Page 30 of A Virgin for the Icy Highlander
“I’m good at helpin’!” Ellie replied, her sweet face splitting into a grin.
“In that case, we will need you to do your very best,” Grace said, feigning seriousness for a moment. “For we are going tosurpriseyour father.”
In Maddie’s plan, they had arranged for ‘anger’ to be the second emotion on the list, but if Grace was going to proceed with this, she didn’t want to see Hunter angry. Indeed, his temper was the very last thing she wished to coax out of him, especially now that Ellie was involved.
Surprise, it is…
She glanced at Ellie, and the kitten in her arms, and allowed herself a small smile as a perfect idea began to form.
Hunter rubbed his eyes to keep them from fluttering shut. He was weary to his bones from the long day he’d just endured. But it was a good kind of tired, caused by a successful, fulfilling day of listening to his people and fixing most of the issues they’d approached him with. He’d taken action to help Clan MacLogan recover from four years of war; that made every bit of his exhaustion worth it. But he was exhausted, nonetheless.
I’m fixin’ what I started… There’ll be peace here, lasting peace. I’ll make sure of it.
The sway of his horse didn’t help in fending off the desire to just sleep awhile. So when a jut of stone appeared in the undulating moors—the sight of home—he was flooded with fierce relief.
By the time he reached the castle, the clouds had begun to drizzle, and he was longing for nothing but his study and privacy. All he needed was a few hours to enjoy the peace before he would go down for dinner.
There’ll be nay dancin’ tonight.
He didn’t have the vigor for that, no matter what his bride-to-be wore or how she tried to tempt him to twirl her around the room.
He was just approaching his study, thinking of the nip of whiskey he might have and the comfortable armchair by the fireplace where he might rest his weary bones, when a sound brought him to a halt.
There was someone in his study already.
Someone… giggling. Stranger still, he heard the faint mewling of what sounded like a cat.
“Do ye think he’ll like it?” Ellie’s cheerful voice rang out from inside the room, swatting away any irritation that had started to bristle in his veins.
“I think he willadoreit,” came Grace’s sweet voice. A laugh rippled out into the hallway. “How could he not? It is a masterpiece!”
The study door was ajar, and when Hunter angled his head, he saw inside. Ellie stood in the middle of the room, her hands—and most of the rest of her—covered in paint. He couldn’t, however, see Grace. She must have been further inside the room.
Striding into the study, he asked loudly, “Who will love what?”
It was beneath him to linger outside and eavesdrop, and, deep down, he was curious to know what the two of them were doing.
Ellie whirled around, bright-eyed and grinning. Her face was streaked with vivid colors and stripes of white. “We painted a portrait of ye!”
It was the most excited he had ever seen his daughter, and the most excited she had ever been to see him. Any anger he might have had about her being in his private study without his permission, or making an extraordinary mess of the place, vanished at the openness of her smile and the merriment in her eyes.
“Portrait?” He frowned. “What p?—”
The words died on his lips when he saw it—a monstrous thing of blobs and stripes and colors on what might have once been a plain canvas, stretched onto a large frame. He wondered if heneeded to glean some secret information in order to make out what it was supposed to be, for it was unlike any portrait he’d seen before. Indeed, he couldn’t decipher a single face.
“Might ye explain it to me?” he asked flatly, noting out of the corner of his eye that Grace was hiding a smirk behind her hand.
Ellie puffed out her chest proudly. “This is ye,” she said, as if it should have been obvious, pointing to a vague, pink circle with two blue spots for eyes, a red smudge for a mouth, and an open triangle for a nose that she’d decided to paint green.
Dark blue swirls accounted for his hair. His cheeks were rosier than they ever were in real life, and his ears were positioned high on his head such that they stuck out through the mane of hair.
At that moment, a tiny creature nudged his leg, drawing his astonished gaze downward.
“Why is there a kitten in me study?” he asked, picking up the ball of fluff by the scruff to get a better look at it.
The poor thing hadn’t escaped the explosion of color. It, too, was spattered with little droplets of paint.
The kitten stared at him, flicking its tail.
