Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 03] by Wedding for a Knight Page A

already sent returned whence it came. That I do not, it is only because I would not deny you the experience of building a galley, seeing one come to life beneath your hands.”
    And because, as the good king Robert the Bruce once sought aid from his friend Angus Og, I fear this realm will yet again look to the Isles—and leal Islesmen with swift-sailing galleys—if e’er Balliol and his Disinheriteds are to be routed once and for all.
    Biting back the niggling threat of danger yet uncoiled, lest he overburden his brothers’ young hearts, Magnus curled his hand around his low-slung sword belt and gripped hard, clenching and unclenching his fingers on its smooth-worn leather until the tension began sliding from his shoulders.
    “It is scarcely a noble course to decline wedding gifts,” Dugan blazoned forth, his tone and the way he toyed with his curling black beard indicating he meant anything
but
shiploads of timber. “Many are the men who would gladly relieve you of such a . . .
bounty.
”
    “And are you declaring yourself such a man?” Magnus shot back, but his blood cooled upon seeing the amused twinkle in his brother’s dark eyes.
    “I thought that was the way the wind blows.” Dugan gave him a playful punch in the arm. “I am pleased to see it.”
    “As am I,” Hugh agreed, a dimpled smile lighting his face.
    At the end of the table, their father harrumphed. “Dinna be smiling too fast,” he admonished his younger sons. “If the curse addles your brother’s brain, there is no telling what foolhardiness might please him. Or what new ills might descend upon us. Already—”
    That did it.
    “A God’s name! I have had enough of curses,” Magnus roared, lifting his voice so everyone in the hall would hear him. Even those hunched sleepy-eyed in the most far-flung corners.
    In especial, any whiling away the morn in the cozy confines of a window embrasure.
    “It is infinitely sad that Reginald of the Victories’ fair lady wife took her life by leaping from the east tower of this castle,” he rapped out, pacing between the dais table and the opened window. “But the circumstances of her death did not call down a curse upon this house, that I swear.”
    He shot a narrow-eyed glance at his da. “And if any seer of olden times truly claimed such a malediction existed, and could only be lifted so long as we keep a mighty fleet of galleys, then I say that soothsayer had a keen interest in selling us timber!”
    He paused by the window, let the gusting damp cool his heated brow. A much-needed measure with
her
striding his way—and on Colin Grant’s gallantly proffered arm!
    That great oaf had an annoyingly wry smile playing at the corners of his mouth, and only his limp saved him from a hot glare, for the lout carried not only Hugh’s lute but Lady Amicia’s fur-lined mantle as well.
    Like as not, he’d charmed her out of it.
    And with the single-minded purpose of parading her full
cloakless
beneath Magnus’s nose!
    No doubt so he could not help but admire her glossy black braids, hanging loose as they did this morn. Two thick plaits of well-sheened ebony, they fell clear to her hips and looked luscious enough to make his mouth run dry.
    Before all the heavens, the lass had the kind of lustrous tresses a man ached to run his hands through, burned to see spilling unchecked over gleaming white skin.
    Naked skin.
    And if he didn’t mind losing his soul, just the sort of glossy skeins a man might bury his face in, to drown happily.
    The heady bliss of nuzzling his face into her
other
hair, without doubt an equally enticing notion, didn’t bear consideration.
    A tiny muscle began to jerk in Magnus’s jaw.
    Aye, with surety, Colin Grant meant to torture him.
    And most dastardly of all, having held a privy ear to Magnus’s secret delights and lusts over the years—intimacies regrettably divulged during too-long nights of endless boredom on the tourney circuit—the cheeky whoreson now used his privy