Chapter Four #3
At the end of the table, their father harrumphed. “Dinna be smiling too fast,” he admonished his younger sons. “If the curse addles your brother’s brain, there is no telling what foolhardiness might please him. Or what new ills might descend upon us. Already—”
That did it.
“A God’s name! I have had enough of curses,” Magnus roared, lifting his voice so everyone in the hall would hear him. Even those hunched sleepy-eyed in the most far-flung corners.
In especial, any whiling away the morn in the cozy confines of a window embrasure.
“It is infinitely sad that Reginald of the Victories’ fair lady wife took her life by leaping from the east tower of this castle,” he rapped out, pacing between the dais table and the opened window. “But the circumstances of her death did not call down a curse upon this house, that I swear.”
He shot a narrow-eyed glance at his da. “And if any seer of olden times truly claimed such a malediction existed, and could only be lifted so long as we keep a mighty fleet of galleys, then I say that soothsayer had a keen interest in selling us timber!”
He paused by the window, let the gusting damp cool his heated brow. A much-needed measure with her striding his way—and on Colin Grant’s gallantly proffered arm!
That great oaf had an annoyingly wry smile playing at the corners of his mouth, and only his limp saved him from a hot glare, for the lout carried not only Hugh’s lute but Lady Amicia’s fur-lined mantle as well.
Like as not, he’d charmed her out of it.
And with the single-minded purpose of parading her full cloakless beneath Magnus’s nose!
No doubt so he could not help but admire her glossy black braids, hanging loose as they did this morn. Two thick plaits of well-sheened ebony, they fell clear to her hips and looked luscious enough to make his mouth run dry.
Before all the heavens, the lass had the kind of lustrous tresses a man ached to run his hands through, burned to see spilling unchecked over gleaming white skin.
Naked skin.
And if he didn’t mind losing his soul, just the sort of glossy skeins a man might bury his face in, to drown happily.
The heady bliss of nuzzling his face into her other hair, without doubt an equally enticing notion, didn’t bear consideration.
A tiny muscle began to jerk in Magnus’s jaw.
Aye, with surety, Colin Grant meant to torture him.
And most dastardly of all, having held a privy ear to Magnus’s secret delights and lusts over the years—intimacies regrettably divulged during too-long nights of endless boredom on the tourney circuit—the cheeky whoreson now used his privy knowledge to maneuver the lass forward so that she had no choice but to pass through the chill wind pouring through the opened window.
A decidedly clever coup, for with her low-cut gown of finest linen already clinging to her supple curves, a few scant steps through the rain-misted air was all it took to plaster the thin cloth of her bodice to her breasts—and tighten what appeared to be exceedingly large nipples.
A delicacy Magnus relished . . . as he’d once revealed to Colin when both men had been so deep in their cups they’d had no better topic to pass the evening than an earnest discourse on the various delights of female anatomy.
His blood running hot, Magnus strove to tear his gaze from the bounteous swell of his wife’s bosom. And in especial from the twin dark-tipped rounds thrusting so provocatively against the near-transparent linen.
Seldom had he seen such generous areolae.
And ne’er had he been seized with such an irresistible urge to throttle a friend!
“A good morrow, my lady,” he managed to his wife. Colin, he purposely ignored. “I trust you slept well?”
She inclined her head with a smile, giving him the polite response he’d expected . . . until a determined gleam entered her dark eyes.
A seductively wicked gleam.
“As you will soon see, my lord, our chamber is well-appointed,” she said, her voice as smoky-rich as her other attractions. “The bed in particular lends itself to all good comforts of the night.”
Magnus drew a quick breath. Truth be told, he near swallowed his tongue.
Colin hooted a laugh and gave him a bold wink.
His father cackled with glee. “Ho, but she calls to mind your mother in her time!” he called out, his face lighting.
Fixing a sharp gaze on Magnus, he slapped the table with the flat of his hand, his vexation of moments before forgotten. “Be glad the wedding feast is but in a few days’ time, my son. Such fire ought not be allowed to cool.”
“And if Magnus canna keep it ablaze, I’m volunteering my hardest endeavors!” a deep voice rose from one of the long tables near the back of the hall.
