Spell of the Highlander

Page 80

On the topic of their babes . . .
“Think you we should—”
“Yes,” she agreed instantly. “I’m missing them too.”
He smiled. Though they’d been wed for little over a year, they knew each other’s mind and heart as well as their own. And although they had the best of care for their daughters with two live-in nannies, they were reluctant to be parted from their bairn for long. Unless they were tooping, of course. Then they tended to forget the whole world.
When she peeled herself from his side and moved toward the shower, he rose to join her.
But as he passed the tall windows of their bedchamber, a flicker of motion beyond them caught his eye. He paused, glancing out.
His brother was standing out on the lawn, gazing down at the grass.
Drustan’s smile deepened.
They’d been through a time of it when Dageus had turned dark. It had been hellish there for a while, but his brother was once again free and, by Amergin, life was rich and sweet and full! His da Silvan and their next-mother Nell would be delighted to know how well their sons fared in the modern day.
He had all he’d ever wanted: a cherished wife, a burgeoning clan, his brother wed and blissfully happy, and the prospect of a long, simple, good life in his beloved Highlands.
Och, there’d been a bit of a ruckus last month when one of the Tuatha Dé, Adam Black, had appeared, but things had swiftly settled back into an easy cadence, and he was looking forward to a long time of—
He blinked.
Dageus was conversing with a mirror.
Standing in the middle of the front lawn, holding it gingerly by the sides, and speaking heatedly to it.
Drustan rubbed his jaw, perplexed.
Why was his brother talking to a mirror? Was it some strange twenty-first-century way of mulling things over, of—literally—consulting with oneself?
Come to think of it, he mused, where had the mirror come from?
It hadn’t been there moments ago. It was taller than his brother. Wider too. ’Twas hardly as if Dageus might have been concealing it in a pocket or beneath a fold in his kilt, not that he was wearing a kilt. They’d both adopted modern modes of dress and were slowly adapting to new ways.
Drustan leaned against the windowpane. Nay, not only was the looking glass quite awkwardly large, it flashed brilliant gold and silver in the sun. How could he have overlooked it earlier?
Mayhap, he decided, it had been lying on the ground, and Dageus had picked it up. And mayhap he was merely saying something along the lines of “Oh, my, how peculiar, where did you come from?”
Drustan’s silvery eyes narrowed. But why would a mirror be lying about on the front lawn? They had gardeners. Surely one of them would have noticed such a thing and relegated it elsewhere. How had it gotten there? Perchance dropped from the sky?
He was getting a bad feeling about this.
“Are you coming, love?” Gwendolyn called.
He heard the sound of the shower spray change as she stepped beneath it. In his mind’s eye, he could see her; water sluicing down her beautiful body, glistening wetly on her smooth, pale skin. He adored modern plumbing, couldn’t get enough of his wife when she was soapy and slippery and feeling frisky.
Below him, Dageus was now shaking a fist and shouting at the mirror.
Drustan closed his eyes.
After a long moment, he opened them again and cast a longing glance in the direction of the running shower and his gloriously naked, wet wife.
Then a glare out the window.
He exhaled gustily. “I doona think so, love. I’m sorry,” he called, “but ’twould seem Dageus is, for some unfathomable reason, having a heated discourse with a looking glass out on our front lawn.”
“Dageus is doing what with a heated horse and a looking glass?” Gwen exclaimed from the shower.
“Discourse, sweet, discourse,” he called back.
“Huh?”
He sighed again. Then, “He’s talking to a mirror,” he called much more loudly. “I must go discover why.”
“Talking to a—oh! On the front lawn? Dageus? Really? Wait for me, Drustan! I’ll just be a minute,” she yelled back. “This sounds positively fascinating!”
Drustan shook his head. Fascinating, his woman said. She had the oddest perspective on things sometimes.
He smiled faintly then, suddenly far less chafed by the prospect of yet another ruckus in his life. After all, wasn’t that what life was about?
Ruckuses.
And if a man was truly blessed, he got a woman like his Gwendolyn with whom to share them.
“Pick me up, you ham-fisted oaf. The bloody frigging sun is bloody frigging blinding me,” the mirror snarled.