This was not controlled. This was a free fall.
His fingertips brushed the scatter of freckles across her shoulder. He had noticed them before. He remembered thinking then that she looked warm. Not merely beautiful.
Warm.
Now, he traced one distinct freckle with the pad of his thumb. Then another.
Margaret's hazel eyes softened, turning smoky in the moonlight. The sheer vulnerability in her gaze nearly undid him. No fear. No carefulness. Only trust, heavy, blind trust given to a man who had left her on her wedding night.
He did not know what to do with that kind of grace.
His hand slid into her hair instead, his thick fingers catching gently in the tangled curls around her shoulders.
"So much hair," he murmured. His voice was a low, rough rasp in the quiet.
A faint, mocking smile touched her mouth. "Ye sound surprised."
"I think ye hide half of it out of spite."
"Perhaps I do."
Fergus looked down into her eyes and felt something massive shift inside his chest with a slow, terrifying certainty. He had known attraction before. Camp women and noble daughters had looked at his height and his shoulders all his life. A soldier learned quickly how to separate physical warmth from emotional need, affection from convenience.
But this, this had driven roots into the dark spaces he kept guarded even from himself.
He lowered his head, pressing his forehead briefly against hers. Their breaths mingled, hot and fast. Margaret's fingers slid up along the back of his neck, her touch so light, so electric, that she could not possibly know the tight coil it wound in his belly.
Or perhaps she did. That possibility burned hotter.
"Ye are a distraction," he said quietly.
The words settled heavily between them. Months ago, they would have landed like a weapon, a declaration of his resentment. Now, there was no cruelty in them. Only an exhausted, stripped-bare honesty.
Margaret searched his face, her gaze unblinking. "And what am I distractin' ye from?" she asked softly.
Meself.
The answer came too fast, too unfiltered. He looked away first, snapping his eyes toward the narrow opening in the shutters where the midnight wind stirred the dust against the stone.
For a long moment, he said nothing. Margaret did not press. That, too, had become dangerous, the way she waited for him instead of demanding.
He exhaled slowly through his teeth.
"When I was young," he said at last, "there was never much question about what I was meant to become." His voice sounded foreign in the quiet room. "Alasdair's father trained us together from the time we could hold wooden swords properly. Every mornin' before dawn. Riding until our thighs bled. Fightin'. Strategy. Discipline." A faint, humorless breath left him. "Mostly discipline."
Margaret listened, her body perfectly still beneath his weight.
Fergus stared up at the heavy timber ceiling beams overhead. "I kent what mattered then. Loyalty. Usefulness. Becomin' someone strong enough to stand at Alasdair's left shoulder and protect what belonged to him." His mouth tightened slightly. "I was damn good at it."
"Aye," Margaret said quietly. "Ye were."
The absolute certainty in her voice drew his gaze back to her. She believed it. Not because he was the Laird of Clan MacKenzie, but because she could see the boy he must have been—the fierce, lonely child trying to earn his bread. The realization sat oddly in his chest, expanding painfully.
"Nay one ever looked at me and saw a laird," he continued. "Nae then. I was simply Fergus. The bastard foundlin' raised in another man's keep. The sword at Alasdair's side." He paused, his throat dry. "It suited me."
Margaret's fingers moved slowly against his shoulder, neither comforting nor distracting him from the memory. Merely there.
"It was enough?" she asked.
