Eight Months Later, MacKinnon Castle
The fire in the study had been burning since before supper and by this hour it had settled into low and steady burn. Outside, the wind off the sea blowing hard, making the rest of the world feel very far away and the room feel very close.
Jean was reading.
She had been reading the same page for twenty minutes, which was unusual for her. She was a fast reader with a focused mind and she did not generally lose her place. She had lost her place tonight, repeatedly.
She set the book face down on the arm of the chair.
She looked at the fire.
She had been sitting with a particular piece of information for eleven days. She had been certain of it for nine.
She was the kind of woman who needed to be certain before she said a thing out loud, and she had been moving carefully around the reality of it for nine days, getting used to its shape from the inside before she introduced it to anyone else.
Tonight she was going to say it out loud.
She listened to the castle.
Somewhere above her she could hear the specific creak of the third step on the east stair, which was Calum and she had learned the sound of him moving through the MacKinnon walls the way she had learned the sound of him moving through the castle.
He had been in the south tower going over the spring muster with Donal and she had come down to the study an hour ago with her book and her fire and the eleven days of information she was not yet sharing.
The door opened and she sprung up and walked towards the window.
Calum came in with the laird part of him set down for the evening, the careful management that he wore in halls and councils loosened, just himself, moving through his own study in his own castle.
He walked towards her with a smile a planted a kiss on her mouth. He crossed to the fire and crouched in front of it the way he always did when it had burned to this stage, one hand reaching for the iron to adjust the logs.
The fire moved and the light shifted across his face, and she looked at the angles of it that she had been looking at for eight months and still found new things in.
He was, she had decided somewhere around the third month, completely and inconveniently beautiful, in the way of a man who had no awareness of and so wore it without any performance whatsoever, which made it considerably worse.
“Come sit with me,” she said.
He looked at her over his shoulder. Something in her voice, apparently, had a different quality than usual, because the look he gave her was the reading one.
“Aye,” he said.
He walked towards her and wrapped his arms around her waist, his back against the room, and she wrapped her hands around his neck and they looked at each other in the firelight in the particular comfortable silence that had developed between them somewhere around the second month of being married.
She had been married before she understood what marriage could be.
She understood it now.
It was this, a room with two people in it who had chosen each other and kept choosing each other and had stopped needing anything from the choosing except the choosing itself.
“Calum,” she said.
“Aye.” His voice was warm.
She looked at him.
She looked at the man who had built himself into her life with the same steady unhurried thoroughness he brought to everything.
He had learned the names of every tenant in both valleys and sat with Ewan for hours discussing drainage on the north pasture because Ewan’s opinion mattered and he understood that it did.
Who brought her tea without being asked when she worked late in the study and who had twice, in the past eight months, woken in the night to find her sitting up rigid from a dream she wouldn’t fully describe, and had simply made room and put his arm around her and not asked for explanations.
Who looked at her, still, the way he had looked at her with the complete weight of his attention and nothing held back.
She loved him.
She had loved him since somewhere around the hunter’s hut in the storm, if she was honest, and she had been building the vocabulary for it ever since.
“I have something tae tell ye,” she said.
He looked at her and waited.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
The room went quiet and Calum went still. He jerked back.
His eyes moved across her face. He looked at her flat midsection.
His eyes slowly filled with tears.
Two seconds passed and then three and she was beginning to recalibrate her expectation of how this was going to go when he closed the gap between them and picked her up, lifting her clean off the ground.
She grabbed his shoulders by reflex and laughed and then she was laughing hard because he was laughing too, she could feel it in his chest and in the quality of his grip.
“Put me down,” she said, still laughing.
“In a moment.”
“Calum—”
“In a moment,” he said again, and held on, and she held on, and they stood in silence and she could feel his heartbeat against her chest, fast and real. He set her down and kept his hands at her waist.
“When did ye find out?” he said.
“I’ve been certain fer a few days.” She held his gaze.
He looked at her for another moment. She watched the awe on his face.
“A child,” he said.
“Aye.”
He breathed out slowly.
He reached up and took her hand from his shoulder, and held it. Then he pressed his lips to her knuckles.
It was such a quiet thing. Such a specific, unhurried thing, and she felt it all the way through.
