Page 54 of Wed to the Highlander
“She’s with child. Due around Christmas.”
“I heard.” Andrew advanced a step. “Cici is due at the same time—and she’s glowing. But Maggie is gaunt and frail.”
Duncan kept his stance, though Andrew’s barely contained fury had a way of making lesser men shift their weight. “She’s been unwell.”
“Unwell?” Andrew took another step closer, fists clenched at his sides. “I barely recognized my own sister.”
Duncan’s jaw flexed. “In addition to sickness from the bairn, she misses London. Her mother. You.”
“This is more than homesickness,” Andrew snapped. “She’s thinner than I’ve ever seen her, and there was a look in her eyes—like the light’s gone out.”
“She’s exhausted,” he said tightly. “She hasn’t been sleeping.”
“Why?”
A muscle worked in Duncan’s cheek. “You’ve been tae Castle MacPherson. There are drafts and creaking, bumps in the night. It can seem eerie if you’re not used tae it. Then there are the stories—”
“Ghost stories,” Andrew scoffed.
“Legends, which have grown over the years—” Duncan stopped himself. “When you’re not rested and feeling poorly, the mind can play tricks.”
Andrew shook his head, disbelief hardening his features. “I entrusted her to you. And you bring her back like this?”
“I didn’t sit idle,” Duncan bit out. “I brought in a physician, asked the women for remedies, tried everything I knew. She’s not herself—I ken that. I thought time would help. I was wrong.”
Andrew’s expression cooled, but the edge in his voice remained. “After James died, I was drowning in responsibilities—Parliament duties, a dozen estates to manage, a dukedom dropped in my lap without warning. And in the middle of it all, a new wife. I nearly lost her,” he said at length, his voice ragged with emotion. “We did lose our child because I was too mired in estate business to notice the threat to her. Don’t make my mistake.”
The words struck deep. Not accusation but lived truth.
“Something needs to change, Duncan,” his friend, her brother, said, not as a request but a demand.
Duncan’s gaze didn’t waver. “I ken that. Which is why I brought her home the moment she asked.”
“You should have brought her sooner,” Andrew said, not yielding an inch. “Before it got this bad.”
“Leaving the clan without its laird in the midst of a string of calamities and strained peace? I made the best choice I could—until her health outweighed all else.”
His eyes narrowed. “God help you if London doesn’t fix this.”
Even the almighty couldn’t help him if it didn’t, and the worst happened. But, tired of being berated as if he were an underling, Duke or no’, he shot back. “What will you do? Challenge me over my wife and unborn bairn?”
“It would ease my conscience for having trusted you,” Andrew replied.
His best friend, for nearly his entire life, had lost faith in him. That stung, but it didn’t hurt as much as the guilt that consumed him every time he looked at Maggie.
The door opened and she appeared, framed in the threshold, draped in a MacPherson plaid.
“Stop fighting,” she insisted, her hand drifting to the slight swell of her belly. “It’s not Duncan’s fault. This little one is to blame,” she added with the faintest, weary smile.
Andrew moved as if to go to her, but Duncan was already there, his arms sliding around her.
“You should be resting,” he murmured, keeping his tone light even as he felt the fine tremor in her frame.
“I’m sick to death of resting, and of feeling sick,” she said, leaning in to him. “How do women endure this more than once?”
“You won’t have to,” Duncan vowed. “I won’t put you through this again.”
Her gaze flicked up to his, a pale shadow of her usual spark.
