The sight settled something deep inside him.
He heard a footstep beside him.
“So it is true, then?” Alex asked.
Connor did not look away from Violet and the baby. “For a scary villain, rumors travel too fast in me own home.”
Alex cleared his throat. “I cannae blame the maids and guards. It isnae very often that a laird offers marriage to two different women in the same week.”
Connor glanced back at him. “Do ye have a point?”
“Several. But none of them will improve yer temper.”
“Well then, choose silence.”
“I considered it.”
“Briefly, I assume.”
“Aye. It didnae suit me.”
Connor looked back into the nursery. Violet had lowered her cheek near the baby’s brow. Moira stood a short distance away, watching with guarded softness, as if she too understood that something had shifted in the room.
“What do ye ken about her?” Alex asked.
Connor watched Violet’s hand smooth the edge of the blanket around the bairn’s shoulder. “That she’ll love the bairn.”
“And that is enough for marriage?”
“It is enough for the bairn.”
Alex studied him. “And for ye?”
Connor’s jaw tightened. “Hopefully, she’ll bring me peace.”
Alex gave a low sound that might have been a laugh. “Aye. She looks peaceful.”
Inside the nursery, Violet murmured again to the baby. Connor still could not make out the words, but the bairn’s fingers tightened in her gown as though he understood enough.
Connor turned away before either Violet or Moira could see him.
His decision remained practical. It was still order, structure, protection, and the cleanest answer to a problem that could have torn into his clan if mishandled. But Violet’s promise to the baby had changed the weight of it.
She was no longer merely the woman who would serve the solution. She had become part of the thing he could not afford to lose.
Violet eventually found Connor’s private study after questioning three maids, offending one footman, and making a kitchen maid so nervous that the poor girl pointed down the west passage just to be rid of her.
By the time she reached the door, her anger had sharpened into something much more.
The passage was quiet. Too quiet. She had been here for just a few hours, and already she knew Moore Castle had a way of swallowing sound after dark, as if everyone inside it had learned to move carefully because its master liked order more than noise.
Violet refused to be another careful thing within his walls.
She lifted her hand and knocked. No answer.
She knocked again, harder. Still nothing.
Her mouth tightened. She had obeyed enough closed doors in her life. Sickroom doors. Family doors. She had not crossed from England, broken into a castle, and agreed to a marriage trap only to stand politely in a passage while Connor Reed—his name had been drilled into her over and over by the servants—decided whether she deserved a response.
