Chapter 41
Madelyn
set aside an empty box and bent down to rip off the tape on another.
She opened the box, put her hands in the small of her back, and stretched.
The feeling was altogether too familiar.
It seemed as if all she’d been doing for the past three months had been packing and unpacking.
First packing Dewey’s house up, then her own stuff, and now unpacking things from both places into Patrick’s house.
Sunny shouldn’t have worried about them not having any furniture to sit on, or about having funds enough for a few renovations.
Madelyn had seen Patrick’s bank accounts, been rendered speechless by the numbers they contained, and subsequently stopped telling him he shouldn’t have stretched himself to pay off debts that were hers.
Well, not that she still couldn’t believe he’d done it, but now she knew that doing so hadn’t put so much as a dent in his monthly pocket change.
None of which really changed her fiscal outlook, though. She still made him hunt around for the best deals on furniture, fixtures, and contractors. She cared; he didn’t. He just wanted things done quickly.
And he still bought her clothes, despite her protests.
She shuddered to think what he would do when he found out she was going to need maternity clothes soon.
But that was a story for another day. Maybe she could talk him into a weekend away from all the souls who seemed to have taken up residence in their house with them.
The sooner the better, though, or he was going to know without her telling him that she was pregnant and getting more so with each week that passed.
She grabbed a handful of things out of the box and decided, as she did so, that perhaps she was done for the day. Morning sickness was starting to kick in in a big way and she would rather face it lying down, thank you very much.
She crossed over to the armoire, opened it, and shoved her shoes inside, avoiding the spot where Patrick kept his sword.
She paused, straightened, and contemplated.
Shoes. Swords.
Her life was indeed very strange.
But wonderfully so. She shut up her shoes, left room for Patrick’s gear, and went in search of something to ease her queasiness.
Patrick’s sword wasn’t in the armoire because he was off engaging in his morning habit of trying to kill his cousin.
She’d gotten used to that, too. Sometimes Patrick went to Ian’s to train, sometimes Ian came to their house to train.
And sometimes they all went to Jamie’s, and she went along just to gape at the three of them and remind herself quite unnecessarily that she had married into a family of medieval clansmen who were quite firmly in touch with their past.
She wondered if her parents should be seeing that when they came over for the wedding.
Maybe she would do well to keep them in the house while Patrick and his menfolk were at their work, lest they stumble onto something that might set their heads to spinning.
Or, as was more likely the case, something that would set her father to thinking he might improve his Gaelic if he had a sword to wave around.
She could only imagine how that might go over at his faculty teas.
She walked back to the kitchen and stopped at the entrance to it.
It looked better than it had when she’d arrived two months ago.
There were dishes now in the cupboards. They’d found a large farmhouse table with comfortable chairs.
She’d hung curtains on the window. The walls had been covered with a fresh coat of paint and the floors covered in hardwood that was relatively warm under her feet.
Life was pretty good.
She also had a phone installed in that kitchen, which either she or Patrick used once a week or so to call Bentley and check in.
He answered only because he didn’t dare not.
Patrick had promised him that if he didn’t, he would find himself in dire straits indeed.
Worse ones than just being ignored by The Confessor, that discriminating rag that found Bentley’s stories too weird even for their pages.
So they called, Bentley answered, and they checked up on his progress with his UFO reporting and his pro bono work.
Life was very good.
Her sister was sitting at the kitchen table, which made life even better.
Sunny had farmed out yet more of her clients and her yoga classes and come to stay for a while.
She and Patrick happily discussed herbs, healing, and things that grew beneath the eaves of the wood. That suited Madelyn perfectly.
Given that she was growing something quite lovely beneath her heart.
She put her hand over her belly. Two months and counting. It was hard to believe how much her life had changed. She couldn’t help but be grateful to Bentley for that. If she’d never come to Scotland, she would never have met Patrick, and, well, the rest was wonderful history.
She’d worried, of course, about Gilbert and what he would do next. They’d talked to Conal often, and bummed rides off him several times in his Lear. They’d discussed with Conal what Patrick had discovered about Gilbert’s potential background.
Conal had been speechless. Gilbert a medieval clansman? It had almost been too much for him to swallow. It was one thing to believe it of Patrick; it was another thing for Conal to believe it of his brother-in-law.
He’d also said that Gilbert had been unusually quiet as of late, as if he was going through some sort of soul-searching.
Patrick had been skeptical.
Madelyn hadn’t dared speculate.
And then Sunny had come over and Madelyn had given up speculation for the pleasure of family. Gilbert would keep. There was no point in worrying about him. What were they to do, live their lives in fear?
So she’d taken the map Jamie had made her, which looked quite a bit like Jane’s, then taken her sister to roam for hours over Patrick’s land. She’d introduced Sunny to Moraig and watched them fall into each other’s arms like long-lost relatives.
“Need tea?”
Madelyn realized she was staring at her sister without looking at her. She shook her head to clear away the cobwebs, then shook her head again. “Thanks, but no. I’m fine.”
“You should rest.”
“I rest too much. Much more rest and you’ll be worrying about me beaching myself on that couch.”
“Gain what you need to. Your body will tell you when it’s enough.”
“My sister, the midwife.”
“You’ll be grateful for it when you’re in transition screaming at your husband that this child will be an only child and if he disagrees with you, you’ll make sure of it.”
“Do laboring women have enough breath for sentences of that length?”
Sunny threw a dishtowel at her. She always seemed to have them to hand.
Maybe that was all part of her mystique as well.
Madelyn smiled and crossed over to the fridge to peer inside and see if there was anything useful in there.
Well, at least what was there wasn’t covered with mold. Even so, not a thing appealed.
“Got anything for morning sickness?” Madelyn asked, shutting the fridge door.
“Always. Why don’t you go find somewhere comfortable to sit and I’ll bring you some of it?”
Madelyn considered. The living room was still a work in progress. The bedroom contained the bed, and if she went back in there, she would make use of it. There were other bedrooms, of course, but again, the bed thing would happen there, too, and if she had to sleep any more, she would scream.
That left either the study or the sitting room.
She hesitated. She knew what both would contain.
The study was a place that Archibald, first lord of Benmore, had laid claim to the moment the dark brown leather club chair had been installed.
He could be found there most afternoons, puffing on his pipe, contemplating this book or that—books he seemed to have brought with him, apparently, because she and Patrick certainly didn’t own any of that vintage.
He always seemed very pleased when she came to sit with him, but she suspected he liked her because she gave him some hope of posterity.
He was, she had found, very big on genealogy.
She liked Lord Archibald very much. He was gruff, he was a bit on the gloomy side, but he was always very solicitous. And he had begun to put out his pipe whenever he saw her, when he had determined that she was in an . . . um . . . delicate condition.
Why the ghosts and sundry knew and Patrick didn’t was something she would think about later.
But she was too restless to sit, and she wasn’t really in the mood to make polite conversation while trying to ignore the queasiness that raged throughout every cell of her body.
That meant the sitting room was out, too. Lady Dorcas, now that the rest of her home seemed to be approaching her standards of civilization, continually tried to decide on what decor she thought appropriate for her sanctuary.
Sunny didn’t like that.
Madelyn refrained from criticizing. She was perfectly willing to let Lady Dorcas do what she wanted. It had been, after all, her house first.
But the thought of having to accustom herself to another decorating scheme, or turn pages of home improvement magazines for Lady Dorcas while she tried to decide what style she liked best, was just more than she thought she could handle.
A walk in the garden was what she needed. Patrick was due home any minute, and she wanted him to find her rosy-cheeked, not looking as if she was about to puke her guts out. She could look like that tomorrow, after she’d given him the good news.