More the fool him, if so.
She would never forget. She spent each day with a living reminder.
And what Caelis had to be confused about she did not know. Did he think that just because he didn’t want her that no other man would ever want to wed her?
Arrogant blackguard.
“Mummy?” Eadan’s worried voice rose from where he stood beside Niall.
She needed to tell her son all was well, but could not look away from Caelis’s face as he got his first look of the son they had made.
The child he had told her would never happen.
She’d been naïve and believed him. She would never make that mistake again.
Chapter 2
A Faol’s strength means little in the face of his mate’s wrath.
—LACHLAN OF THE BALMORAL
The warrior fainted.
With a great resounding thud as his big, over-muscled body hit the dirt.
Caelis had taken one look at their son, his blue eyes widening in recognition that had quickly turned to horror and then he’d sunk to the ground like a stone.
Several people, Sinclairs and Shona’s friends alike, made sounds with varying degrees of shock and volume.
Her own heart in her throat, though why she should be concerned for the blackguard she did not know, Shona paid none of them any heed until her son spoke. “Is he dead then, like my lord?”
The fact that her former husband had insisted on the formal address from the boy all but he and Shona considered his son never seemed so absurd and yet appropriate as it did in that moment when Eadan stood staring at the unconscious body of the father who shared his blood.
Niall shook his head and turned away from the other big soldier, as if a warrior collapsing was of little notice. “Nay, laddie. He’s alive, just taking a wee nap.”
“On the ground?” Eadan asked, blinking up at Niall uncertainly.
“Aye.”
“He fainted,” said the smaller man who had been talking to her son and Niall earlier, a certain amount of glee in his tone.
“Like a damsel in the stories Audrey tells us?”
Niall snorted a laugh. “Aye, just like that.”
“Audrey?” the redheaded smaller man asked. “Not your mother?”
“Mum doesn’t ever tell stories where the damsel faints or needs rescuing. In all her stories, the knights and princesses fight side by side. My lord said they were nonsense, but Marjory and I like them,” Eadan said with staunch loyalty.
“As you should,” Niall said with a pat to her son’s head. “Let Guaire take you and the others to the keep.”
“What about Mum?” Eadan gave her a worried frown, hanging back.
She couldn’t even dredge a smile of comfort for him, but she did manage to say, “Go with Master Guaire, sweeting,” through a very tight throat.
“Here,” Niall raised his arms. “Give me the girl.”
“My name is Marjory,” her daughter decided to inform the giant man.
“Aye, lass, so I heard and a fine name it is. Will you come to me?”
Marjory turned her face into Shona’s chest, her shy nature asserting itself.
Thomas stepped forward. “Come, little dumpling, Uncle Thomas will carry you.”
Marjory shook her head, not looking away from the cocoon of safety she’d created for herself.
Shona would have laughed if she had it in her to do so. Her daughter’s stubborn shyness was all too familiar.
“How will your mama get down from the horse if you don’t let go of her?” Audrey wheedled.
But to no avail.
“We’ll stay here. It’s comfortable,” Marjory claimed in a voice muffled by Shona’s body.
“Marjory, don’t you want to meet the laird?” Thomas asked.
It was exactly the wrong thing to say because Marjory grabbed Shona all the tighter and exclaimed her very clear denial.
Caelis groaned and shifted on the ground. Shockingly, it was that action that caused Marjory to release her tight grip on her mother’s waist and turn to see the big man sit up in the dirt.
“You felled down.” Marjory’s observation was met with a confused nod. “I takes naps, but Eadan doesn’t. Big boys don’t take naps.”
Marjory spoke in a mixture of English and Gaelic, which Shona was used to interpreting. The perplexed look on Caelis’s face said he wasn’t. She knew he’d learned rudimentary English like she had among their clan, so she wasn’t surprised when his confusion eventually cleared.
“I don’t normally nap, princess.”
“I’m not a princess.”
Shona was so shocked by his kindness to her daughter that she gasped.
He flicked a glance at her, but it didn’t linger.
“Are you sure? You look like one.” Caelis stood, dusting himself off and ignoring the curious stares of the Sinclairs around them. He appeared wholly unaffected by having fainted in front of a bailey full of people.
Six years ago, he would not have been so sanguine about revealing any weakness to others.
“My papa was a baron.”
“He isn’t one any longer?” Caelis asked.
“He’s dead. Brother is baron now, but I don’t think he likes Eadan and me.”
Out of the mouths of babes.
This time when Caelis looked at Shona, his regard stayed with her. “You are a widow?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“That is hardly a civilized response to learning a woman’s husband has died,” she remonstrated.
Though she could not claim to feel grief over Henry’s demise, the fact that she’d been left alone in the world—again—without even the baron’s marginal protection, was hardly cause for rejoicing.
“I am not a civilized man.”
He would get no argument from her in that regard. There had been a time that the wild side to his nature appealed to her very much. No longer. “Still, I cannot fathom why you should think my present circumstances good ones.”
She’d thrown off one yoke only to find herself at the risk of falling prey to another, far more onerous one.
Caelis shrugged. “It is good I do not have to kill him.”
Shona gasped, unable to fathom him expressing such a sentiment. “You cannot say such things in front of my children.”
Regret flared in Caelis’s eyes, but his jaw set in stubborn lines she remembered too well for her own comfort. “Please pardon me for speaking so in front of you, princess.”
Marjory giggled.
“What about me?” Eadan demanded.
“You are a big boy, five summers are you not?” Caelis asked.
Eadan nodded without his usual questions of how the man could know this.
“Warrior talk will not upset you,” Caelis said with certainty.
Eadan puffed up at the implied praise and nodded solemnly. “Sometimes a man must do what needs doing.”
Caelis flicked a glance at her. “That is a clan warrior’s saying.”
“My grandfather told me.”
“Where is your grandfather now?”
Eadan’s eyes filled with grief. “The horse kicked him and he died.”
“What horse?”
“Mine.”
“It was not your horse, sweeting. It was only the horse an idiot man put you on.” Shona hated the guilt her son struggled with over his adored grandfather’s demise. She told Caelis, “Eadan’s older brother put him on an untried horse. Percival claimed he did not realize the horse was so temperamental. My father died saving my son.”
“Not a brother.” Caelis’s tone brooked no argument.
Shona was saved from a reply by her son’s. “No, Lord Percival is a bad man. I do not want him for a brother. Mummy said I did not have to claim him if I do not want to now that we are in Scotland.”