a thriving island stronghold. Not worrying about whether the MacLeod laird has taken a McAuley bride within some ridiculous and entirely nonsensically determined period of time. I don’t believe in it and I refuse to follow it.”
Graham thumped Roan’s desk with his fist to underscore his words, though Roan barely raised a brow at the action, despite it being well out of character. “I’ll take it up in a town meeting if need be. Gain a consensus vote. Surely if everyone says aye to abolishing the thing, it must be rendered no longer legally binding. We could rid ourselves of it and get back to focusing on what’s important.” He smacked the desk with both palms, then pushed off and strode across the room to look out the front window and down the main lane of the village. “There will be no sham wedding on Kinloch.” He turned back to face his friends. “I have your support in this, am I right?”
Both Roan and Shay continued to stare at him for several long moments, before finally looking at each other.
“I’ll expand the search to the mainland,” Roan said.
Shay nodded. “I’ll write up the banns that are to be posted as soon as an agreement with the bride has been reached.”
Graham looked at them both incredulously. “Did ye no’ hear a word I just said?”
“We did,” they both said in unison, neither one so much as pausing as they continued going about whatever it was they had to go about to see Graham lawfully wed to an eligible member of the McAuley clan before the end of the autumnal equinox. Being as it was mid-August, that was little more than a month away. Giving him roughly forty days to find a bride.
Heaven help them all.
“I’m going to call the town council,” Graham stated, not giving up just because the two men he regarded as brothers had already done so. “In fact, I’m going to call an island tribunal. If we get a consensus then, as far as I’m concerned, legal or no’, that’s all the support I need to continue on and be done with this wild goose chase.”
“It’s no’ just a consensus, Graham,” Shay told him. “It has to be one hundred percent. They all have to say aye.”
Graham spun back around. “Really? So there is a solution! Why didn’t you say so? I’m certain I can and will have that. Who would say nay?”
“I can think of a few,” Roan said. “Like Dougal. And auld Branan, for certain.”
“They’re not the only elders who will hold out,” Shay agreed. “They love you, no doubt, but they’ll stick with tradition.”
“Even over what’s best for the island? If we let someone else, an outsider no less, come here and begin making decisions regarding our well-being—surely even the oldest resident wouldn’t chance that.”
Roan shrugged. “Perhaps they think you’ll persevere with your crop management whether you’re laird or no’.”
“What if I have no say in the matter? What if this”—he turned to Shay—“what’s the bloke’s name?”
“Iain McAuley.”
Graham turned back to Roan. “Iain. What if this Iain has other ideas about our little island industry? He’s never so much as set foot on our soil much less worked it with his own hands. Who knows what he’d decide to do. We can’t risk that.”
“He may not even want it,” Roan reminded him. “In fact, he probably won’t. Who would?” He looked to Shay and grinned. “We’re no’ exactly the Fortune 500 of inheritances, you know.”
“He’ll probably be begging you to take it over.” Shay agreed, then leaned back in his seat and folded his arms. “Besides, if he wants to be laird, he’ll have to honor the marriage pact law as well.”
Graham pumped an air fist. “Right! He’ll have to marry a MacLeod! I’m betting he won’t be any more enthusiastic about that than I am. Hell, for all we know, he’s already married.”
Shay shook his head. “He’s no’. He’s thirty-two, unwed, living in Edinburgh. Works for an investment firm. Quite the bright and shiny diamond, too, from what I’ve dug up.”
“Still—”
“There is a much longer list of eligible MacLeod lasses,” Roan pointed out. He shrugged when Graham shot him a dark look. “I’m only stating the truth here. I mean, aye, he could find the whole thing tiresome and a waste of his time, but what do we know? Maybe he’ll think it quite the lark. Shay said he already has more money than Croesus—from his job, as well as a few trusts and such from his mum’s side of the tree.”
“He could marry just to lay claim to the property and the title,” Shay said. “The wealthy generally don’t mind accruing more things.”
“This would hardly be a feather in his asset list.”
Shay shrugged, and Roan said, “I don’t think we should chance it,” before going back to his search.
Graham turned to Shay, who merely lifted a brow. “He’s right,” he added, as Graham began swearing under his breath.
“I’m still calling the island tribunal,” Graham insisted. “If I get the damn law overturned, there will be no title inheritance. Kinloch will remain under my governance as long as her people wish me to lead.”
“You’ll have forty days to campaign, get them all to agree,” Shay reminded him.
“And that’s the same forty days you’d also have to find a bride,” Roan added. “I dinnae think it’s a wise bet to divide your energies.”
“I need to try. Especially given that even if I was willing to follow the law, there doesn’t seem to be anyone eligible to marry anyway.”
Both of his friends sighed, then nodded, knowing, as they must have all along, that he wouldn’t go down without a fight. To that end, Graham turned on his heel, determined to do whatever it was going to take to set the proceedings in motion. His hand was on the knob, when Roan hooted.
“What do ye know. I think I’ve found her!”
Graham turned, knowing he had to at least ask. “Found who?”
“Your wife.”
“Roan—”
“I expanded my search to the mainland, and, well…I had to search a wee bit more widely, but I plugged the McAuley name into Facebook, then backtracked the names to the tree list that Shay has drawn up, and”—he turned his laptop around and gestured with a flourish—“voila! A connection to our own McAuley tree, albeit a wee bit distant one. But it only matters that the connection is there.”
Graham wasn’t about to take a single step closer, much less look at the poor woman Roan had targeted. He already felt trapped, bound, and tethered by an archaic clan law…and he’d grown up knowing about it. He couldn’t fathom broaching the subject with someone who knew nothing of him, nothing of Kinloch, much less of the ridiculous MacLeod-McAuley marriage pact.
Roan looked at him triumphantly. “It just took a little determination.”
“How
