Epilogue
Dun Scaith, Ten months later
Emerging from a deep sleep, Darroch stretched and covered his eyes with his forearm. The sun was already up. He’d slept late again.
“Awake at last, lazybones,” Isabel whispered.
Her sultry voice was enough to turn the pleasant morning erection to granite. He turned onto his side to cuddle into her and opened one eye. As usual, two-month-old Stewart Rory MacKeegan lay on his mother’s chest, snoring softly. “How much longer?” he asked, feeling selfish the moment the words were out of his mouth. He’d posed the same needy question every day since his son’s birth.
Isabel didn’t help matters by rubbing his leg with her foot. “Coira says a fortnight, Fanny a month.”
Darroch groaned. “The auld woman just wants to see me suffer,” he complained.
“’Tis hard for me too,” she replied. “I miss ye.”
He twirled a finger in his son’s black curls. “I didna hear ye get up to feed him.”
She chuckled. “’Tis no wonder—ye’re tired out every night. Yer father has no time for his duties now that he’s preoccupied teaching Kyla to ride, avoiding Fanny, and showing Stewart off to everyone.”
He turned onto his back and stared into the rafters. “I ne’er thought to see the day he would entrust me with leadership o’ the clan.”
“But ye’re enjoying it,” she teased.
He mumbled his agreement, incapable of adequately expressing how much he relished the days spent learning to be chief, carrying out his father’s directives and introducing some improvements of his own to the castle. “The council and clanfolk seem to welcome my ideas,” he remarked.
“After years of yer stern sire, who can be surprised?” she quipped. “They recognize the future looks brighter with ye at the helm.”
He turned onto his side and patted his son’s bottom; his heart filled with optimism as the aroma of motherhood stole up his nostrils. “And this wee laddie will follow me.”
The babe startled when Kyla burst into the chamber, followed by Blue.
The hound slumped down at the foot of the bed with a groan.
Darroch sat up, ready for his daughter to launch herself onto his lap. “Have I nay asked ye to knock?” he reminded her for the umpteenth time.
“Sorry, Dadaidh,” she replied halfheartedly.
“’Tis clear we’ll have to install a bar on the door,” he told Isabel with a wink. “Within a fortnight.”
Kyla crawled into the space between him and his wife and stroked the babe’s head, cooing endearments and promising to tell him the tale of Cú Chulainn when he was old enough.
Darroch let his eyes wander around the chamber he’d slept in since childhood. He’d never felt a sense of belonging there, until now. His wife had added furnishings, tapestries and rugs, and tactfully suggested some of the weapons and hunting trophies be moved to the hall. It was a much less masculine chamber, but he loved it nonetheless. If he could, he’d happily spend all day lying abed with his beloved and his bairns.
The moment the thought occurred, he recognized it wasn’t strictly true. He itched to get busy improving the lives of his clan and building a mutually beneficial alliance with the MacRains. It was his destiny.
*
Isabel lingered abed after Margaret took Kyla off to get bathed and dressed, which her pouting daughter only agreed to if Boo came with them. “’Tis the same ritual every day,” she told Darroch.
“I doot she’ll ever change,” he agreed, getting out of bed. “Stubborn.”
“I wonder where she gets that from?”
She watched her naked husband shrug as he walked across to the garderobe, a sight she never tired of.
Stewart woke and fussed, so she sat up and let him suckle, which is what she was doing when Darroch emerged from the garderobe, rubbing red curls dry with a linen. He covered his maleness with the cloth as soon as he saw her and the babe. “Ye’re determined to make this more difficult for me,” he complained.
“Aye,” she teased, though his obvious excitement had her wishing the next fortnight would pass quickly.
He dressed with his back to her—as if she didn’t enjoy the play of the muscles of his broad back and the tempting sight as he leaned over to pull on his knee stockings.
His kiss of farewell was chaste, as it had been since the babe’s birth. She looked forward to the return of the kisses that lit a fire in her womb, and other unmentionable parts of her body.
She missed him intensely as soon as he left the chamber, but was resigned to her destiny. “We’ll always be obliged to share yer dadaidh with the clan,” she whispered to her babe. “They need him.”
She chuckled when she realized Stewart had fallen back to sleep. Motherhood wasn’t what she’d expected, but then she didn’t really know what she’d expected. And who could have predicted her first child would turn out to be a seven-year-old lass?
Despite the challenges, bearing a bairn had changed her in more ways than one. She had brought a new life into the world, a son she would nurture and protect to the best of her ability. Perhaps, God willing, the first of many healthy bairns.
“Let’s ye and me enjoy these last few minutes of peace and quiet,” she whispered, “before Coira and Ava come to help us dress.”
Establishing herself as the Lady of Clan MacKeegan hadn’t been easy, and many older folk still resented her as a MacRain, though Stewart’s birth and her father-by-marriage’s support had changed attitudes.
Nevertheless, she lived each day in the certainty that she was where she was meant to be, living the life she’d been destined to live, with the capable and loving man made just for her.
She laughed out loud as she stroked her babe’s soft curls. “One day, I’ll tell ye the tale of how yer father jilted me,” she promised, “and he’ll insist ’twas me jilted him.”