Highlander of Mine (11 page)

“Wow, that sounds amazing. Full of conflict. You thought that up when you were eleven?”

He shrugged and wouldn’t look at Fleur then. “So I’s tellin’ the story. Havin’ a good time with the crowd too, and my stepfather comes in and tells them all that I hadn’t baled the oat stalks correctly. That I had been too lazy thinkin’ up tales, rather than doin’ my chores.”

Fleur scooted until her legs touched Duncan’s, her hands finding his. “I’m so sorry. How humiliating.”

Although Duncan wouldn’t look at her, he wrapped his thumbs around her hands, holding her to him. “Aye, ‘twas. But even more so, because I had tied the bales right. I tried to defend myself, but Albert out yelled me, kept sayin’ I was lazy, my head in the clouds, thinkin’ of all my stupid tales.”

Her heart bled for the boy Duncan had been, how his stepfather had mortified him into thinking his gift was laziness. No wonder Duncan had given up.

“I’m glad Albert’s dead. I’d kick his ass if he were still around.”

Duncan finally looked up and smiled at her.

“Is that why you keep threatening me with the yelling?”

“Suppose so. I don’ ken any other way to fight, other than with my hands. I don’t think they are the right ways, so I keep my mouth shut meanwhile.”

“And fight other people’s battles for them.”

He shrugged.

She smiled and scooted even closer. “I’m going to pick a fight with you right now. So you can learn how to use your beautiful words instead of yelling or smacking me around.”

He reached for her arms, tugging urgently. “I’d never hit ye. Never. I swear it. And I never want to yell at ye either.”

She had known that all along. He was a gentle giant, which might have seemed absurd considering his current job was training men how to kill. But she knew he’d been jesting about out yelling her, and she knew it down to her bones he’d never do anything to hurt her.

She patted his chest, but couldn’t quite take her hands from him when she should have. God, he was so...hard. It distracted her for a moment, but then she thought of helping him learn how to fight. She hadn’t fought with anyone since her cousins, too afraid of saying the wrong thing, so it would be fun to pick a fight with the big guy. She might learn a trick or two herself.

“I know you’d never hit me. I was just teasing. Sorry. Bad joke?”

He slid his hands down until they rested on her lap, where she held them with her fingers poking between each of his thick digits.

With him distracted by her movement, she tried to think of what they could fight over. “You have dreadful weather here in MacKay country.”

He glanced up, his red brows furrowed in confusion.

“We’re fighting now. You have to tell me it’s not dreadful weather.”

“But it is. Been too hot. ‘Tis never like this. Horrible weather.”

She shook her head. “No, we’re fighting. You have to disagree with me.”

“But I don’ want to. I agree with you.”

“That’s not the point. You have to fight with me.”

“Ah, Jesus.”

“You can’t get Him involved. We’re fighting.”

He laughed, then straightened, and tried to wipe the smile from his face. “All right. The weather has been unpleasant, but ‘tis enjoyable in the evening, like now, with ye, where ‘tis perfect with a slight chill, so we have to sit close together to keep warm.”

She leaned her forehead against his strong chest. “Oh, we’re pathetic at fighting.”

“Nay. We’re not,” he said sharply.

She glanced up.

He smiled widely. “I’m fighting with ye now. Happy?”

“Being contrary isn’t fighting.”

“Aye, it is.”

“Oh, God.”

“We can’t have the Son, but the Father can be involved in our fight? How is that fair?”

She laughed, and he did too, but she saw something shift in his laugh. He was becoming more serious, which she wasn’t sure she wanted. When he’d told her about his stepfather, she’d wanted to protect him from that pain, wanted to wrap her arms around the man now and the boy back then.

But she wanted to know what was obviously bothering him. “What? What are you thinking about?”

He suddenly became sheepish, not looking at her. But he answered all the same. “Since I met ye,” he took a huge breath, “I—I keep thinkin’ upon a story, one I made up a long time ago.”

