Drew MacIntosh was not certain of many things in life. He never had been. No man would ever have made the mistake of referring to him as a grand thinker.

Nay, he was a man of action. A man who tended to allow his fists and his determination to do the talking for him. Many was the ill-fated fellow who’d found himself at the receiving end of Drew MacIntosh’s temper.

Men who’d underestimated him due to his stature, thinking him a soft target. Thinking it would be mere child’s play to make a mockery of him.

He’d been the one to make a mockery of them, until his reputation had grown large enough that fewer and fewer dared test him.

And it had grown quite dull, truly, once the men of Inverness and Avoch had grown accustomed to him and knew it was senseless to challenge him. If he were back to roaming the Highlands, it would be another matter. There would be all manner of challengers.

Rather than the challengers who stood before him at that very moment. Challengers even smaller than himself, yet somehow more fearsome than any he’d ever encountered.

“What are the two of ye on about?” he asked, sighing as he sank into a crouch “Do ye not know the pigpen is no place for one as wee as yourself?”

A pair of large, dark eyes—so dark they were nearly black—stared up at him. Blinked. Then stared again.

“And what of the mud all over hands and knees? I suppose ye expect me to believe ye merely tripped and fell just beside the fence, rather than trying to shimmy beneath it as I know ye did?”

More staring.

“Answer me, ye wee devil.” He placed his hands on a pair of small shoulders. “Ye know ‘tis better to tell the truth. I know yer mam taught ye that much.”

A gulp. “H-how do ye know?” a small, trembling voice asked.

“Because that was what our mam always taught us, and yer mam liked to cudgel me about the head whenever she caught me telling an untruth. Now. What were ye doing out here, young Owen MacKenzie?”

The four-year-old whose shoulders he held gulped once more. “I wanted to see the wee piggies.”

The sow had birthed a large litter not a week earlier, and the curious lad had been determined to see them up-close ever since.

“And how many times did I tell ye? Ye are not to venture inside the pen, Owen. ‘Tis for yer own good. Any animal will take great offense to a human coming close to their wee ones. They dinna know ye mean no harm. They want to protect, which means that sow might bite ye.” He pointed to her, lying on her side in a pool of fresh, cool mud while her litter fed.

He held up his nephew’s mud-covered hand, the small fingers wiggling. “Would ye take kindly to the loss of one of these? Perhaps all of them?”

Owen’s eyes filled with tears, and instantly Drew’s heart softened. While he knew from his own experience as a lad that fear of consequence was often the best way to get through to a bairn, he hated seeing his nephew tear up this way.

But he would hate far worse the result of the wee devil getting into the pigpen and angering a new mother. This added steel to his heart and his backbone.

“I want ye to promise you’ll never venture beneath that fence again. Do ye understand me?”

He nodded.

“I need to hear ye say it, lad. Do ye promise to never, ever do this again? Not ever?”

“Aye.” Owen nodded again, black curls bouncing as he did.

“All right, then.” He patted the lad’s backside. “Now, we’ll need to get ye washed.” As if he had the time. He was possessed of half a mind to dunk the lad in the stream running behind the house. Why not teach him a few more lessons?

“Ye dinna see me havin’ to talk this way to Moira this way, do ye? She obeys when I tell her what she ought and ought not be doing.”

“Moira is a lassie,” Owen grumbled.

Drew couldn’t help but smile, though he did his best to hide it behind a harrumph. “Moira is a good lassie who minds her uncle, as ye ought to do. If I catch ye breaking yer promise to me, lad, it’ll be the strap for ye.”

Och, the strap. How many times had he felt the sting on his backside? And how resentful he’d been. Now, as a grown man, he understood how necessary those punishments were. He’d done some terrible things. Wicked things, just because he could.

And it might have gotten him hurt. Badly. Killed, perhaps. Climbing the tallest tree on his family’s land and tumbling out. He might have broken his neck along with an arm.

Even then, he’d received the strap. Because it might have been much worse.

He now understood why his father had behaved so, just as the man had told him at the time. One day, ye shall understand the reason why ye need to be punished. One day, ye shall have a bairn of yer own, and ye shall know why I did this.

It had all come true exactly as he’d foretold, except for one bit. Owen was not his own bairn, nor was Moira. He’d never met them until the day they arrived at Rufus MacIntosh’s farm, along with word of his sister’s death, and that of her husband.

As the last living sibling of either parent, the wee bairns came to him. Four years old, wondering where their mam and da had gone to and when they would come back.

And Drew with no understanding of how to raise children.

“Davina will be in an awful temper when she learns ye made filthy the tunic she only just sewed for ye,” he grumbled as he stripped the mud-caked garment from the lad. “And ye know how poorly she’s been feeling as of late.”

