The Chieftain Needs an Heir - a Highland ménage novella (Clan MacKrannan's Secret Traditions) Read Online Free PDF Page A

renewed… ahh!  The Chamber of the Green Man would work great magic.
    The vision melted away .  Cecily again beheld Sorcha's face as it was right now.  And she came to realise that she'd been so busy faffing about with the esoteric that she'd missed the blindingly obvious.
    " Thinking on yer husband, are ye?"
    "Cecily, I must confide … I have thought of little else since late this morn.  Yer face-reading has been a welcome distraction from my pining."
    "It is all yer feminine parts making ye think on him?"
    Sorcha sat up .  "It is as if they shout at the world without my bidding," she said, quite surprised at the perceptiveness of the question – though not at its intimacy, for the Wisewomen had been bolder than this in their speech.  "And I cannot seem to find cool air, even at the window's breeze."
    "Hilde! Come quick!" Cecily called over her shoulder.
    From the far side of the bedchamber, Hilde ran to the floorcloth and follow ed Cecily's pointing to their mistress's face.
    "Ye are ready," said Hilde, beaming ear to ear.
    "More than ready," said Sorcha.  " Niall and I have been parted long now.  I miss him."
    "Milady, this is a different kind o' ready. Come, we maun make preparation."
    Hilde rose to guddle in her baggage for the three ceremonial gowns she had brought.
    Cecily rose to guddle in her baggage for the green pennant.  She unfurled it and threaded it through the waiting cord on the far window, the one which overlooked the cottage of the Bard and the Grandam Wisewoman.  She could see Oona bent over to lift dry laundry off the grass so she concentrated on the back of her neck, the place of alert where she'd feel the wee hairs prickle, and the Grandam Wisewoman turned obediently and looked up to the bedchamber window.  And the message was this:
    The green pennant flies.  The Chamber of the Green Man is come again.
    When Oona ascended the stairs in her fresh-laundered ceremonial gown she had with her a hamper filled with several baskets, and a vast retinue of servants carrying buckets of water, and the mistress's husband Niall, and his brother Ruaridh.  The husband she delivered to his own bedchamber nearby, and told him to undress, for attendants would shortly be visiting to cleanse him.  His brother Ruaridh she delivered to his own bedchamber in the other wing of the castle, and told him the same, handing him a ceremonial gown as she left.
    Ruaridh held it up, letting it unfold to its length.
    "A bit on the wee side for me, no?"
    " But the right size for Mirren, yer wife."

    " Bathed by you two?" said Niall, and would have said more but for the faraway look in Hilde and Cecily's eyes as they filled his tub.  In some sort of trance, they were, swaying to and fro in a dance and muttering their incantations with every bucketload.
    This must be it, then.  The Fertility Tra dition.  He was desperate to see Sorcha.  His dreamings asleep and awake had been ravaged with images of their early days… he was running her fair locks through his fingers as they kissed, and she was sitting on him as she was wont to do, and he was watching her shimmer as she rode him senseless, and he was flipping her onto her back and watching her shimmer all over again... the times they'd had before her spirit broke.  And before he neglected her hurts and sought out a wench, fool that he was.
    And although he would have preferred to love her now without witnesses, his need for repentance bade him think a more public loving of her would do the better good.  The Bard's ways were manyfold beneficial.  A Wise Man indeed to mark his chieftain's passage from past to future with a period of abstinence and start him afresh with a Tradition.
    A strange humming noise filled the chieftain's ears as he becalmed himself and clambered into the big oaken tub. Ach, he was imagining it.  Far too much honeyed mead and springwater and no' a drop of ale or wine since his banishment from Sorcha's presence.
    The bathwater was neither hot nor