Highland Magic by K. E. Saxon Read Free Book Online Page A

regions.
    “That sluggard physician only just came down
to tell us that your fever broke early this morn,” Lady Maclean
said. “Here, let me feel your forehead.” Her gate was slow, and her
tall frame a bit stooped, but her unusual eyes—one blue, one
green—snapped with vitality as she walked over to stand at the side
of the bed and proceeded to do just that. “We should not have
listened to him when he told us to stay away from you while your
fever raged, else we would have known of your recovery much
sooner.” Her gray-sprigged black brows furrowed as her eyes scanned
his countenance. “A bad business, this. Your
uncle...er... stepfather —pardon, I’m still not used to
thinking of him thus—met with Laird Gordon for most of this day
past to negotiate a settlement for this insult.”
    “Insult!” Callum yelled. “‘Twas attempted murder !”
    “Now Callum,” his mother soothed, “‘twas not
as dark a deed as that, for ‘twas—”
    “How can you say such! I—”
    “Hush, and I will explain,” she chided
gently, her voice softer, more melodious than her mother’s. “‘Twas
the Laird’s young page—his nephew—who...well...he stirred your wine
with a finger he’d stuck in swine offal.”
    “What!?” In the next second, he was gagging
and coughing as his innards roiled inside of him.
    Lady Maclean placed her hand on her
grandson’s good shoulder. “Now, now. You didn’t partake of enough
to perish,” —she turned to her daughter and said, “Maggie, fetch
him some water, else he’ll surely retch more bile,”—before turning
back to Callum and continuing, “so you’ve no need to carry on in
such a manner.”
    “And I suppose you would react with dignity,” cough, cough, gag , “not even raise an eyebrow, were you to
find out you’d been fed pig turd for supper?” He glared at her
through blood-shot, watery green eyes.
    Lady Maclean caught her daughter’s eye and
gave her a look that said, ‘ Do not laugh! ’ “Nay, I’m
sure I would react in much the same rather excessive way.”
    Laird MacGregor came in at that moment, for
which it was clear the two ladies were very grateful. “I see you’ve
recovered from your fever. Good, good.” A middle-aged dark-haired
man of great girth and height, his heavy footsteps caused the table
next to the bed to jump, making the water slosh out of the ewer and
onto the floor.
    “Chalmers!” Callum’s mother sighed and shook
her head, but hurried to clean the mess with the cloth she found
next to the ewer.
    Her husband gave her a sheepish look.
“Pardon, my beloved.”
    Callum rolled his eyes. Why must the man
continually speak love words to her directly within her son’s
hearing? “What reason did my father-in-law give for his nephew’s
conduct?” he asked his stepfather, though his eyes never left his
lithely built dark-haired mother. Would she never stop flitting
about like a wee bird, lighting first here, then there? She needed
more meat on her bones, and this was no way to go about it.
“Mother, let the maids do that.”
    “The older pages dared him to do the deed,”
Laird MacGregor answered.
    Callum’s eyes swung to his stepfather and he
cocked a brow at him.
    “They’ve evidently been teasing the bairn,”
Laird MacGregor continued, “calling him a coward, ever since his
first night sharing quarters with them when he refused to take part
in their secret guild’s ritual and walk the moor alone at
midnight.”
    For the first time since realizing his drink
had been tampered with, Callum’s wrath lessened. He smiled before
he realized he’d done it and said, “Poor lad. I remember well the
insults to my own manhood I received—and gave back in turn—when I
first paged.” Callum shook his head, his eyes once again on his
mother, following her movements as she silently tidied the
bedchamber and found a stool for her aged mother to rest upon, but
his mind focused inward, on memories that, until this moment, had
been