they arise. “Is she with child?”
“Nay!” Evander stared at him as though he had just said they would eat their horses for dinner. “At least…I dinna think she is.” He squirmed in the saddle. “I didna even get my willy all the way inside her. When she pulled on it while I sucked on her bubbies, I couldna keep from squirting everywhere.” His horrified look plainly said how he felt about that. “It felt so good, I thought I’d died.” He shook his head. “But then her da walked in on us, and I thought I was dead for sure. That man’s big as an ox.”
Magnus bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.
“I went to chapel twice to thank God that all he did was drag my arse to Mama.” The boy made a face. “’Course, then I thought I was dead, too. She might not be big as the smithy, but God help ye if ye give her a case of the red arse.” He gave Magnus an earnest look. “Ye think I’m gonna be a da? Will the chieftain make me wed Ellen?”
“Do ye love Ellen?” Magnus decided to attack this delicate issue from that angle.
“Nay—leastways not enough to wed her.” Evander frowned. “Did ye love yer Lady Bree?”
“That was a different situation.”
“Different how?” The lad’s eyes narrowed as though he thought him a liar.
“I was fond of her,” Magnus lamely replied, wondering how the hell their talk had turned this way. “When she asked for my help, I couldna refuse.”
“Yer help with what?”
“The ridding of her maidenhead.”
“Her what?” Evander stared at him in disbelief.
“Has neither Gretna nor Ian talked to ye about these things?” Magnus wasn’t about to explain the joining of a man and a woman to the boy. It wasn’t his place.
Evander grinned. “I was just funning with ye. I know about the getting of bairns. Mama’s just afeared I’ll be making her a grandmam sometime soon. I do my best to be sure and pull my willy out before my seed spills. What do ye do?”
“What I do is none of yer damned concern.” If it wasn’t for the fact he’d sworn to take care of the boy, he’d snap the little arse wipe’s neck. “And ye’d do well to remember ’tis a long walk back to Tor Ruadh.”
“Ye think her sister’s the one raising yer bairn?” Apparently, Evander preferred a horse to travel on foot and had decided to focus on the matter at hand from a safer angle. “Ye think she’s the one who sent that letter? Why ye reckon she waited so long? More than five years? Wonder what happened to make her decide ye needed to know now?”
“The date of the letter was five years ago, and from the look of the parchment, that’s when it was written.” Magnus had asked himself the same questions. “Although, I canna imagine it being handed about to me for that long. How could it have survived? Maybe Lady Bree’s sister helped her write it to give her peace before she died, then it got set aside or lost. I dinna ken what couldha happened. All I know for certain is I must find the boy—if he still lives.”
“Her sister couldha got too busy to send it. What with taking care of a babe and finding shelter for them both, she probably didna have a minute to call her own.” Evander looked thoughtful. “I know when it was just Mama and us bairns—it was hard for her to keep us all fed and safe. Many a night, her head didna touch her pillow.”
When the lad talked like that, he sounded a great deal older than his fifteen years. Magnus knew life hadn’t been easy for Evander and his brothers before their mother married Ian. “That’s why we must find them,” he said. “Lady Bree’s sister and the boy.”
“What’s her name?”
Magnus frowned. What was the sister’s name? For that matter, would he even know her if he saw her? No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t bring her to mind. Had he not met her during the time he had been at their keep? He finally shook his head. “If I ever knew it, I have forgotten.”
“I wouldna tell her that,” Evander advised in the tone of one who knew from experience. He squinted up at the sky. “At least this time of year, the days are longer. Gives us more light to search.”
Magnus agreed. “Aye, we’ll only stop when the