Page 4

“I am Sheona…”

Before she could finish her sentence, Angus whirled on his heel with explosive energy. He didn’t walk; he bolted. His small leather shoes clattered frantically across the stone floorboards as he flew past the heavy worktable, threw open the heavy oak door, and charged out into the main corridor.

“Ach, nay, nay, nay!” Sheona gasped, scrambling up from the floor, her heavy skirts catching on her shoes.

She stumbled to the open threshold, clutching the wooden doorframe as she watched the little boy’s dark head disappear around the far stone corner of the hallway, his excited voice already echoing loudly from the high vaulted ceilings.

Sheona stood frozen in the doorway, her blood running cold.

What have I said to make the child run off like he were on fire?

She pressed a palm to her forehead, letting out a ragged breath. It would not take five minutes for that child to reach his terrifying, stern father, and Laird Brodie MacKinley would be marching back down that corridor to demand to know why the daughter of Duncan MacFaris was badgering his heir.

She stepped back into the chamber and pulled the door shut, her eyes darting nervously toward the heavy wooden latch.

“I found me new mother. Please, prepare the arrangements, Father.”

Brodie had faced charging warriors, settled bloody clan feuds, and buried his father, mother, and wife, yet none of those trials prepared him for his nine-year-old son marching into the meeting hall before half the Highland Lairds and announcing that he had found himself a new mother.

A few chuckles flared near the back trestle tables. Caelan McLaren smothered a cough behind his fist, and two Gallaway men grinned into their ale horns.

Brodie didn’t turn his head. He lifted his hand off his broadsword hilt and held two thick fingers flat against the table.

The laughter died instantly. The hall fell dead quiet, save for the crackle of fat in the hearth. He never laughed at his son. Never.

Brodie leaned forward, resting his heavy forearms on the oak table, his dark eyes level with the boy’s. Angus stood square in the center of the flagstones, his chest puffed out beneath his tartan plaid, his small hands planted firmly on his hips. A smudge of dried herb dust coated his cheek, and his dark curls were wild from running.

“What are ye talkin’ about, son?” Brodie asked, his low rasp slicing through the silent room.

“Lady Sheona,” Angus declared, without a single tremor in his voice. He took two steps closer to the dais, pointing a small finger toward the west corridor. “I want her. She’s to be me mother, so ye must marry her.”

Sir Thomas Morrison stiffened at the far end of the chamber, his parchment rolls rustling as his knuckles whitened against the ink-stained leather. Beside him, Aaron Gallaway tilted his head, his brows arching with quiet intrigue.

Brodie didn’t blink. He felt the air grow heavy in his chest, a dull, familiar tightness knotting beneath his ribs.

“She is a prisoner of war, Angus. A guest under Gallaway’s guard. She is nae a trinket ye pick off a market stall because ye like the look of it.”

“She is nae a trinket!” Angus insisted, his leather shoe stomping hard against the stone. He squeezed his hands into tight little fists at his sides. “She didnae tell me to stop askin’ questions! She didnae look at me like I was underfoot, and she didnae laugh when I asked about the rosemary!”

Brodie’s jaw worked. He felt the eyes of every laird in the hall pressing into the back of his neck.

Angus stepped right up to the edge of the dais, looking his father dead in the eye. “She told me a good healer reads people first. She looked at me, Father. She actually listened.”

The boy stood his ground, unyielding as a mountain pony, his chin set in the exact stubborn line Brodie saw in his own mirror every morning.

For years, Brodie had paraded noble daughters before the lad—wealthy heiresses, strategic alliances, and quiet ladies who curtsied and offered sweetmeats. Angus had ignored them all, slipping out of rooms or retreating into silence.

He had never asked for anyone. Not once. Until now.

CHAPTER THREE

Brodie stared down at his son, the certainty in the child’s dark eyes settling like heavy iron in his chest.

Ever since his late wife, Isabel, had bled out while bringing the lad into the world, Brodie’s council had been relentlessly hounding him into another marriage. His clan was powerful, commanding four glens and two hundred broadswords, yet it was burdened by massive debts he had inherited from his father’s late misrule.

To make matters worse, Isabel’s father had betrayed him immediately after the funeral, reclaiming her full dowry through a bitter legal loophole before gambling away every last coin in the southern ports.

Since then, noble daughters had been paraded before Brodie for alliances, wealth, and cold strategy. Marriages of convenience, marriages of spite, marriages of sheer desperation. He had hated every proposal. Marriage was a burden he had no desire to shoulder again.