Brian returned the favor by spitting on his palm and scrubbing a smudge of dirt from her cheek. Do you want your baby sister to learn your roguish ways?” She brushed at the grass stains scoured into the knees of their finest trews. “I ought to bang your stony little heads together. She shook them gently, her English accent clipped with annoyance. The boys hung by their tunics, trapped into sheepish surrender. Elizabeth Cameron separated the roiling mass of strawberry curls with a skill born of ten years’ practice. They rolled, locked in battle, straight into the folds of their mother’s skirt.

He arched his back, tumbling his younger brother into the slick grass. Brian rode on Alexander’s shoulders, bellowing orders and whacking him with a rowan twig. A grunt and a giggle sounded a warning as the iron gate came crashing open and Sabrina’s brothers galloped into the garden. A knot of pug-faced puppies nested on her abandoned mantle. Low-hanging clouds that boded rain splintered the sun into dazzling spills of red in her upswept hair.

Her mother knelt at the edge of the garden path, stabbing the earth around her rosebushes with a silver trowel. Sabrina parted the glossy leaves to peer out. On moonless nights, when the hounds whimpered and howled around the manor walls, it was said a MacDonnell was stalking the shadowy forests, searching for a naughty boy or girl to carry back to his lair. The children of Cameron Glen trembled in fear of them, and men full grown took care not to wander far from the village after dusk. Great shaggy creatures who walked on two legs and wore nothing but fresh animal skins. Fearsome giants they were, her brothers whispered by candlelight, half man and half beastie. The MacDonnells had haunted her nightmares for most of her short life. The MacDonnells were coming, and one careless move might see her bones melted to Cameron stew before this day was done. She sneezed, then clapped a chubby hand over her mouth and burrowed deeper into the hedge. Tiny feathers of pollen tickled her nostrils. Sabrina Cameron rubbed one of her mother’s plump tea roses beneath her uptilted nose.

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