Free Sue-Ellen Welfonder - [MacLean 03] by Wedding for a Knight

fripperies, he wanted naught.
    Not when the plentitude had been paid for with
merks
taken from the Lady Amicia’s overflowing coffers.
    And without doubt they had been.
    The guilty flush stealing across his father’s face confirmed it.
    “I cannot condone this.” Magnus frowned, each colorful thread in the new tapestries, each eye-catching gleam of silver glinting off the candlesticks, a dirk thrust in his pride. “We can ne’er repay such splendor.”
    “You needn’t glare holes in me,” Donald MacKinnon defended the opulence. With a show of strength that would have delighted Magnus at any other time, he shook himself free of his son’s grasp.
    Belligerence sparking in his eyes, the aged laird thrust out his chin. “Nary a coin from your lady wife’s dowry went toward any of this,” he declared. “’Tis wedding gifts you’re a-looking at—all of it. From the MacLeans, and from their sundry friends and allies throughout the Isles. Even the high table—”
    “The high table?”
Magnus started at once for the raised dais at the upper end of the hall.
    “Aye, so I said—the MacLeans gifted us with a new one, complete with a finely carved laird’s chair.” His father hurried to catch up with him. “They even sent along a matching chair for your lady.”
    Magnus could only grunt in response. The neck opening of his tunic suddenly proved too tight for him to press a more coherent reply past his throat.
    Mmmmmph
would have to suffice.
    That, and a good dark scowl.
    Furtive glances slid his way from those men already awake and breaking their fast, but each time he glanced in anyone’s direction, the offender made a great show of buttering a bannock or leaning down to offer a tidbit to one of the many hounds begging about the hall.
    Other eyes observed him, too.
    Eyes well-hidden in shadow so none would notice the simmering malice a certain someone couldn’t quite tamp down since the MacKinnon heir and his dastard father had emerged from the stair tower—for their appearance gave irrefutable confirmation that the morning’s attempt to have done with the ever-greedy lairdie had met failure.
    “I kept my own chair,” Donald MacKinnon prattled, giving his son a sidelong look. “It is no so fine as the new, but will serve for the now.”
    “The
whole
of the old table would have served,” Magnus snapped, stepping around a sleeping clansman. “A mercy, Da, that table has stood on the dais since before your grandsire’s day. Christ’s wounds—what happened to your sense of family tradition?”
    “The only tradition this clan has hanging ’bout its neck is that damnable curse,” the old laird muttered as they made their way past row upon row of bench-lined trestle tables.
    New trestles and benches,
Magnus noted, the discovery causing the throbbing at his temples to increase to a most disagreeable hammering across the whole of his forehead.
    “The old table had to go, and none too soon,” his father insisted, puffing out his cheeks. “Its wood had grown wormier than a lochan’s bank in spring.”
    “I dinna care . . .” Magnus froze, his heart slamming hard against his chest. “Saints alive—they are grown men!”
    His jaw dropping, he stared toward the magnificent new high table but saw only the two strapping young men slouched fast asleep across its black-gleaming surface.
    His younger brother, Hugh, snored, his head resting mere inches from a platter of untouched oatcakes. Hugh’s burnished auburn hair, so like Magnus’s own if a wee shade lighter, glinted gold in the candlelight.
    Dugan, his middle brother, and dark as Colin Grant or any MacLean, slept too soundly to snore. He’d cushioned his strikingly handsome face on arms that looked every bit as well-muscled as Magnus’s own.
    The transformation clutched hard around Magnus’s rib cage and made breathing difficult. Saints, where had the time gone?
    “God have mercy,” he got out at last, his deep voice thick with emotion. “They