Assorted agreement and guffaws followed, coming from all corners as men everywhere joined in the merriment. Dugan and Hugh indulged with gusto, laughing long and loud, and even Dagda’s tired eyes sparkled with mirth.
Only Janet’s face darkened, her lips tightly pursed as she bustled about replenishing wine cups and making ever-louder clattering noises.
Turning his back on the lot of them—his bonnie-nippled, serene-smiling bride in particular—Magnus strode back to the window, where a single ray of watery sunlight sought to pierce the day’s gloom.
Frowning at it, lest he be minded of how easily Lady Amicia could have dispelled the darkness from his heart if only he could have taken her to wife under more favorable circumstances, he waited for the jollity behind him to lessen, then spun around, his gaze seeking Colin.
“The weather is clearing, my friend,” he said, amazed by the calmness of his tone. “If you would try the wonders of the Beldam’s Chair, we’d best be off before the rain worsens again.”
“The Beldam’s Chair?” Donald MacKinnon’s bushy brows shot upward.
“Tscha!” he cried, slapping the table again.
“You spurn my belief in old Reginald’s curse, call me a fool for claiming I’ve seen a ghost galley plying our waters of late, yet you would see your friend hie hisself across the bogs and moor to seek a cure in a magical chair? ”
Throbbing heat inched its way up the back of Magnus’s neck, and he took several deep breaths before answering.
His gaze strayed to Colin’s injured leg.
“I ne’er said I believe in the chair’s curative powers, though I will not deny I am wishing to see a wonder worked for my friend—that hope is why I brought him here. ”
“And her?” Janet appeared at his elbow. “Are you now keeping her?”
Never one to lie, Magnus nodded. “It would seem so.”
His cousin’s blue eyes narrowed, perturbation hovering in their depths. “You still needn’t . . . take her—even if you have to get through a sham wedding feast.”
“Ah, fair lass, but the wedding feast shall be true enough,” Colin put in, seizing her hand for a kiss as he joined them. “As will be the bedding ceremony thereafter—I shall personally assure that it is so.”
“And how, my friend, do you think to do that?” Magnus demanded the instant Janet flounced away, anger peppering her step. “Do you plan on doing the . . . honors?”
Colin shook his head. “Of a certainty, nay. That bliss shall be yours alone, my good friend.” A slow smile spread across his handsome face. “I but mean to claim that vow you swore to me at Dupplin.”
The words out, Colin’s slow smile cracked into a full-fledged grin.
Magnus felt the floor open beneath him.
“Not that vow?”
“None other,” Colin assured him, taking Magnus’s elbow to lead him from the hall. “The oath you gave me when, after the battle, you awakened to discover I’d carried you from the field—despite my wounded leg.”
“But—”
Colin glanced at him as they neared the hall’s arched doorway. “You promised any boon I desire, even swore on your honor. Or do you deny it?”
“Nay, you ken I would ne’er unsay a vow,” Magnus said, opening the door. “It is just that—saints, man—we never specified what that boon would be.”
“Exactly,” Colin agreed as they stepped out into the blustery morn. “We did not. And I now know what boon I desire of you. I want you to bed your wife.”
A short while later, mayhap even before the young MacKinnon laird-in-all-but-title and his limping-legged friend had trotted their garrons through Coldstone’s gatehouse, a certain someone stood in the hall’s blackest shadows and watched the pestiferous person of Donald Mackinnon sip his wine.
Choking on a much ranker brew, the dastard ought be about now . . . afloat and glassy-eyed on a sea of foulest muck.
Ne’er again to glimpse the rising sun.
That he’d been spared such a fate, rankled deep.
But there were other ways to see justice served—more means than a plunge into the cesspit to perpetuate that sniveling weathercock’s faith in maledictions and doom.
Indeed, with his recent claims of demon-driven ghost ships no one else e’er saw, mayhap his own increasing addlepatedness would bring about his demise.
Either way, the fool’s days were numbered.
“A curse on you, Laird MacKinnon—my curse on you everlasting,” the shadow-cloaked figure snarled, drifting ever deeper into a dark recess in the walling. “I will purge these isles of you and yours if it costs me my last breath.”
Nothing was surer.