Claimed by a Highlander by Margaret Mallory

Author:Margaret Mallory
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Highland
Publisher: 0
Published: 2016-07-24T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 27

After giving her one more kiss, Rory opened the door, and a flood of women poured through it, led by Grizel. Two of the women carried a wooden tub between them, while several others brought in buckets of steaming water.

“We’ve come to wash your feet,” Grizel announced.

“Wash my feet?” Sybil asked.

“’Tis a Highland wedding tradition,” Rory said.

While the women with buckets filled the tub, others surrounded Sybil, plunked her down on a stool, and began removing her shoes and wool stockings.

The women laughed and made bawdy remarks to Rory as they did the same with him.

“Have you lasses opened the whisky keg early?” he asked.

“Of course we have,” a plump woman with graying hair said. “’Tis no every day we have a chieftain’s wedding to celebrate.”

“Did ye bring a dram for the poor bride?” Sybil asked, stretching her arm out. “I’m begging ye, please.”

That set them all to laughing again. Though she had made a joke of it, she was desperate for a drink to calm her nerves. The women cheered when she leaned her head back and drained the cup.

“She drinks like a Highlander,” one of them said.

Sybil decided this was going well, but then she shrieked when two women grabbed her ankles and rubbed soot from the hearth all over her feet.

“I thought ye were going to wash them,” she said.

“The ash represents the past,” Grizel explained. “Now we wash it away so ye can start the marriage clean and new.”

Sybil liked the idea of that very much. Could it be so simple to wash away her past, to erase the dishonesty that had brought them to this day? She hoped so.

For her wedding day, she would let herself believe it. Someone poured her another dram, and she drank it to help push aside her worries.

The women rubbed ash on Rory’s feet as well. While the women scrubbed her and Rory’s feet in the tub, the younger ones giggled and whispered behind hands, and the older women openly speculated about the likely duration and frequency of what would occur between the bride and groom tonight in this bedchamber.

Sybil met Rory’s gaze, and the sounds of the women’s voices faded. Today they would begin their marriage and a new life together. Nothing that came before should matter.

When the women finished, Rory helped her to her feet. She stood in the tub with her skirts tucked up, facing Rory and surrounded by twenty chattering women.

As they stood staring into each other’s eyes, she felt overwhelmed by how she had gone from feeling despair to such hopefulness for the future. He cupped her neck and started to pull her in for a kiss.

“There will be time for that later, laird!” one of the older women shouted, and pulled on his arm. “Leave her to us now, or there will be no wedding today.”

“I entrust my bride to your good hands.” Rory bowed to the gathered women and winked at Sybil before he went out the door.

For the next hour, the

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