A silence. Then his hand found her waist. It arrived without ceremony, resting there at first—nothing more than contact. But her body responded to it with a shiver that moved through her, which she could neither stop nor hide.
His breath changed. She felt that too.
She turned. His eyes met hers first, dark and close in the firelight, then briefly dropped, just for a moment, to her mouth. His hand was still at her waist. Neither of them moved.
Choose it. Just this once. Choose it.
He stepped back.
The cold came in immediately where the warmth of him had been.
"I'll nae have me head filled with foolishness." His jaw was tight, the words coming too fast, too hard for the quiet of the glen. "I am a laird. Lyin' in the grass, starin' at stars." He exhaled sharply. "That is nae what I am meant to do."
Margaret looked at him. The firelight flickered across his face, revealing the effort he was making, the way he was piecing himself together in real time. She had felt the shift. She had been inside it with him. She understood what it had taken for him to step back.
That was almost worse.
"I am yer wife," she said quietly. "Ye gave me yer word. Yer presence."
He said nothing. She held his gaze a moment longer. Something settled in her chest, not anger—something colder than that.
"But I cannae demand that ye want to stay." The words came out even, carefully placed. "Only ye can do that."
"It's time to go," he said. Controlled. Distant. The voice he used when a conversation was over.
"Of course, me Laird," she answered.
She picked up her basket. She did not look at him again. She walked ahead of him back up the path toward the castle, her back stiff. She did not let him see that her hands were not entirely steady.
Chapter Thirteen
He had been putting it off for three weeks.
Angus mentioned it first, carefully, the way Angus mentioned things he knew would not be well received. Then two of the senior clan members came to him separately, on different days, wearing the expressions of men who had been patient longer than they should have been. The disputes had been building up since before he took the Lairdship, with land boundaries blurred by years of neglect under the previous man, grazing rights argued over in doorways and across fences, a debt between two families that had turned into something uglier than money.
They need to see ye decide.
Fergus understood this. He had stood at Alasdair's shoulder through a dozen of them, watching how it was done, how a laird listened without appearing to wait, how he held the room without raising his voice, how he found the line between mercyand weakness and walked it without flinching. He had thought, then, that it looked straightforward enough.
He had been wrong about a number of things.
* * *
They came to him after breakfast. Three of them, senior clan members—the kind of men who had survived the previous Laird by keeping their heads down and their opinions quiet. They were not keeping their opinions quiet now.
Fergus let them in and did not sit.
"The MacAllister boundary has been disputed for two seasons," the eldest said. His name was Edward, gray-bearded, deliberate, the kind of man who chose every word like he was paying for it. "And the matter of the Brennan debt willnae hold much longer. There are others."
"I ken there are others."
"Then ye ken a gatherin' cannae wait." Edward looked at him steadily. "The clan needs to see ye decide, me Laird. Nae just hear that ye have."
The other two said nothing. They did not need to. They were here because they agreed with Edward, and their presence was the agreement.
Fergus moved to the window. Below, the yard was already busy, with two men loading timber and a woman crossing toward the well with a basket. His clan. His responsibility. Every one of them had something that needed settling, something that had been left to fester under the man who had ruled this land before him.
Fairness is never clean. Fairness demands cruelty. It demands that ye look a man in the eye and tell him he is wrong and nae flinch from what that costs him.
