tobacco from his jacket.
“You know how remote the MacKenzie Clan lands are. Twenty years ago, we had only one physician to serve all of our families. But then one winter measles swept through our villages, and old Dr. MacKenzie was one of the first to die. We sent a call to Edinburgh for a physician, and they sent Dr. Morton. When he came, he brought his wife and wee daughter.
“It was a terrible time. Many of the clan died, but the Mortons stayed until the danger passed. He and his child were fine, but his wife, who nursed our clansmen right by his side, caught the disease, and the fever took her down.”
“Why don’t I don’t remember any of that?”
“Your da came and took ye away to school.”
“Why didn’t he help the clan?”
“Because his practice in London was way too important for him to see to his dead wife’s barbaric relations in the Highlands.”
The bitterness in the old man’s voice caught Cullen by surprise.
“So, ye see, Miss Willa Morton is all alone in the world with no one ta protect her because her father answered the call ta save the clan families - yer people - all those years ago.”
Chapter Five
Hours after the hall clock chimed midnight, Cullen still stared at the ceiling medallion in his grandfather’s former bedchamber. How many times, he wondered, had the old man lain in this same position, puzzling out the weighty concerns of the clan?
He imagined there had been many situations where the elder Cullen MacKenzie had had to put the clan above his own needs and pursuits. Cullen’s grandmother had been a plain-spoken, stoic woman from one of the island clans. His grandfather had arranged their marriage in order to keep peace in the far northwest of the Highlands.
He’d been a loving patriarch to Cullen’s mother, sisters, and brothers as well as his grandmother and the rest of the clan. But everyone knew he’d loved Annie McCullough until the day he died. She’d never married but had remained at the home of her clansmen. Each year at the Highland games when the clans gathered, young Cullen could see how the two of them sought each other’s glances whenever they happened to meet.
Finally, at about two in the morning, Cullen rolled over and gave in to a weary, deep sleep. The only dream to interrupt his slumber was a small tiger cat with huge gray, accusing eyes. She’d been abandoned in front of a harbor-front tavern and had fallen in behind him when he left the establishment. Every time she swatted her tiny claws at his boots, he pushed her away. But still she followed in his steps.
He awoke with a start, beads of sweat rolling down his face. When he threw aside the quilt, Cook’s gray tabby sprang to the floor with an angry yowl.
“Sorry, Puss,” he mumbled. “Thought you were someone else.”
Cullen joined his Aunt Elspeth and Fergus for breakfast in the elegant townhouse dining room. He heaped his plate high from the sideboard with ham, coddled eggs, and oat cakes.
When he finally took a seat at the table, his aunt’s stare seemed to eat up all the air in the room. He raised a brow and returned her unblinking regard.
She broke the silence first. “I might have known. You’ve inherited Marianne MacKenzie’s stubborn streak.” She shifted forward in her straight-backed chair. “In the name of all that’s holy, what have you decided, you vexing excuse for a Highlander?”
“Was there ever any doubt of what I would do?” Cullen took a long swallow of water from the crystal glass filled by one of his aunt’s footmen.
His aunt sagged back with a sigh. “You’re sure this is what you want to do?”
He raised a brow again. “All I can promise is I will ask Willa Morton to be my wife.” Cullen put down his glass. “If the female version of Wills Morton is as inflexible as the alleged young man I left in my surgery in Portsmouth, then I have no idea of how she, or he, may react.”
“Furthermore, who knows what the protocol would be for solemnizing an engagement with a young woman dressed as a man?
