Tempest Heart - Paula Quinn Page 0,93
were evil.
She kept her head against Tristan’s chest as they finally turned for their horses. “My home is gone. Where shall we go?”
“Wherever you desire, love.”
Her heart warmed and she was thankful for having such a man in her life now, after the last two disasters. She looked up at him and let him see her love. “I have always wanted to be free and unafraid. It sounds like ’tis time for me to go to Invergarry with you.”
He spoke into her hair. He was smiling. She could hear it in his voice. “’Tis a simple life.”
“I want simple. I’m so ready for quiet I could scream.” She flashed him a playful smile and pushed her hair off her face.
His deeply expressive gaze told her things his mouth didn’t know how to say—like she’d captured his heart. All of it. He was hers. “We will leave now.”
She nodded happily. What was holding her back? Nothing!
“Tristan?”
“Aye, love?”
“I will finally have a family.”
“Aye,” he laughed, “likely more than ye will want.”
“What if they do not like me?” Hadn’t some in her own home disliked her?
“They will love ye, lass.”
They would love her. And he would love her.
Oh, if she had to do it all over again, she would if he was at the end of it. But now was not the time to think of endings, but beginnings.
The road before them was open. They had a long trip ahead of them.
She could not wait to begin.
Epilogue
A sennight later…
Autumn frost settled on the rolling hills surrounding the enormous stronghold in the distance.
Rose drew in her breath at the power and protection emanating from the MacPherson stronghold. She didn’t know what to call what she was looking at. A large town within a walled enclosure locked and guarded by over fifty men patrolling the battlements? She guessed a stronghold it was. From what she could see in the center sprang up not a castle, but a fortress of three manor houses belonging to the three MacPherson brothers. Cainnech, Torin, and Nicholas.
She turned to her husband. “You look as taken by the sight of it as I am.”
“I havena seen it in ten years.” He smiled. “Every time I return, ’tis bigger.”
“Why is it so fortified?” she asked. “Have the MacPhersons need of so much protection?”
Tristan shrugged his shoulders. “Likely, nae. But my father and his brothers were just young boys when the English rode through their village, took their cottage, and killed their parents. The soldiers took the lads. Only Uncle Torin managed to escape them. My father, the oldest at seven, was recruited into the English army and lived fer many years on the battlefield. Uncle Torin survived by livin’ in the forest, and then in the castles of the most influential by infiltrating their armies from the inside and bringin’ down more strongholds than any man alive. The babe of the three, two-year-old Uncle Nicky, was sold fer a stone into slavery. Their lives were forever changed because their home, their village, was poorly protected. When they reunited, they vowed never to be so vulnerable again. Their bairns wouldna suffer as they had.”
He pointed to the hills outside the walls on both the south and west sides of the house. The north and the east were surrounded by a forest. Rose wasn’t surprised to find trees here.
There were large cottages, four on the left side and three on the right. Scattered like little clouds, sheep grazed with coos in numbers she could not count.
“We will live in a house like those—bigger, smaller, whatever ye want, love.”
It was always whatever she wanted. Tristan did everything he could to make her happy. If she wanted him to choose, he did that, too.
“Where have you learned how to make me so happy? Who taught you to try? Your uncle, Torin?”
“Nae,” he told her. “My father. He is the fiercest man I know. When I left here ten years ago, he was still terrorizin’ anyone who came through those gates. He doesna like strangers.”
He smiled at the captain and Mary. “Ye need not fret. If I vouch fer ye, and ye are not tryin’ to court my sister, who is already married, ye will be accepted, as will Jones and his wife when they arrive.”
The captain looked confused. Rose smiled behind her hand.
“But when it comes to my mother,” Tristan continued. “my father is as harmless as a puppy dog.” Tristan laughed…but then stopped, perhaps realizing that he wasn’t so different from his father when it