by Lynn Kurland
"Aye, and with their children as well," Kendrick said. "Jake took the entire family on magnificent trips all over what of the world he could reach. He thought experience was the best teacher. Indeed, he was in Italy with Amanda when I was… well, murdered."
Gideon coughed and Megan had to slap him on the back several times to get him to stop.
Genevieve laughed. Maybe Gideon wasn't as accustomed to Kendrick's history as he pretended to be.
Kendrick looked at them with twinkling eyes. "My kin, as you might imagine, were desperate to find me, and then when they did not, to exact revenge. It was only later that I realized that a messenger had brought my father a missive from Jake in private. My friend Richard was beside himself that my father merely turned away and didn't raze Seakirk when they realized that I had met my end there."
"How timely that the messenger found Robin when he did," Genevieve said dryly.
"Indeed," Kendrick agreed. "In truth, I think the lad had been following my father's company and was waiting for the moment Jake had predetermined. Anyway, what I learned later from other ghostly companions was that the missive had warned my father Robin to simply walk away and Jake would give him all the details later."
"And Jake did?" Genevieve asked softly.
"Jake did," Kendrick said with a smile. "He told my father that he had known me in the future, that I had a wife, a large family, and had become Lord of Seakirk. It was cold comfort to my sire at the time, but he was grateful for the knowledge. Of course, my father did not see fit to share that knowledge with anyone but my mother, so the rest of the family grieved more than they should have, but that was his choice."
Genevieve looked at him and shook her head. "And you didn't tell Jake any of this when he was here. Why not?"
"He teased me unmercifully when I was a lad. I owed him for years of torture."
"Which he dealt out no doubt because of your treatment of him these past few weeks," Gideon pointed out.
"And so we go on," Kendrick said with a contented sigh. "Circles and circles of time and family." He took Genevieve's hand and held it gently between both his own. "I would not have traded a minute of it."
Genevieve understood. She sat with her husband in his ancestral hall and looked around her at the place in which he'd grown to manhood—yet another circle going 'round again. Megan would have her baby soon and there would begin another one with Gideon, Megan, and their child.
But now she and Kendrick would be a part of that, along with their children. Families, love, memories, all flowing in and out of a keep that had stood on the edge of the sea for eight hundred years.
She turned the portrait over again where she could look at Amanda's beautiful, smiling face. She looked content, as if she'd found all her heart desired.
Genevieve understood.
She understood very well indeed.