Epilogue
MAGNUS
One month. I had convinced Tara to return to Faoiltiarn and live there with me for one month. Just through the Autumn Test Matches … which I then had to explain weren’t actual tests, but showy international games.
Like most wolves in professional sports, I only needed to retire from the sport when I felt like it since my wolf genes helped me to heal faster and age more slowly than most human players my age.
But I promised my mate if she truly did not like Faoiltiarn, I’d delay my retirement plans.
We would limit our time in the Highlands until the bairns were born, and she could even join me on the road if she so wished.
Yet four months later, I woke to find Tara’s side of the bed empty…again. And it occurred to me I might never have brought her home to Faoiltiarn if I’d known I would be waking up alone for the remainder of the foreseeable future.
Tara didn’t like being the reigning Queen of Faoiltiarn.
She loved it. Too much, I suspected after I began waking up alone in our bed because my mate had decided to return to “St. Ailbe” hours—which apparently meant jumping out of bed at four in the bloody morning.
Within a week of coming to Faoiltiarn, Tara created a list of improvements that would be added to the newer modern half of town, and to New St. Ailbe which Tara referred to as the Brigadoon side of town (but only in private so as not to offend anyone).
There had been some shuffling of homes and many in-person visits, but Tara eventually managed to get everyone on the same page and to agree to the new terms. She’d even commissioned the creation of a small stream dug from the castle’s moat to serve as the line of demarcation.
Tara, as it turned out, was not the type of queen anyone expected. She was far better.
She didn’t just agree to take on the role, she threw herself into it.
I had cheered when she quit her job to oversee the construction of the New St. Ailbe Exchange and focus on her list of Faoiltiarn improvement projects.
But by the end of November, I found myself out on the road alone.
Tara barely had enough time to make it to my home games, much less travel with me as some of the wives and girlfriends did.
Currently, I was home for a rare four weeks with only a couple of home games on the Rover calendar. However, I already decided when the season was done in April, I’d be done, too.
In the end, my reluctant mate turned zealous queen made my decision to retire an easy one. If I actually wanted to see her and the pups, she was growing between all the village work, I’d have to give up rugby, just like she sacrificed her job in the city.
If you could call it a sacrifice. My mate now seemed more dedicated to her daily Faoiltiarn routine, than I’d ever been to my rugby practice.
I thought maybe she’d make an exception to her usual crack of dawn routine on today of all days.
But like nearly every day I’d spent with her in Faoiltiarn so far, I began this one searching for my mate.
“Have you seen Tara?” I asked my parents at breakfast.
It was rare to have them there in Faoiltiarn. Not just because they still hadn’t bothered to remarry, but also because Lachlan had decided after our trip to Canada that he quite liked traveling. Valentina, in turn, had offered to show him around … the entire world.
Thus far, they’d gone on long holidays to Thailand (it turned out my Da enjoyed Milly’s copy of The Beach much more than Tara), Australia, Bali, Korea, and Texas—from which they, like every self-respecting European tourist, had returned wearing flashy heeled riding boots and the biggest ten-gallon cowboy hats they could find.
But they had finally returned to Scotland for a two-week visit, and with Milly’s help, they were trying to decide whether to go to South America or Africa next.
In any case, neither of my parents responded to my question about Tara’s whereabouts. I wasn’t even sure if they’d heard me. They were too busy giving each other nibbles of food as if they’d both come down with some rare disease that rendered them incapable of feeding themselves, only each other.
Technically, I was happy—if slightly befuddled—to see my parents back together. But this morning their moony behavior grated on my nerves, acting as yet another reminder that I’d woken up alone. Again.
“Dinnae make me declare a law that only married people can go at it worse than feckin’ teenagers under my roof,” I said, lobbing one of the rolls the New St. Ailbe mail-order brides brought with them when they arrived two weeks ago.
“Sorry, king of mine, did you say something?” Lachlan asked after the roll bounced off his head.
“Have. Ye. Seen. Tara,” I repeated, not bothering to hide my impatience though Tara had told me several times I should try to better understand that my parents were in “back together again” mode.