“Will she be angry?”

Would she? Drew found it doubtful, especially since she had many more important things weighing on her mind. Such as the bairn growing inside her and the way it caused her to lose nearly every scrap of food which crossed her lips.

Rufus was beside himself with worry for her, and when Drew was honest with himself, he could admit he shared that dread. It did not seem fitting for a woman in her condition to hold down so little. Rather than growing plump, she’d seemed to shrink. There were hollows beneath her eyes and a pale, gray pallor to her complexion. She spent most of her time in bed, doing what she could from there.

Old Innis, the wife of one of the men who had served the MacIntosh family when Rufus’s father was alive, had taken to spending a great deal of time about the house, gardens and such. She prepared broths for Davina, tended to meals for the men and tidied the place up.

Yet she could only do so much, and they were nothing more than a group of men who had little experience caring for a home and those depending upon it. They might be able to care for themselves out in the wild, for instance, riding for days on end and doing their eating and sleeping beside a campfire.

Somehow, the intricacies of a home were beyond their ken.

Drew soaked the tunic and ran it through the running water until it seemed the coarse homespun was as clean as could be. He spread it out to dry over flat rocks by the water’s edge and kept watch over his nephew as he washed away layers of mud.

The wee lad was a good sort, to be certain. Bridget had done a fine job of raising both of the twins to be polite, to show respect to their elders. He could not doubt she’d been a bit of a taskmaster with them both. Young Moira already knew how to sweep a hearth and scour a cooking pot, all at the tender age of four winters.

They were bright, cheerful children in spite of the tragedy which had befallen them. Drew did what he could not to see Bridget in them, for thinking of the sister he’d not spoken to since her wedding years earlier caused a curious lump to form in his throat, made his chest tighten.

She’d been his oldest sibling, his second mam. Her black curls and equally black eyes carried over to her children, as did the dimples in Moira’s cheeks when she smiled.

He rested against the trunk of a sturdy birch, sighing.

“Are ye feeling poorly, Uncle Drew?” Owen ambled along the stream’s bank, half-bent in search of minnows which he liked to catch in cupped hands.

“Nay, lad. What makes ye ask it?”

“Ye sighed. Ye sigh when ye feel poorly.”

From the mouths of babes. He sometimes forgot, even after three months of having the children with him, that they saw and heard everything. The more a body sought to hide or conceal from them, the more a bairn knew.

He watched his nephew like a hawk watching its prey, taking note of every movement. Watching for signs that he’d begun to lose his balance.

He believed children should be allowed to play and roam, but only after a certain number of name days. Four was too young to frolic beside a rather deep stream on one’s own.

“I dinna feel poorly,” he explained. “I feel tired. I’m quite tired.”

“Ye should go to sleep. Cousin Davina always tells me when I ought to nap, and ye always tell me when I ought to be in bed.”

“Aye, lad, but ‘tis not so simple for a grown man. There are many things he must turn his hand to before he can take his rest.”

“What sorts of things?” Owen lost interest in his minnows, doing his uncle’s heart a great deal of good when he knelt by his side with a stick and dug out small tufts of soil.

“Och, lad. For one, helping with the running of the farm and tending of the land. Ye were not with us when we first came to live here. ‘Twas in terrible shape. It took a great deal of time to clear out the overgrowth and prepare the land for planting. We brought in the new livestock, as there were no longer any living cattle on the place. The same went with the pigs, the horses, the sheep. Everything ye know now, on this land, is here because of our hard work. Mine, Rufus, Clyde and the hands. Every day the animals must be tended. Cleaned up after, feed and watered, sent to graze and rounded up after. The fences needed mending, the buildings needed to be mended. A few needed to be torn down completely.”

Owen had already long since lost interest, but it was just as well. If Drew went on much longer, he’d put himself to sleep, since calling this work to mind did nothing but remind him of its backbreaking nature.

“Grown men have many things needing their attention,” he concluded, running a hand fondly over his nephew’s curly head. “Such as yourself.”

For he had not even begun describing the extra time, patience, energy, and devotion it took to mind two bairns he had only just met. With no knowledge of children or how they ought to come up. In fact, had it not been for Owen’s muddy trip to the pig pen, he might have washed up and prepared to take his evening meal.

Instead, he’d run full-out across the yard and barely managed to take the lad by the ankles and pull him away from the sow. Now, he was merely recovering his senses while his heart left his throat.

The wee ones were aging him. No doubt about it. He’d be dead by the time the year was out, or at most before the one following.

Life was much easier when all he’d had to worry himself with was a fight in a tavern.