Highland Strength (Book 3)

Chapter 41

AN - Hi everyone, i just wanted to say i went back to work today, and as such the updates may be a little bit more infrequent than you have become used to. But as it is my stress release to write, i would not say you have to wait too long between uploads!! Az x

Chapter 41

With a wide, jaw cracking yawn, Aonghus threw himself down upon the pallet laid out before the doorway to the small second room in the cottage he had grown up in. The cottage his brother had told him just an hour before was now his in every sense of the word. While Aonghus had tried to argue this, Artair had been the one to laugh in his face and say that he knew what Aonghus wished to use it for, and he was welcome to do that without his brother listening in and ‘giving tips’. He could see and feel his brothers grief at the loss of his childhood home, while at the same time a guilt ate at him, and Aonghus knew something was going on which he did not know about and he planned on cornering his brother…but on the morrow, he was bone weary with all that had happened since he had left his home to go after Sheena.

He needed sleep. But a contentment swam through him at the knowledge that Sheena slept in his bed. The ticking creaking a little as she moved, a soft sigh leaving her lips. Scottie curled up on the frame which had barely contained his frame, yet, seemed to swallow the two of them whole when he had walked back into the room to set up his pallet, both Sheena and Scottie had been curled up together already deeply slumbering. All he could do in that moment was stare upon them, his heart giving a little kick, but whether it was because he had nearly lost them to circumstance, or because he liked them in his space, he could not tell.

With a smile upon his face, he threw himself around a little on the pallet, trying to find a comfortable spot to sleep in, and make sure the doorway was covered so the people who meant the most were protected, even while he slept. With the uncertainty of the forest, and the unknown of who could be watching them at any point, and how Douglas and now Maggie Mai were trying to separate him from the two who slept so peacefully in his home. He felt the need to keep watch over them. No one would take them from him. Not now, and not in any future he could imagine.

With another bone cracking yawn, he allowed his gritty painful eyes to gradually close, and a long sigh to release from him as his body relaxed for the first time in…who knew how long. Muscles unknotting and a peace entering his soul as only ones home could allow. With a small smile upon his freshly shaven face, much to Sheena’s disappointment if her reaction to the sight of him stubble free was anything to go by, he finally fell into a deep and powerful, healing slumber. For all intense and purposes he was in fact dead to the world.

Sheena rolled to her back, Scottie curled into her side, as if she were the only thing keeping away the wee imps that wanted to torment him. Her arm falling off the side of the bed, and she turned her head to look at the shadowed figure of Aonghus as he lay on a pallet upon the floor. Blinking slowly at the image he created before her, she had heard him enter as he bumbled about with the pallet, and felt his gaze on her as he went silent and still. The heat and utter exposure she felt were indescribable and meant that she was uncomfortable and irritated at the fact she could not sleep, even with the weight of need pressed upon her mind.