Free Tallchief: The Homecoming by Cait London Page A

“I’ll keep them for you, and we’ll talk again. Thank you. I loved my mother very much.”
    “You’ll see to my son, if I’m late tonight? You’ll take care of him?” he asked, the desperation in his voice slicing through her.
    “Aye, I will. Rest easy on that, Liam Tallchief, and do what you must,” she answered. The man had been too alone, fearing for his son’s safety over his own. “We’ll tend him well, if anything ever happened to you. He’s one of us, and so are you. When you claimed the name Tallchief as your right, we claimed you.”
    “It’s the feeling,” he whispered. “That I am a part of a family. That I am not. That I have a heritage I don’tunderstand. Not just the bloodline, but what goes with it. Storms move inside me and other needs I haven’t explored. You know, don’t you, that Reuben Cartwright made me what I am?”
    Other needs, Elspeth repeated silently. Michelle had raised those fierce needs to take and to claim, and, being a controlled man, walking in shadows, Liam wasn’t prepared for the urgent calling.
    “Your past was cold and hard. You aren’t. You did what you had to do to survive, to provide for your son. When it’s time, we’ll have tea again, and I’m glad you’re not as ill-mannered as my brothers. Birk calls my teatime ‘torture and drinking grass.’ Thank goodness I don’t have to tend them anymore…. I want you to have this—”
    She rose from the table and took a folded length of tartan sash from the shelf. “It’s the Tallchief plaid, blue and ‘dragon-green’ and vermillion for Tallchief. And I’ll have no complaining as my brothers did, when I finish your kilt. No crude comments about the cold wind blowing up your backside. You’ll be wearing it like the rest and tearing the heart from the ladies, just as they do, the beasts. J.T. will have one, too.”
    On top of the folded tartan, Elspeth placed a small neat journal. “It’s Elizabeth Montclair Tallchief’s. You’ll find out more about our heritage, and you won’t be faced with your past just yet. Sometimes these things are better to ease into…when you are ready. I’ll do what I can to help you with that journey. You take your time, Liam Tallchief. I’ll see that J.T. is cared for.”
    “A few hours on the mountain. By myself, then I’ll be back,” he said, holding the tartan very carefully as if he’d never been given gifts before. She nodded and promised herself that Liam would see more gifts—and love—coming his way. Softness and love and gifts hadn’tbeen in Liam’s life, and his big hands trembled, his expression humbled.
    After Liam had gone, Elspeth called Duncan. “Duncan the Defender, you are not to tuck Michelle Farrell under your wing. A battle is brewing between her and Liam and you are not to interfere.”
    She listened to him rumble a protest, and smiled. Elspeth hung up the telephone and set her mind to the task of studying the letters from her mother to Tina Tallchief, Liam’s rightful mother. When the wreck occurred, Liam’s parents were coming to visit the Tallchiefs, to discover their heritage, just as their son would do now. Elspeth opened Una’s journals and held the letters close, trying to see into the past. “It’s the flint and the fire,” she said finally, too drained to move. “Liam’s time has come, and he’ll find more pain before he finds peace. He’s not a man who can burst into a new world, and each step will take him closer to more of what he has lost—a family torn apart by a selfish man. Liam is methodical, taking in one piece of the puzzle at a time. He was so humble accepting the Tallchief plaid, I could have cried.”
    She ran her fingertips across the small tooled copper box—the mountain symbol and the stick man and woman—and the flints. “Aye, flint and fire.”
     
    Liam made his way up Tallchief Mountain, across the tiny lush meadows filled with August sunflowers, the jutting rocks high above him. The path was worn,