Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 02] Read Online Free PDF Page A

drew a ragged breath. “Stop crying, lass,” he rasped, appalled by the effort it cost him to form those few simple words. “I am not vexed with you.”
“For truth?” Amicia’s cheeks glistened with tears. “You are not wroth with me?”
“Nay,” he assured her, making a brusque motion with one hand. “You have my oath on it. I ken why you did it, and I— . . . I thank you.” He gave her a tight smile . . . a wee one.
The best he could manage.
And only for her.
Others present were about to taste the full measure of his wrath.
With a burst of energy torn from the very depths of his hardihood, he flung back the covers, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and held fast to its edges until the wild spinning lessened.
Then he raked every male in the room with a scorching glare.
That accomplished, he heaved himself to his feet and fixed his most formidable stare on the cheeky soul he held responsible for transforming his quarters into a sea of eye-gouging brilliance.
The grizzle-headed lout had even set a fire blazing in the hearth and lit every branch of candles in the room. The wall torches, heavy iron-bracketed nuisances long unlit and neglected, hadn’t been ignored either. Each one hissed and crackled with well-burning flames.
Iain suppressed the urge to give a bark of cynical laughter. For all the stifling heat thrown off by the myriad sources of light, he might well have awakened in Satan’s den.
With the most casual calm he could muster, he addressed the rheumy-eyed seneschal. “As I mind it, Gerbert, I’ve instructed you times without number not to lay a fire in here, to desist from lighting a single taper, and”—he paused for emphasis—“to leave the windows shuttered.”
Not to be intimidated, the seneschal regarded him with a look of studied blandness, but gave away his discomfort by shifting his feet in the floor rushes . . . a sure sign of guilt.
Iain drew a deep breath, released it slowly, and, holding the old man’s gaze, asked, “Where are the window shutters?”
Stiff-lipped silence met his narrow-eyed perusal, but he caught a flash of pity in the graybeard’s hazy blue eyes . . . the same fleeting glimpse of commiseration he’d noted on Gavin’s open visage just moments before.
And that great oaf avoided all further eye contact with him. The lumbering Islesman kept his shaggy, auburn head bent low over the jeweled reliquary casket, furiously polishing its silver casing . . . though not a single speck of soot remained.
The precious container for holy relics gleamed brighter than a bairn’s newly scrubbed behind.
A wholly un -formidable glance at his sister-in-law reaped no more than a noncommittal shrug.
A shrug and a most eloquent glance at her husband.
Iain looked at him, too. The MacLean laird’s rocklike stance bode ill, but too fine a ferment brewed in Iain’s gut for him to care. “’Twas you,” he said, squinting in the sun’s glare slanting in through the now-bare windows. “You ordered the removal of the shutters.”
Donall the Bold didn’t deny it.
Instead, he crossed his arms and set his mouth into a hard, uncompromising line.
Cold-edged pricklings of ill ease attacked Iain anew, only this time, rather than merely slide down his spine, they laid vicious siege to his every nerve ending, crashing over him in a tidal wave of foreboding as ominous as the missing shutters and his brother’s grim-set countenance.
Ignoring the others in the chamber, Iain fixed Donall with an equally stern eye, but his brother didn’t so much as blink. Nor did his features soften or reveal even a hint of the sympathy he’d seen on the faces of the others.
Iain’s hands clenched at his sides, his nails cutting welts into his palms. Honor demanded he accept and abide by his brother’s edicts. Donall was laird, not he, and ne’er had Iain minded his lot as younger son.
But ne’er before had Donall crossed the threshold to Iain’s private quarters as laird.
Only as his good brother and friend.
That he’d do so now, and in such a