Highlanders Collection. Ann Lethbridge
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you look well. The bairn?’ All he could see was a small head with thick black hair pressed up against her chest.
She rubbed the bairn’s head and nodded. ‘Young Alpin is well,’ she said. He smiled at the name chosen.
‘Do you need a ride, Gunna?’ Tavis asked. ‘I could get a wagon,’ he offered. The nearest of the farms was some distance and it would take her a goodly amount of time to walk there.
‘Nay,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Nessa’s husband is sending his wagon shortly. Walk with me, Tavis. I meet him at the river’s edge.’
Bidding Fia farewell, he walked outside with Gunna, taking the sack from her and carrying it. They walked a few paces before he asked her, ‘Why did you summon me? Is there something you need?’
‘Oh, you’re a good lad,’ she said, patting him on the back. ‘Nay, I need nothing. But speaking to Ciara the other day reminded me that we never spoke after your sweet wife passed.’
‘I did not know she sought your care, Gunna. She was only about five months carrying.’
‘Oh, aye,’ she said, pointing in the direction they needed to walk, her body waddling from side to side as they did. ‘She had some fears about carrying. After all, her mam lost four bairns before delivering the three girls. And two of them died giving birth.’
Saraid had never explained her fears. He’d not known about losing sisters in childbirth.
‘She never told me,’ he said.
‘She didna want you to ken, but she wanted me to.’ She paused for a moment, staring at him. ‘Did she fall from the horse? Is that how she passed?’ Gunna asked.
‘I found her on my way from Dalmally on the laird’s business. She was bleeding heavily and said her pains had begun the day before.’ He did not speak of the rest of it or expose his role in the debacle.
‘I told her she might lose it. Told her not to strain or carry.’
‘I did not know,’ he whispered.
‘You’re a good lad,’ Gunna said. ‘But some women are not built to birth bairns. Your Saraid was one of them. She knew it, but wanted to try for you.’
‘Was there anything I could have done?’
‘Oh, nay,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘’Twas in God’s hands to decide. Even if I was next to her when the pains started, I couldna saved her. The bairn would not have lived that early born.’
It was just as Ciara had told him. Nothing would have mattered. Nothing could have saved Saraid.
That did not lessen his guilt in her death and in the manner of her death, for she’d died alone, in terror and pain, while he rode off in anger. He’d spent years regretting what he’d done. Spent years with guilt weighing down his soul for killing her. His heart locked away in fear and pain.
Tavis would rather have been at her side, soothing the fears and holding her than to know she lay by the road for hours by herself. She was incoherent by the time they arrived back here. The healer had visited and given her a potion for the pain, but nothing could stop the bleeding that eventually took her life.
If anything happens to me, you must go on.
Saraid’s words from his dream, from early in their marriage, came back to him then. She knew. Somehow she knew. And she’d warned him, but when the time came, he did not recognise it.
Stunned, he stopped walking. He stopped thinking. When he realised he was not moving, he glanced around and found that Gunna was gone. Shaking his head, he looked in the distance and saw her on a wagon many yards away—he never even realised she’d left.
He needed to think about all this and he did not know where to go. The one person he most wanted to speak to was the one he could not. She had known. And she pointed him in the right direction to find out and accept it for himself, freeing himself from the past.
I know it is too late for us …
Even knowing it would not benefit her, she’d protected him in a way he’d never been able to do for her. She’d been a better friend to him, in spite of his efforts to hold her away, than he’d been to her, even in the early years.
And she loved him enough to free him from his past and to let him go. To make him understand that his failure to one woman did not mean he would fail everyone, even while he failed her.
Tavis went back to his cottage where the echoes and ghosts of the past still haunted and tried to figure out how to right a life that had gone so wrong. But he feared that he was indeed too late to correct all his mistakes and to learn from his past ones. Only when he noticed that his latest carving—the one he’d promised to make for her—was gone, did he dare allow himself to have any hope at all.
Ciara had had no idea that pleasure could ache so much.
Or mayhap it was from sleeping up against a wall, wrapped in only a plaid shawl? As she’d uncurled herself, her body had let her know that, whatever caused the aches, she would suffer for it.
Waking to find only darkness outside, she’d wondered if she’d awoken before dawn, but after stumbling to the door on legs that were numb from being under her all night, she’d discovered the sun had risen after all. Thick clouds covered the sky and rumbles of thunder rolled within them.
Her stomach had added a few more, reminding her that she had not eaten since yesterday. And she’d had some quite strenuous exercise since then.
That had made her smile, regardless of the aches and pains.
There were places on her body that she had never known could feel the way he made them feel. The rapture that women had talked about, whispering amongst themselves, was no longer a mystery to her. Tavis had awakened her body and those senses and overwhelmed them. As she walked, the place between her legs actually throbbed as memories of his intimate caresses there returned. Her breasts tingled and in her mind she could still see his mouth on her.
She’d made her way home and, after hiding the wooden heart inside her trunk, Ciara had broken her fast with her family, explaining that she wanted to be home on this last day before leaving them. Her mother’s eyes had filled with tears while her sister asked if she could have Ciara’s bedchamber now that she would be the oldest. Ciara had allowed these joyful moments to wash over her for soon, very soon, they would be over and she would be gone.
Her mother had made her favourite porridge, extra creamy this morn, and even her father had joined them and lingered there longer than usual. She wondered if they could tell that she was somehow different this morning. She felt different from inside out. A woman now where a girl stood before. Though that last step to womanhood would be on the morrow.
Finally, everyone had set about on their day’s tasks and she began to pack for both the next night, which would be spent in a chamber in the keep, and for the journey—nay, move to James’s home. She stumbled now just as she had a few weeks ago over what to take and what to leave behind, but now it meant letting go of whatever remained here in the chamber. She was touching the carvings when her mother came in. She did not know she was crying until her mother touched her shoulder and took her in her arms.
‘There now, sweetling,’ she soothed. ‘Soon you will have your own bairns and I can send these along for them.’
‘I do not know why I am so weepy, Mother. ’tis not as though I did not know this day would come.’
‘Knowing it approached and having it here are two different matters.’
Ciara leaned back and searched her mother’s face. ‘I do not know how you did it. Taking on everything you did. Seeing to me. Then marrying Papa and coming to a new village, a new clan and a whole new life.’
‘I married a good man, just as you will.’ Her mother stroked her back, touching her hair and combing it with her fingers in