She grasped his arms before she even considered her actions. She’d also scooted much closer to him, practically on his lap. “That’s great! Will you tell me about it?”

“’Tis silly.”

She growled at him. “I told you already. I like silly, and I don’t consider storytelling silly. It elevates the spirit, it gives one hope when all is dark, it is the reason human beings stopped living in trees and sat around a fire. It’s why we have communities now, all because of stories.” She stopped, realizing what she’d just said. Well, he might not understand the evolutionary reference, but as for the rest...she hadn’t realized she felt so fiercely about tales, but she did. The stories told by her elders had been so old, as they would say in the Green Cat tavern, older than time was time. At one point she’d loved listening to them, believing in them. It had happened so slow, or maybe too fast, but one day she no longer thought of stories, or tales. She no longer believed.

But with Duncan, she felt she could have hope again. She could believe.

He took another breath, then began. “Ye might like this story. I hope. See, we all heard the tale of the princess Pocahontas coming from America. We’d heard the stories of cities of gold, treasures abounding, and beautiful people.”

“Really? Beautiful people?”

“Oh, aye. I even bought the stupid book that John Smith wrote, not believin’ much of it, but, och, how it stirred my imagination.”

“You know, America doesn’t have the gold that South America, Brazil, has. Well, there’s gold, but it won’t be discovered for another...jeez, another couple hundred years.”

Duncan grunted and nodded. His form of accepting what she’d told him. It made her laugh.

“Anyway, about Pocahontas . . .” She gestured with her hands, finally releasing her grip from his arms. But she had to keep touching him, so she settled her hands on his, which happened to be on his iron-tough thighs.

“Aye, well, she visited England nearly forty years ago. ‘Tis still much discussed, especially her death.”

“Yes, she died when she was young, right? I’ve forgotten that part of my history.”

He sucked in a breath, as if admonishing her, but smiled. “’Tis before my time too. Anyway, so her story is that she was kidnapped while still living in Virginia. In captivity, she supposedly fell in love and married a white man, even though she was already married. Then she traipses off to London. Not there even a year, she had a babe, then dies. Not from having the bairn. Nay. But what she dies from, no one knows. She was eight and ten years of age or little older. How could she die so young? So my idea for a story is to have it durin’ that time, and to have a Highlander, o’ course—”

“Of course.”

His smile widened. “Have a Highlander partner up with an Indian to discover if she truly died from an ailment. Or was it murder?”

She clutched him once again, this time landing part of her thigh on him too. “Oh my God, Duncan, that’s brilliant! You have to write it.”

“Help me with it?”

“’Course,” she answered the way he would, and it made his smile turn hot, like the fire.

For the next week, they’d meet at night, plotting Pocahontas’s murder mystery, sharing, and talking until the early morning hours. When they’d finally depart from each other’s company it was always reluctantly.

After Fleur had started to hold Duncan’s hands, they’d find themselves by the end of the night with him inclined against a fence pole, and she’d lean part of her back against his chest. They’d both stare up at the stars.

“Have you heard of Galileo?” She’d asked while the back of her head nestled against his strong shoulder.

“Aye. Died a decade ago or so. Seemed like a smart man, like ye.”

“Are you calling me smart? Or a man?”

He chuckled, and not so bashfully leaned his head over her to glance at her chest. “There is nothing manly about ye, I can attest to that.”

Reclining back against the pole again, he was staring at the stars when she smacked him across his other mighty shoulder.

“Ow.” Then he quietly laughed. “I suppose I deserved that.”

She pursed her lips, but liked that he had called her not manly, and liked even more his focus on her breasts. Any other man, she would have thought indecent. But she wanted him to notice her, especially the fact that she was a woman. Because she felt so, well, feminine to his masculinity. So then she turned her head and reached up, kissing him on the cheek quickly.

Settling back against him, she felt him chuckling more than heard anything, and decided to keep the conversation going. “I like Galileo. In my time, he’s called the father of science. He charted the stars better than any other astrologer before him.”

