A Laird for All Time by Angeline Fortin (room on the broom read aloud txt) 📗

Connor grunted in acknowledgment of Ian’s grin.  “She told me she does that.  She called it a worse-case scenario.” Connor murmured and lie back and ran his hands over his face.  “I feel like a horse has sat on my head.”

“An ass anyway,” Ian corrected.  “Have you spent the last six days in this state?”

“Sailing,” Connor confessed.

That took Ian aback.  He had assumed that his brother had been in the condition that he found him in for the entire week.  “Not here?  Where were you?”

“Aye, we actually went all the way to Liverpool,” Connor covered his eyes against the bright sun coming through the porthole.  “Thought I might get some supplies for the winter and some gifts for yer bairns.  God, I need a drink.”

“You smell like you’ve already drank a keg or more,” Ian scoffed, “and slept wi’ every lass at Sally’s.  She’s going to kill you, ye know?”

“I may have drunk the ocean, but I didn’t bed anyone.  I wanted to; I planned to, but in the end…” Connor sighed.  “Ach, mon, gi’ me a drink.”

Finally obliging, Ian poured a glass of whiskey and gave it to his brother watching as he swished a largely dram around his mouth before he swallowed.  “Ahh, that’s better.”

“What’s gotten into you, brother,” Ian asked.  “I’ve never seen you like this before.”

“Her,” Connor grunted as Ian chuckled.

“Finally caught by Cupid’s arrow, hmm?”

“More like his cannon,” Connor guzzled the remainder of the drink and dropped back down in fatigue pulling the pillow over his head.  “That woman will be the death of me!”

“C’est l’amour,” Ian sighed mockingly and laughed when Connor threw the pillow at him.  “Come, brother, what has you up in arms?  Love is a beautiful thing yet you act as if you have the plague.  You should be rejoicing to have found such a woman to love.  Emmy is an extraordinary lass.”

“Emmy, huh?”  Connor raised a brow.  “She has got ye believing it, too?”

“Dory has already told me that she knows that Em is not Heather.  She will not tell me how she knows, which has its own frustrations, but she is certain,” Ian told him.

“And ye believe her?”

“I believe them both.”  Ian poured himself his own glass of whiskey and sat back down.  “Em just doesn’t seem the sort to take a farce to such an extreme.  She’s a bonny lass in and out.”

“Aye, she is,” Connor admitted finally.  “I’ve never met anyone like her.”

“Everyone in the house has been saying that about her,” Ian informed his brother.  “There’s just something about her that is…beyond us.  For example, she knows so many things I have never imagined knowing, much less a woman.”

“Don’t let her hear ye say that,” Connor muttered.

“Aye, and there’s another thing!” Ian pounced.  “She doesn’t act like a woman does, ye ken?  She refuses to be told what to do.  Women offer opinions and hope a man might keep it in mind when making his decisions and choices, but Emmy expects us to or tries to make us do what she wants.”

“Why do ye say that?  What has she done?”

“She wants to have the telephone installed at Duart and…” he pulled out the contraction, “she expects to have a ‘public phone’, that’s what she called it, put in Lochdon, Craignure and wherever else she thinks might need one so folks might telephone in case of emergency.”  He nodded, “She said it just like that.  She said if you are going to be the laird and be responsible for all these people, they shouldn’t have to wait for a messenger to get help.”

“Lovely,” Connor grumbled and lie back once more.  What a bossy, lass!  But the idea was sound and as he had told her before when they were discussing the suffrage question, he respected her for her reason and logic.  It was a sensible idea.  “She’s probably right, too.  She has a keen intelligence.”

“Oh, I agree, but I didn’t want to tell her that!” Ian chuckled and drank.  “What a corker, she is.”

“Aye, she is,” Connor sighed and tried to ignore the pounding in his skull.  He had fled Duart for just those reasons.  Emmy, aye, Emmy, was having a greater affect on him than he had imagined possible.  It had gone beyond wanting to simply try his hand at marriage again.  He had considered matrimony based on companionship in bed and out of it…as a way of keeping her close by.

Looking back, his desire for sport and camaraderie was naïve.  Connor knew he could not uphold that standard indefinitely.  Each day he was with her, he wanted more, more of her, more of them.  He wanted to lie beside her each night, touch her constantly, furrow his way under skin and become one with her.  He wanted the challenge and emotion of her.  He wanted to possess her and, indeed, wanted to be possessed by her and there is where the problem had arisen.

He was vulnerable to her.  She had taken his defenses and beaten them to the ground though she seemed unaware of her victory.  Had yet to wield the power she now had.  Emmy could lay his heart open easily with a word or action.  Even though he wanted her to stay with him always - he did accept that truth - she did not seem to have the same hopes.  She spoke of ‘when she left’ and ‘when she got home’.

Duart was not her home.  She did not view them that way which meant that she might one day decide to go leaving him and his heart torn.  It might be the end of him.  He did not want to retreat to the hole he had recently crawled from.  He liked who he had become with her, with her help.

Connor had thought long and hard on these things during the past week and then, like the fool Ian accused him, had determined to purge her from his mind with the body of another.  He had sat at Sally’s for hours