They walked in the gardens together while the carts were unloaded behind them, the two of them and the dog, who had long since transferred all his devotion to Olivia and would not now be parted from her side for any bribe. The gardens at Cairn were good, Olivia noticed resentfully, better than she wanted them to be.
A kind woman’s gardens, planted with love and long thought, full of herbs gone leggy and late roses past their best, and a stone bench set just where the afternoon sun would find it. She wondered who had tended them.
“So,” said Anne, the moment they were out of earshot. “Tell me the truth. How bad is he, this Laird of yers?”
Olivia opened her mouth to tell her that he was a monster. It was the word she had used in every letter these last months, underlined twice. She found, to her own great astonishment, that she could not get it past her teeth.
“Complicated,” she said instead, which surprised them both.
Anne’s dark eyebrows rose clean above the rims of her spectacles. “That’s nae the word ye used in yer letters. Ye had a great many words for him in yer letters, and that wasnae among them.”
“He’s nae what I thought he was.” Olivia bent and tugged at a weed that did not need pulling, only so she would not have to meet her friend’s clever eyes. “There are things, Anne. About what happened that day. About me braither. About this keep, and who’s in it, and why…” She stopped.
The full and dreadful shape of it was far too heavy to lift into the light of a garden in the afternoon, and her mother was only twenty paces off among the rose canes, and Elspeth must never, ever, so long as she drew breath, learn what her firstborn son had done.
It would simply kill the gentlest woman Olivia had ever known.
“I cannae tell ye all of it yet. Some of it I daenae ken how to say aloud. But the man I came here hatin’ may nae be the same man who lives in this keep. And I daenae have the first notion in the world what I am meant to do with that.”
“And the marriage bed?” Anne asked, ever the practical one, lowering her voice. “If he isnae the monster ye thought him, that changes a great deal, surely.”
“That changes nothin’.” Olivia straightened up sharply. “I will carry his name. I will keep his peace before the world. But I willnae give meself to him, friend or foe or somethin’ tangled in between. I’ve told him so to his face. He’ll nae lay a hand on me, nae once, nae ever, and he has agreed to it.”
“But…” Anne frowned behind her glasses. “How can that be, Olivia? Ye’re to be wed before a priest. He’s a laird, with a laird’s needs and a laird’s pride. He’ll want?—”
“He’ll want,” Olivia agreed grimly. “He can want until he has gone gray. Wantin’ costs me nothin’.”
That was the precise and unfortunate moment the man himself rode in through the gate.
He had been somewhere, as he was forever and always somewhere, and as he never once thought to inform his bride where. He swung down from his black horse in one long, easymotion, his shirt open at the throat against the warmth of the day, and his sleeves rolled up to his forearms. Olivia watched helplessly, noting the muscles flexing in his back and shoulders as he handed the reins to a stable lad.
A slow wash of heat crawled up her neck and spread across her face before she could command it not to.
Anne, beside her, went very still.
“I do believe,” she murmured, so low that only Olivia could have caught it, “that I have never once in all me life seen ye go that shade of red while merely lookin’ at a friend.”
“Anne.”
“I am only sayin’ what I see.”
“Anne, I will throw ye into the loch. I will hold yer head under meself.”
“Ye will have to catch me first, and ye are wearin’ the heavier skirts.”
Ragnall had spotted them. He was calmly walking across the gardens toward them, exuding his usual unhurried confidence. Olivia, feeling the heat in her face, averted her gaze and bent down to examine a cluster of nearly dead roses with great interest, though it was clear to everyone—even the woman with the spectacles—that she was only pretending.
“Ye must be Lady Anne.” He bowed, and the bow managed to be both perfectly correct and entirely unbothered. “There were two names on the card the Elders sent me, and I’ve just been embraced by one of them, so I’ll take me chances on the other.”
“Ye must be the monster, then,” said Anne pleasantly, before Olivia could draw breath to stop her. “There was only one name on the card ye sent us.”
There was a small, dreadful silence. Olivia felt the ground tilt beneath her.
And then Ragnall Crawford, who did not laugh, laughed. It was a short, startled, rusty sound, as if the thing had gotten out of him before he could shut the door on it.
“Aye,” he said. “I’m him.” He straightened, and there was something in his dark eyes that had not been there a moment before. “Ye’re welcome at Cairn, and gladly, Lady Anne. I am glad me bride will have her own folk around her for this, and nae be among strangers on her weddin’ day.”
His gaze moved from Anne to Olivia, and Olivia’s treacherous pulse moved right along with it. “I will be much taken up with the clan for the next days—the river and such—so I willnae be underfoot at yer preparations. Ye will have the run of the keep, both of ye. Take what ye need from it.”
