Rosie seized a fistful of his hair in triumph, tugged on it with all her strength, and crowed with delight at her own conquest.
Across the hearth, Alastair was watching him with an expression Ragnall did not much care for.
“Have ye told her?” his friend asked, quietly now, all the jesting gone. “The lass. Yer bride. Does she ken any of it yet? About Kate. About what her braither did to her? About his bairn?”
Ragnall looked down at the little face tucked against his chest. Rosie had Kate’s dark, soft as thistledown, but she had the wrong family’s eyes—the deep, clear blue of the Blythes. One day too soon, someone would have to sit the little girl down and explain exactly whose blood ran through her small, fierce body, and how she came to be born at Cairn.
“Nae yet,” he said.
“Ragnall.”
“Soon.” He pressed his lips to her dark head and did not look up. “Soon.”
CHAPTER 4
By the secondmeal she had refused, Olivia understood that hunger was simply going to be the price of her pride, and she found she was prepared to pay it.
She had sent her excuses for dinner the first night, pleading the long journey, and for breakfast this morning, she had pleaded nothing at all, which was its own small flag run up its own small pole.
Let him eat alone at his long table. Let the whole house of Cairn wonder among themselves whether their Laird had brought home a bride or a prisoner, and let them wonder which the new Lady considered herself to be.
She would sit here in this borrowed room and starve like a saint on a pillar if it kept her from sitting across from that scarred, infuriating, unfairly handsome face one moment before she was dragged to it by a priest.
It was a poor sort of rebellion, she knew, the kind a child would stage in a nursery, refusing her supper to punish a world that would not so much as notice the empty place at its table. But it was the only rebellion the Council and the edict and her own helpless circumstances had left her, and so she meant to wage it to the bitter, growling end.
The trouble with her plan, as it turned out, was the dog.
Tattie had appeared at her door before dawn and scratched at the wood with one heavy paw, patient and relentless, until a sleepy-eyed maid had given up and let him in. Now he lay across her feet like a felled tree, vast and shameless, and every time she tried to ignore him, he heaved a sigh so deep and so tragic that it might have been heard clearly in the next glen.
“Go away,” she told him, without conviction. “I am nae supposed to like anyone in this keep. Do ye nae understand that? It’s the entire shape of me situation. I am to be miserable here. It’s the only choice left that’s mine to make.”
Tattie rolled onto his back and presented the broad pale expanse of his belly to the ceiling, all four legs folded in the air like a dead beetle, and gazed at her upside down with such perfect, uncomplicated hope that her chest gave way.
She held out against him for a count of ten. Then she gave up the whole campaign and sank her fingers into the warm fur of his chest, and the beast let out a sound of pure idiotic bliss. Despite the dead, the edict, and the man somewhere down the corridor, the knot in her chest loosened by half a turn.
“All right,” she murmured. “All right, ye great daft article. But ye’ll be the only exception. The one and only. And ye cannae go tellin’ yer master, do ye hear me? Nae a word. That will be our secret till the grave.”
“A bit too late for that.”
She did not shriek. She would swear ever after, against any witness and under any oath, that she did not shriek. But she came up off the floor very fast and spun about, one hand at her throat.
And there he was, filling her doorway, one broad shoulder propped against the frame as he watched her court his hound with an expression that was not quite a smile and not quite anything safer than one.
“But then again,” he continued, “ye and I cannae very well have secrets, can we? We’re to be wed in less than a week.”
“Do ye nae knock?”
“I knocked. Twice, in point of fact.”
He pushed off the frame and took one step into the room, and the room, which had been a perfectly adequate size only a breath before, seemed all at once to lose half its air.
“Ye were too busy makin’ an alliance with me hound to hear it. Ye missed dinner. And breakfast. Me grandmaither’s convincedye are ill and wants to send up a tonic. The maids think I’ve locked ye in the tower like a tale. One of them, I am reliably told, thinks I mean to eat ye.”
“And what do ye think, me Laird?”
“I think ye are punishin’ me the only way that’s left to ye,” he said. “And I think ye are hungry enough by now to gnaw the bedpost, and I think the two facts have been at war inside ye since the breakfast bell, and I think hunger’s very close to winnin’ the field.”
The galling part, the truly galling part, was that he was right.