My mother, proving she hadn’t changed that bloody much, had the nerve to laugh at her son’s show of temper. “Oh, Lachlan, someone—I will not say who, but he looks exactly as you did thirty years ago, mi bello—seems very upset that he cannot find his mate … again,” she sing-songed.
“Have you seen her or not?” I demanded through gritted teeth.
“Nae,” Lachlan answered for the both of them. “But mebbe ask Milly … I can hear her coming now.”
Milly and Iain arrived on cue carrying their one-month-old daughter, Elspeth, with them.
She’d been born in this very castle, much to the delight of the village.
Elspeth was sleeping peacefully as a lamb inside her mother’s arms. But judging from the dark circles under my brother and sister-in-law’s eyes, that might not have been the case last night.
“Have you seen Tara?” I asked my brother’s mate as I took my wee niece from her. Not because Milly looked exhausted, mind ye. But because I was the king and should be allowed to cuddle with my adorable niece whenever I wished.
“Sort of,” Milly answered in her decidedly American way.
“Ellie was up all night, crying. Tara came by our rooms and took one look at me and told me to go back to sleep because she had this morning covered. She even said she’d ask her sister to babysit for us tonight—seriously, Magnus, she’s such an awesome queen. ”
Aye, too awesome, I decided as I stomped across the stream toward the New St. Ailbe Exchange House.
The snuggle time with my niece had done little to alleviate my bad mood.
Nor did my change into my special leather Rufglen kjalta and Prince Charlie jacket.
If anything, my mood became as dark as the mud from the newly made stream splattered across my vintage kilt hose and Ghillie brogues.
A truly bucolic scene greeted me when I finally reached the three-story Exchange House the Faoiltiarn males had built in record time on the eastern side of the village.
All but a few of the mail-order brides were playing baseball in the snow-covered field next to the house. And they’d drawn a bit of a crowd. At least forty villagers—mostly young males also dressed in their leather kilts and Prince Charlie jackets—watched the game from a respectful distance.
“We’ve been cooking all morning, and they’re playing a game before we change into our church dresses,” Naomi told me when I found her setting out an array of pies and other desserts on the house’s long communal table.
Unlike the she-wolves playing baseball outside, Tara’s sister had no interest in the young male spectators on the other side of the field.
A disappointment for sure since a few of my subjects had already asked me about the brown beauty who’d shown up with the rest of the brides but hadn’t bothered to send so much as a postcard in the letter exchange before her arrival.
Even more disappointing, Naomi hadn’t seen Tara since she’d come over to help with the milking and asked Naomi to babysit.
“You let a she-wolf, five months pregnant with twins, milk a cow?”
But Naomi only shook her head and said, “It’s not like it’s a wood-burning stove. Do you think she’s been here so long she’s forgotten how to milk?”
With a roll of my eyes, I walked back toward the main part of town, asking villager after villager, most of whom were already dressed in their Highland finest, if they’d seen Tara.
What was frustrating—though not unusual—was that nearly everyone had seen her. She’d dropped off a pair of heels with the cobbler and asked that he put some tread on the bottoms when he was done with the order of sturdy black shoes for the exchange brides.
She’d also stopped by the baker’s for a morning sausage roll even though she could have eaten a proper breakfast at the castle, couldn’t she?
And Alban complained she’d knocked on his door personally to ensure he had enough volunteers to handle tomorrow’s installation of solar panels.
Nae, Alban did not have any volunteers yet—because he could do it himself and didn’t need anyone else in his way.
He told her this thinking the matter sorted. But less than an hour later, a few of the village men came to him with reports of their five-months-pregnant banrigh rubbing her belly as she asked if they really wanted to let her down by not volunteering to help with the solar panel installation.
Aye, the luster of a doubly pregnant queen had fallen off Tara’s crown rather quickly. Now people were more likely to hide rather than gape when they saw the banrigh heading their way. They’d learned from experience that wherever Tara went, work followed.
“I told her ‘just me!’” Alban groused, finishing his story.
Right now, the only one more exasperated than Alban with the new queen was her king.
“I saw her head over to the bank after she ambushed me at my house,” a bitter solar panel “volunteer” told me. “She said I was the last person on her list of people to harass. Do you ken she actually has a list? And it actually said PEOPLE TO HARASS—I watched her make a tick next to my name!”