“I don’t suppose you’ve ever given anyone your trust before, have you?” she asked with a sigh against his chest. “It probably would have gotten you killed eight hundred years ago.”

He was silent to that, surprised that she could even comprehend such a thing, much less be willing to accept it. He rubbed her back in slow, gentle circles, savoring the feel of her in his arms, her warmth, her smell, her softness.

“I trust you,” he said, and realized that he did. It was a very liberating truth.

He especially trusted her to trust him, and that was probably the greatest gift two people could give each other. He set her away enough to look her in the eye. She was grinning like the village idiot.

“You’re going to have to be patient with me, lass. I might forget sometimes that I trust you.”

She patted his chest and left her hands there, drawing those distracting circles again. “I’ll try and remember that the next time I’m tempted to brain you with your sword.”

Grey decided it was time to get back to his original question. “So you don’t have a problem with marrying an eight-hundred-year-old man?” he asked.

“I don’t understand any of this,” she said, digging her nails playfully into his chest. “But I will by the time we get married.”

“And when will that be?” he asked, releasing the breath he’d unconsciously been holding.

“Summer Solstice.”

He stepped back so fast he bumped into a chair. “That’s four months away!”

“Do you know I have six brothers?” she asked softly, not even flinching at his shout.

“Six? I knew you and Mary had half brothers. Six?” he repeated. He wondered what kind of gauntlet he’

d have to run to get their approvals. And where her questions were leading now.

She nodded. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

His gut tightened. “Just Morgan now,” he told her.

Her mouth fell open. “Morgan is your brother?” she asked in a squeaky voice.

“My half brother. Different mothers.”

Her mouth still hanging open, she shook her head at him. “You two don’t act like brothers.”

“That’s because I’m his laird first, his brother last.”

“I can’t believe you’re brothers,” she kept repeating.

The woman was beginning to sound like a parrot, and he was not getting any closer to getting her out of this house.

“Well, now you know. Let’s go home, and you can scold Morgan for not telling you.”

She snapped her mouth shut and crossed her arms under her breasts, pushing them up in a way that made Grey even more eager to get her into his bed tonight.

“We’ve known each other for six days,” she said then, looking as if she was planted in place. “And all we’ve learned in that time is that we love each other. And also that we trust each other. But there’s more.

We need these next four months to learn the little things, the details, the simple things.”

“And if you learn you don’t like me?”

“That won’t happen.”

“I don’t want to wait. We can spend the rest of our lives learning these details.”

“I won’t stop loving you, Greylen MacKeage. I promise, on the twentieth of June, at sunrise, I’ll marry you.”

He looked at the tin on the table, then back at her. “Grace,” he said softly. “Your sister’s funeral and your wedding day will be the same. That’s not a memory you want to live with the rest of your life.”

“It’s not a funeral. It’s a celebration of our love for Mary. There’s nothing sad about it. It’s a release of our sorrow,” she told him, walking up and touching his arm again.

“It will be like having my sister at my wedding. You have no idea the great memories my family share of TarStone Mountain at sunrise on Summer Solstice. Every year that Mom and Dad were alive, we all went up there. All my brothers came home, and we had a huge birthday party on West Shoulder. We spent the entire day picnicking and playing and laughing. And that’s what I want my wedding to be.”

Grey covered her hand on his arm with his own hand. “It’s a woman thing, isn’t it, this wanting a nice wedding with everyone there?” he said, resigned to being a bachelor for four more months.

That sure as hell didn’t mean he had to be celibate.

She nodded and leaned up and kissed his chin. “I’m not getting married without my brothers. They’ll be here then. They already promised to come for Mary. You can fix your ski lift for the wedding, and we can all ride up to the top on it.”

That reminded him. “Ah, about that,” he said, taking her by the shoulders so she couldn’t run away. “I think I promised the people of Pine Creek a little party.” He shifted his weight to his other foot. “And I sort of had you in mind to plan the thing.”

“Well,” she said, thinking about that. “We could combine the two if you want. I was going to have to invite half the town anyway.”

He closed his eyes and hugged her. “Thank you. I don’t know what I was thinking when I mentioned having a grand opening.”

“I do. You’ve discovered that you don’t live in this town all alone, haven’t you?”

“Aye. With the ice storm throwing us all together the way it has, it was like back in the old…well, it’s nice.”

She squeezed him hard. “Please don’t let go of the ‘old days.’ I’m curious about what your life was like.”

She pulled away and smiled up at him. “And now we’ve got something to do for the next four months. I can ask you a million questions, and you can tell me everything. The time will go by before you know it.”

She smoothed down the front of his shirt. “We’ll have a real old-fashioned courtship, with us getting to know each other and going on dates.” She gave him a mischievous, nasty grin, patting his chest. “And I might let you kiss me good night at my door and send me flowers the next day,” she added, just to get even for his snide remark about the modern men she had dated.

“I’m not keeping my hands off you for four months,” he told her, deciding he’d better set her straight right now.

And that he’d better get out of there before she came up with another hare-brained idea. He kissed her quickly on her lips and headed for the door.

She ran up and grabbed him by the back of the shirt, and he obligingly let her pull him around to face her.

She gave him a stern look and actually pointed her finger at him.

“You will,” she said to his declaration. “It’s bad enough I won’t be a virgin on my wedding night, as I always intended. I don’t want to be pregnant as well.”

“There are things we can do, lass, so that doesn’t happen.”

She waved that away. “Like we did just now?” she hissed through her teeth. “Three times we haven’t used anything, because whenever our lips make contact, there isn’t one single functioning brain cell between us. So it’s pecks on the cheek when we say good night at the door,” she said, poking him in the chest with her finger, “or I’ll see you on Summer Solstice. I will not be pregnant when I get married.”

Chapter Twenty-three

She was going to be four months pregnant when she got married, Father Daar told her. Grace hadn’t been able to work up the nerve to visit the priest, so instead the old man had decided to come see her just seven days after their little adventure on the mountain. And the first things he’d asked when he walked through her door were how was she feeling and how was that babe in her belly coming along.

Grace had burst into tears.

Now she was sitting at the kitchen table across from him, going through her last box of tissues.

“Now, now, girl. It’s not as bad as all that,” he said, looking at her uncomfortably, the way most men did when they were around a crying woman. “Having the MacKeage’s bairn is a wondrous thing.”

“I don’t want a baby. I haven’t gotten over the last one yet.”

And she hadn’t. For two days she’d forced herself to stay away from Michael’s home, giving him time to bond with his son. They had been the longest two days of her life, and she had spent both of them crying her eyes out. By the third day she couldn’t stand it any longer and had knocked on the Bigelows’ door at six in the morning.