“Come down here,” he led her to the hearthrug by the chair and he wrapped his arm around her and she settled against his side with her head against his shoulder and the fire warm in front of them and the wind outside doing its work against the walls.
They sat like that for a moment.
“Our child,” he said again. Quietly. Into the firelight.
“Aye, our child.”
“Is this why ye went off fish and the tiredness.” He leaned back to look at her.
She ducked her head, “Aye, fish has been repulsive lately. I didnae ken at first until the healer confirmed it so.”
His arm tightened around her.
“I keep thinking about what the world is going tae look like tae them,” he said after a while. “A child who crosses the water between both holdings without thinking anything of it.
Who kens the MacKinnon cliffs and the Druim Ard valley the same way as simply theirs.” His hand moved, finding her waist, pulling her closer.
“Who grows up kenning both Councils and both sets of tenants and the way the light falls differently off the loch on the mainland and off the sea here.” He paused. “A child with nay particular reason tae see any of it as foreign.”
She looked at the fire. “Ye’ve been thinking about this before now.”
She turned her head to look at him. He was looking at the fire with the expression she loved most.
“She’s going tae be extraordinary,” he said.
She looked at him. “She.”
“Aye. She.” He chuckled.
“Ye dinnae—”
“Oh, I ken,” he said firmly.
He pressed his lips to her temple. Then her cheek. His hand moved from her waist to her stomach, warm and deliberate, just resting there, and she put her hand over his.
They stayed like that.
The castle had gone quiet around them, the sounds of the evening settling into night.
“Jean,” he said.
“Aye.”
“I need ye tae ken something.”
She looked up at him. He was looking down at her with the full weight of everything, nothing behind his eyes that he was keeping from her, the complete open version of him that she had been the recipient of since the hut in the storm.
“From the moment I saw ye on that coastal road,” he said, “being dragged by Fraser’s men and fighting every inch of it—” He stopped.
His jaw tightened once. “That is nae an image that left me quickly. I rode after ye the moment I understood what was happening and I have spent every day since then—”
He stopped again. “Grateful,” he said.
“That is the only word. That ye came. That ye sat across from me in that study and made the argument ye made and didnae soften it.”
His thumb moved in a slow circle over her hand on her stomach. “That ye are here. That this—” he meant the fire, the room, her hand under his, the eleven days she’d been carrying quietly, “—is what we are.”
She looked at him.
She had spent a long time being a woman who managed everything at a careful distance.
Who checked every structure for weaknesses.
Who had learned, early and by example, that wanting things you might lose was how you got broken.
She had stopped checking.
“I love ye,” she said softly.
He shifted until she was facing him ad then he looked at her, desire pooling in his eyes.
“Jean,” he said.
“Aye.”
He cupped her face in both hands and kissed her.
His hands were warm on her face and she pressed into them and kissed him back with everything she had.
His hands slid from her face to her neck, to her shoulders, pulling her in, and she went, and the fire was warm at her back and his chest was warm at her front and the wind was outside and everything was this room and this fire and his mouth on hers.
He pulled back a fraction.
“I love ye, so much” he said, against her lips.
She almost laughed against his mouth. “Me decisions are never poor.”
“This one worked out,” he said. “That isnae the same as nae poor.”
“It was—”
He kissed her again before she could finish the argument, which she suspected was intentional and which she entirely forgave because the kiss was thorough and warm.
She sank into it.
His arms came fully around her and he pulled her into his lap, one arm around her back and one hand in her hair, and she wound her arms around his neck.
When they finally stopped she rested her forehead against his and they both breathed.
“She’ll be taller than ye,” he said.
Jean pulled back enough to look at him. “Absolutely nae.”
“The MacKinnon height—”
“She’ll be the perfect height,” Jean said. “Which is me height.”
“Which is a fine height,” he said, graciously. “Fer someone who isnae—”
“Calum.”
“—particularly tall.”
She looked at him.
“She’ll be exactly as tall as she needs tae be,” Jean said with finality.
“Aye,” he said. “And she will be as strong as her maither.”
He pressed his lips to her forehead. Then her cheek. Then the corner of her mouth. Then he gathered her in and held her and she held him back, and the fire burned down slowly, and neither of them moved for a very long time.
It was enough.
It was more than enough.
It was exactly what she had ridden across an open sea to find, and she had found it, and she was keeping it.
The End.
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