One Man's Love Read Free

the woman was attired in a pale yellow dress adorned with trailing sleeves and a coronet of daisies in her hair. Her winsome smile and soft green eyes had been so perfectly executed that it seemed as if he could hear her breathe.
    “Who do you think it is?” Fergus whispered beside him.
    Ian only shook his head.
    “It’s Ionis’s lady,” James said, emerging from the staircase.
    Ian looked at him questioningly.
    “Ionis? The saint?” He glanced above him again. He’d heard the stories about Ionis from his grandfather and had thought them only MacRae lore. Now it seemed as if they were real after all.
    Slowly, Ian followed the two boys out of the cave, his boots crunching on the pebbles. Ahead of him was a cove he’d never before seen. The deep blue water was surrounded on three sides by cliffs. Where Loch Euliss should be was a series of massive stones emerging from the bottom of the loch like the blackened teeth of some great monster.
    Tipping his head back, Ian stared upward, expecting to see the priory above. Instead, there was onlythe steep wall of an overhanging cliff. He walked along the shoreline, his attention riveted on the last of the rocks in the chain. He circled the shoreline until his perspective was better. There was an opening between the chain of rocks large enough for a ship to pass.
    The cove, Ian realized suddenly, was the true secret, not the staircase. It was Gilmuir’s one vulnerability.
    “We should leave,” he said, his hand throbbing as if to remind him of his honor. Ian pushed past Fergus and entered the cave again. All he wanted to do now was leave this place, seal up the staircase, and pretend that he had never learned the secret.
    “Where are you going?” Fergus asked.
    He spun around, frowned at his friend. “The laird will not be happy,” Ian cautioned. “And being his grandson won’t matter if he learns I was here.” In fact, his birthright might well make the punishment more severe.
    He retraced his steps, ascending the staircase in half the time of the original journey.
    It was with a sense of doom that he emerged from beneath the stone, saw the boots, then let his gaze travel upward. There was a woman in the clan who had the Sight, and claimed to feel the burden of the future. At that moment, Ian MacRae, born Alec John Landers, felt the same.
    Most of the time there was a twinkle in his grandfather’s blue eyes, but now they appeared icy.
    “Come with me, Ian,” the laird said, his voice echoing in the priory. “It’s a man you’ll be this day, and I’m sorry for it.”
    “Yes, sir,” he said, forcing himself to look up into his grandfather’s face and accept his punishment with bravery.
    Ian hoped that his courage would not fail him. But his grandfather did not stop in the clan hall, nor retreat to the laird’s chamber. Instead, he led the way through the archway and into Gilmuir’s courtyard.
    His grandmother stood in the courtyard, her apron over her face, weeping uncontrollably. “Moira, Moira,” she moaned, rocking back and forth on her heels.
    Ian felt a sense of dread so strong that it almost made him ill.
    His mother’s horse stood there, tied to the end of a wagon. His sides were lathered, his eyes rolling as he pulled away from the groom who attempted to calm him. Surrounding the wagon were several men, none of whom Ian recognized.
    But it wasn’t the strangers that caught his attention, nor his grandmother’s weeping. He stepped forward, forced to by a feeling he could not name. A sense that after this moment there would never be the childish innocence and delight he’d felt at Gilmuir.
    He walked closer to the wagon thinking that he truly wasn’t here but in the midst of a strange waking dream. He was exploring in the cove below with Fergus and James.
    The Drummonds had killed his mother, his beautiful laughing mother.
    He wanted to be sick. Or cry. Or throw himself into his grandmother’s waiting arms.
    “The women will prepare her,”