“Aye,” Rory assured her with amusement. “Though in truth, I think she probably was half in love with him when they married. She definitely loves him now.”
“No’ that it matters,” Niels added quietly. “Had MacDonnell been a spoiled, lying third son unable to support her and any bairns they might produce, we would ha’e beat him to death rather than let him marry her . . . whether she loved him or no’.”
“What?” Edith gasped, shrinking away from him with surprise.
Niels frowned at her reaction, but then asked, “Ye said ye do no’ think Victoria’s parents told her that Brodie had lied. Was it only because she ran off with him?”
“Nay,” she admitted reluctantly.
“Then why?”
Edith blew her breath out unhappily, but then admitted, “Because she seemed shocked when they got here and Brodie introduced her to our older brothers.”
“How shocked?” Niels asked.
Edith stared at him silently, suddenly suspecting he already knew the answer. If he’d talked to anyone here since their arrival, he probably did, she realized, and wondered just how long the men had been here and what all they knew.
“She fainted,” Edith admitted quietly, recalling the way Victoria had paled and then collapsed. Brodie had tried to brush it away as exhaustion from the trip as he’d scooped her up and carried her above stairs to his chamber, but they all heard the shouting coming from the room some ten minutes later when Victoria had apparently woken up.
Aware that no one had commented and the three men were watching her solemnly, Edith sighed and asked, “How long ha’e ye been here?”
“Nearly a week,” Rory answered.
“A week?” she gasped with amazement.
“Only six days,” Niels corrected him.
“But . . .” She glanced from man to man. “What ha’e ye been doing all that time?”
“Mostly taking turns guarding ye, hunting up game, making broth, and dribbling it down yer throat while ye were unconscious in hopes ye’d recover enough to wake up,” Rory answered gently.
Edith stared at them, her mind spinning slowly. While Brodie had fled the keep with its threat of illness, these three men, who did not even know her, had been here nearly a week taking care of her?
“Why?”
The word slipped out without her conscious intent, and for a moment it just hung there helplessly in the air. Then Niels shifted her slightly so that she was looking at him and said simply, “Because ye needed our help, lass.”
Perhaps she was still exhausted and drained from her illness, or perhaps it was the deaths of her father and brothers that she had not yet had a chance to grieve, but Edith’s eyes suddenly glazed over with the sheen of tears. Just as she felt herself beginning to crumble in Niels’s arms, the bedroom door suddenly burst open. Edith turned to see another man enter the room, this one as big and brawny as Niels and holding up two dead birds by their feet.
“I got a nice pair o’ pheasants this time, Rory. If ye only use one fer broth, we can maybe get Cook to roast up the other and—” The man stopped and blinked as he noted Edith half-upright in the curve of Niels’s arm. “Oh, say, ye’re awake! Well, is no’ that fine?”