Torin smiled, listening to his wife’s chatter and happy to hear it. He may have wanted a quiet wife, but fate knew better and sent him a woman he could not help but love.
CHAPTER30
Epilogue, two years later.
“Wah dat? Wah dat? Wah dat, Da?”
Torin smiled at his two-year-old daughter Alina, named after Flora’s mum, holding her comfortably with one arm. She was as curious and as chatty as Flora, and he loved her dearly.
Alina placed her tiny hands on her da’s face and turned his head, then pointed her small finger. “Dat, Da. Wah dat?”
“A tree, Alina,” he said.
“And dat?” she asked, pointing elsewhere.
“A flower,” Torin said.
“And dat?” she asked, pointing up.
“A cloud,” Torin responded patiently
“You need to be more specific, Torin,” Flora said, extending her hand out to him to help her to stand from where she had been kneeling to dig up a batch of nettles.
Torin took her hand and helped ease her to her feet. “Are you all right,” he asked concerned, seeing her rub at her lower back.
“I am good, a backache from bending over,” she assured him.
He rested his hand on her rounded stomach. “Are you sure the bairn gives you no trouble?”
“Aye,” she said, resting her hand over his. “We have two months before he is born and while he is an active one, he causes me little discomfort.”
Torin smiled when he felt the bairn move against his hand. He had often laid his hand on his wife’s stomach when she carried their daughter, amazed to feel her moving and know that their love had created her. It was no different with this second bairn. It still amazed him.
He kissed her cheek.
“Me, Da. Me,” Alina said, turning her cheek to him for a kiss which he did not fail to give her.
“Love kisses,” Alina said with a giggle.
“My kisses, Alina, only my kisses,” he warned, already worried about the time when she reached marriageable age, and he would have to find her a husband.
“We have discussed this, Torin. She will choose her own husband,” Flora said as if she read his thoughts.
“What if she chooses poorly?” he asked.
“We will teach her well and she will choose well,” Flora said with confidence. “Just as I did.”
Torin grinned. “That is because you chose an exceptionally wise man.”
“Aye, and without even knowing it,” she said with a chuckle and scooped up the basket of nettles.
Torin kept an easy pace as his wife walked alongside him through the woods to return home.
“Now, Alina, listen well so you know,” Flora directed her daughter, who turned wide eyes on her mum and remained silent. “That tree—” She pointed to the one Alina had asked her da about. “Is an oak, a mighty sacred tree here in the Highlands that helps us in many ways and which you will learn all about. The violet blue flower you pointed to is a bluebell and, along with the wind flower, are the first to blossom in the spring in the Highlands. If you are lucky enough to spot a white bluebell, then it is where a fairy has been.”
Alina clapped her hands and twisted her head to look around. “See fairy.”
“Fairies only show themselves to those who they choose,” Flora said.