“I wouldn’ say that.”

She turned again, their faces so close. “You wouldn’t?”

“Nay, before Christianity took hold of Scotland the religions here were based on the stars and their movements. There’s still much of the old ways about us, the way we do things.” She settled against him again, one of his arms reaching around her, twining their fingers together on her lap. “The elders told of how difficult it was to convert to Catholicism. Perhaps that is why so many Highlanders chose Protestantism. Mayhap they thought it more akin to our old ways. Who kens.”

“What do you think? Are you Protestant?”

He didn’t answer for a beat, but when he finally did, his voice was lower and bounced through her ribs. “I suppose I lost faith in anything a long time ago. I wouldn’t call myself a man who believed in much.”

She turned once more to face him. “Faithless? I wouldn’t describe you like that.”

He swallowed and looked deeply into her eyes. “Perhaps I’m changin’.” He shrugged against her. “Mayhap I have a wee bit more faith than I once did.”

The day after that conversation Fleur was with Helen as they sat in surprisingly comfortable chairs at a corner of Durness’s Greens, which she had discovered was the name of the center of town, where communal sheep and cattle sometimes grazed, but in the past week and a-half had been converted into Duncan and Rory’s training ground. The sun shone brightly in dandelion yellow, making everything around them seem colorful, cheerful, as if the white washed taverns and small houses that surrounded them were about to become animated and dance like in a Disney movie.

Helen and Fleur sat in the shade of the nearby Green Cat tavern. Fleur couldn’t seem to stop herself from remembering the way Duncan had looked at her last night. The coals from the fire were a bright orange, and his eyes, although a dark forest green, also radiated with sparks of orange that made her heart thud against her ribs. She wasn’t too sure how they could part so amiably when their fire would burn out, the chill from the air settled in, yet their words—no, it was the unspoken ones—stretched inside her, making her desire Duncan in a way she’d never felt before.

She looked over at Duncan’s mother, worrying, like so many times previously, why she was here. The muses had said something about this
glimpse
not being just for her. Helen’s lids slipped closed as her head leaned over to a pillow Fleur had propped for her on the back of the chair. The fact was other than Helen being a bit pale, maybe a bit thinner than she might have been otherwise, Duncan’s mother did not appear very sick. Granted, Fleur could smell the cancer, which was never a good sign, but she seemed to have boundless energy. Well, except for now.

Watching Helen doze off, Fleur remembered Na doing the same in the hospital and the sense of impending doom. Maybe that was because Na had been in a hospital, and already her feet had been removed as well as two fingers. Her vision had hardly been beyond a few feet, and Fleur felt like such a failure for not knowing how bad it had gotten before she’d come to the Pine Ridge Hospital. Na had been so little and her hair had grown so white, but she had smiled and hugged Fleur as if her weakened muscles didn’t restrain her.

It had felt so good to be held like that, and as Fleur studied Helen’s sleeping form, she wished she could hold her. In the last few days, she’d grown to love Helen. She and Helen spent hours together, watching Duncan train his troops. Helen had a special tea that she’d taught Fleur to make for her. It smelled a bit too much like a rancid tree, so she’d declined when Helen had offered her sips.

While helping bake bread on an open fire, Helen had told her of Duncan’s father, her first and only love. They’d met when they were both sixteen, and had waited until she was nineteen before they’d wed. Then Helen had laughed and admitted it was because she was pregnant with Duncan.

“Oh, we’d had quite a time trying to make that lad, we did.” Helen had leaned in close, conspiratorially. “We’d practiced tryin’ to make him for more than a year before we had to wed.”

Fleur had blushed and shook her head. “Am I really supposed to know this?”

Helen held her hand. “’Tis so nice to share. ‘Tis like ye are my daughter. Nay, ‘tis like ye are my friend. I suppose that’s what a daughter in-law is like, hmm?”