When they heard a sound outside the door an hour later, they stood, ready to take on whoever had broken in.
Logan held up his hands, knowing exactly who was out there. He hadn’t locked her bedroom door.
“Lass,” he called out when he heard her footsteps backing away from the door. “Come in here, please.”
They all waited as she opened the door and appeared before them. Steafan still gripped the hilt of his sword.
“Apologies if I startled ye,”
“We dinna startle, lass,” Steafan was quick to tell her.
Logan smiled—until he came to his senses and remembered who he was smiling at. “Are ye lookin’ fer somethin?” he asked her.
She nodded and held up an apple. “Is it all right if I took it? I was still a bit hungry.”
“Aye, eat what ye feel safe eatin’.
She rubbed the apple on her thigh, then took a bite out of it.
“Do ye drink mead, Miss Woodburn?” Jamie asked, missing Logan’s murderous glare. He was a wee bit drunk and didn’t think it wise to spend time with her now.
She eyed their cups. “I have only partaken in mead one time.”
Ewen stood up, poured her a cup, then handed it to her. “Have a seat and join us.”
His cousin motioned her to sit on the settee with him. He avoided Logan’s gaze or blatantly ignored it. Logan couldn’t tell which. Either way, it darkened the warning that flashed across his eyes like lightning in pitch black skies.
“We should get some sleep if we are departin’ in the mornin’,” Logan told them and was about to stand when he heard her slight, dulcet voice.
“Are ye all goin’ somewhere?”
“Aye, home to Tor Castle,” Jamie told her.
“Tor Castle?” she repeated, growing pale in the firelight.
Logan was struck, not for the first time, by the sight of her bonnie face. She wasn’t the bonniest lass he knew, but something about her expressions, her haunted gazes and fierce passion to hate him, stirred his blood—just as she had the first time he’d seen her. Despite her knotted hair tied at her nape, heremembered a lass whose glossy flaxen curls shone in the sun like a crown.
“Are ye taking me with ye?” she asked, looking directly at Logan.
“Of course,” he answered. “Do ye think I would leave ye here alone?”
“What if I dinna want to go there?”
“Why would ye no’ want to go there?” he asked, insulted. Tor was the home of his father, Lochiel. She wouldn’t be safer anywhere else.
“Too many people. I dinna like crowds. I dinna like being alone either. I thought it would be just the five of us fer a wee bit. A sennight, mayhap, seven days, at least.”
“What are ye sayin’?” Logan asked her.
“What? Och, just that I am uncomfortable in large crowds of people.”
Three of the men grew quiet. The fourth, the obvious leader, spoke. “Ye will grow accustomed to it after livin’ there a few years.”
She went from pale to a tinge of green before she spoke. “But…I thought ye put me in Ewen’s possession?”
Logan noticed how she nearly choked on her last word. “Ewen lives at Tor Castle,” he told her.
“Have ye lived in a castle before, lass?” Jamie asked.
