Wedding for a Knight by Sue-Ellen Welfonder

Author:Sue-Ellen Welfonder
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-07-18T03:18:36+00:00

She wanted to give him her favor.

The fine length of jewel-studded silk her father had given her a fortnight ago, claiming the precious cloth held all the colors of the sun.

She thought the silk a perfect match for Magnus MacKinnon’s wild mane of lustrous bronze-colored hair.

And she wanted him to have it as a token of appreciation for helping her when she’d hurt her ankle at a similar gathering of the clans a year before.

A token, too, of her affection, for she’d given him her heart that very same afternoon. But telling him so could wait . . . or would have to.

She could not do or say anything to him if he ne’er bothered to look her way.

Biting her lip, she lifted her arm and waved the silk high above her head. Fine and light as it was, it snapped and rippled in the wind at once, and she was sure he’d notice.

Tears of frustration began filming her eyes, blurring her vision, but she kept her arm in the air, holding up her favor until her shoulder burned as hotly as her eyes and her arms and fingers began to tingle.

And still he did not look.

“Hell’s damnation,” Amicia hissed beneath her breath, venting her misery with one of her brothers’ curses.

It felt good to at least curse since she could not call out Magnus’s name. To do so, him being a MacKinnon, would have her father dragging her off the games field by her ear and mayhap even forbidding her to return the next year.

So she kept brandishing her shimmering gold prize, praying he would see and come for it—for if he did, especially as a much-loved games champion, even her da would not be able to keep her from presenting it to him.

To do so then, with all the clans looking on, would be a gross breach of Highland etiquette.

So she hoped and waved and stared his way, silently calling his name as loudly as her heart would let her.

But he stood, turned halfway from her, almost in full profile, and so hemmed in by clamoring, clutching maidens, her hopes of catching his eye grew slimmer by the moment and the archery trials were about to begin.

Crying inside, she drank in his golden beauty, branding him onto her memory so she could relive, at will, each precious moment of looking at him. Each dimpled smile he flashed at someone, every bonny twinkle in his laughing blue eyes. Even if his smiles and laughter weren’t meant for her.

In her dreams, she claimed them.

Saw again her young Caledonian god, standing in half-profile to her, so proud in the sunshine of a fine Hebridean day, with the wind tossing his gleaming bronze mane, his handsome face shining.

His refusal to accept her favor as sad as the way her beautiful silk banner turned old and scratchy in her hands, its cool smoothness forever gone, the teensy seed pearls and gemstones adorning its edges now only irritating bumps of itchiness on a tattered and smelly saddlecloth.

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