This Heart of Mine (94 page)

“Is it now?” replied Dugald belligerently. “Ye named the first one. Dinna I get to name this one?”

“I named the first one after you,” replied Pansy, equally feisty. “This one is named after my pa. Bran I calls him, and Bran he’ll stay!”

“Then I get to name the next bairn, and would ye do me the kindness to at least let me be wi’ ye when ye have him? Ye seem to delight in going off and spawning yer bairns without me, woman. At least I get to see this one when he’s still a babe.”

“Just be glad he’s healthy!” snapped Pansy. “Now tell me, Dugald Geddes, are you just going to stand there arguing with me over trifles, or are you going to kiss me and say you’re glad to see me?”

“I dinna think ye needed to hear it, woman. I thought ye knew it. God knows ye know everything else!”

“Well, I do need to hear it,” said Pansy, smiling as he drew her into his arms and gave her a hearty buss, “and you’re right, I do know everything else. After all, I’m a traveled woman!”

Velvet smiled again now at the memory. They were all so damned lucky, she thought, and she was grateful.

The party threatened to go on all night, but gradually as the children fell asleep where they sat, and the nursemaids carried them off to the dormitory that had been set up in the attics for them, even the adults began to show signs of tiring. Finally the king departed for his chambers giving the rest of the guests the excuse to find their beds.

Pansy prepared her mistress for bed, helping to bathe her in a warm, gillyflower-scented bath; brushing her long auburn hair free of snarls so that it rippled down her back in soft waves; and finally sliding a pale sea-green silk night rail over her lithe form. Velvet looked at herself in the pier glass. She had just had her twentieth birthday, and despite the fact that she had already borne two children her body was still good. She smiled a small Smile of self-satisfaction and turned to dismiss Pansy.

“Don’t come until I call you in the morning, Pansy. You could use some rest, too.”

“Aye, but with two bairns I’m not so likely to get it, though Morag is wonderful with Dugie. His wee nose is still a bit out of joint over Bran.”

“I think if you’d had a girl it would have been different,” said Velvet.

“Perhaps”—Pansy shrugged—“but he’ll get over it soon enough. Well, good night, m’lady.” She bobbed a curtsy. “Good night, Pansy.”

The door closed after the tiring woman, and Velvet stretched and yawned. She was exhausted.

“Ye’re tired?” Alex said, entering her bedchamber from his. Sitting down beside her, his arms slipped around her. “I had thought that we might play a bit after our long day.”

“Did you now?” she teased him. “And what game did you have in mind, my wild Highland husband?”

His arms tightened about her. “Do ye know how very, very much I love ye, Velvet?”

“Aye,” she said quietly. “Do you know how very, very much I love you, Alex?”

“Aye,” he answered, and then, “I will never let ye out of my sight again, lass. Those months of not knowing where ye were, of people believing that ye were dead. I could not go through it ever again!”

“Did you believe I was dead?” she asked.

“Never!” he said. “I would have felt it, and I did not. Ye were simply lost, lass, but I’ve found ye, and I will nae let ye go ever again.”

She looked up at him, locked within the protective circle of his embrace, her emerald eyes filled with the enormity of her love for this wonderful man who was her husband. “I will never leave you again, Alex, for this heart of mine could not bear the separation! You have become my life!”

“As ye hae become mine,” he said. “Our love has been forged strongly, Velvet.” And then kissing her passionately, he swept her into a lover’s world from which neither of them would ever willingly emerge again.

Bertrice Small
lives on the North Fork of the eastern end of Long Island, where she writes her novels in a light-filled studio surrounded by her cover paintings and the many momentos of the Romance genre she has collected. Married for thirty-three years to her husband, George, she is the mother of Thomas, a radio sportscaster and writer, mother-in-law of Megan, and grandmother of Chandler David Small. Longtime readers will be happy to know that Nicky, the charming cockatiel; Chequers, the fat black-and-white cat with the pink ears, now almost fourteen; and Sebastian, the tiny two-year-old griege-and-white cat, remain her dearest companions. Many will be saddened to learn of the passing of Deuteronomy, her beloved long-haired Maine Coon cat, at the age of twenty, who will be sorely missed; and of Gilberto, the cranky Half-Moon conure, age unknown, who has gone to that great aviary in the sky.