Free Tallchief: The Homecoming by Cait London

man would find peace. He looked surprised at the small table she’d prepared, applesauce cake cut on plates and served with iced tea on her woven place mats. She’d known he would come, when that quiet, troubled gaze sought hers at the Tallchiefs’. Michelle Farrell had him brooding, a strong woman tossed into the tempest of his life. Liam Tallchief had much to settle, and Elspeth would try. “Sit. Let’s talk,” she invited, aching for him as he noted the huge loom Tallchief had fashioned for Una, a weaver. “I learned from my mother and she from hers, and then some from Una’s journals. She was a woman alone, except for her love, in a strange, frightening country, and I think the journals helped. He loved her of course, though she wounded his pride.”
    “You knew I was coming. I’ve heard you can—”
    Elspeth shrugged, making light of the senses that prowled within her, telling her the future and of the past. Liam was silent, sipping his tea, the small chest at his feet. He met her eyes finally, after taking his fill of the room, cluttered with yarn and a spinning wheel and the massive loom. “It’s too much,” he said quietly.
    “I know. The feelings are in you as they are in us, but we’ve had time to understand. It’s new to you.”
    As tall and powerful as her beloved Alek, Liam ran a rough hand down his jaw. “I want this for my son,” he said unevenly. “I’m leaving the chest—for now. It was found with me. There are letters inside from your mother and other things. I’d like those things back, please. When you’re finished.”
    “The letters seemed too private, a woman writing to another woman?” A woman who had raised and fought with her brothers, Elspeth knew that honor ran deep within Liam. “Who told you?”
    He breathed deeply, sucking in the past and releasing into her keeping a scarred wound reopened, and pain ran through the shadows of his face. “Mary Cartwright. Wife of Reuben, who carried me home from my parents’ wrecked car and gave me to her—to raise as a son. You’re right, I don’t like women’s letters and for a reason. I found a letter from Mary after Reuben died—she’d hidden it. Mary was already gone, so was my wife—Karen died giving birth to J.T. I want more for my son than I had,” he said more strongly, emotion threading his deep voice. “ I had a son and didn’t even know who I was. What I was.”
    “None of it was your fault. You’ll find what you need. Give it time. You know you’re named for Liam Tallchief, one of the five children of Una and Tallchief.” And so Elspeth told Liam of how Elizabeth Montclair, an English noblewoman, and her hunting party had been trapped by the lawless on Tallchief Mountain. Forced by the outlaws to save her sister and herself, Elizabeth entered the tent and took the fierce, fighting man staked to the ground within her. It pleased the renegade band that an English lady would mount an unwilling man, a half-blood stakedto the ground, and let him pierce her virgin body. Furious that he had no choice and that she had taken his seed from him, Liam had hated her. Then she was safe back in England, away from the raw land. But the child she bore was his, and he claimed them both, pirating them back to Tallchief land. “She came to love him, and they treasured each other. But the taming wasn’t easy for both of them. She threw away her jewels to save his pride, and he gave her his heart.”
    “I want J.T. to know love. How it feels,” Liam stated, emotion rumbling in his tone.
    “You love him. He knows that.”
    She could have cried when Liam lifted his pain-filled eyes to hers and said, “I’m not certain I know about love. How to give it.”
    “Then it’s time,” she whispered, her heart bleeding for him.
    “I have to be ready…inside. I can’t just read them.”
    “You will be.” She hugged her mother’s letters tight against her, and fought damning the murderer who took her parents away too soon.