Page 46 of Owned by the Scarred Laird

During the twenty agonizing minutes she had spent navigating the castle’s indifferent, looping corridors, her frustration had inflated the room into something grand and imposing. In truth, it was a modest, claustrophobic vault.

The stone walls were bare, saved from total darkness by a single, narrow arrow-slit window that admitted a stark, gray column of morning light. In the iron grate, a peat fire had burned down to a mound of steady, crimson coals. The massive desk in the center of the room had clearly been chosen for brutal utility rather than prestige. Dark, broad oak, every square inch of its surface buried under heavy ledgers and maps.

Edward sat behind it.

He had been writing when she entered. His head snapped up at the heavy thud of the door, and she caught the sudden, violent flash of surprise across his features. It was raw and unguarded, a hairline fracture in his armor that vanished before he properly reassembled his stony mask. His pale blue eyes darted from her face to the empty doorway behind her, as if confirming she had truly breached his walls alone, before locking back onto her eyes.

He set his quill down.

“Chloe,” he said.

“Edward,” she replied evenly.

She stepped fully into the room and let the heavy door fall shut behind her, the latch clicking into place. The study was silent, a settled, deliberate quiet that her presence disrupted at the seams.

She let her gaze drift, deliberately, away from his face. She looked toward the narrow stone bench beneath the high window.

Furs were piled there. They were folded, but haphazardly, in the unmistakable manner of bedding used daily rather than stored for winter. A linen pillow sat propped against the masonry, a pillow that had no logical reason to occupy a warlord’s study. Three or four clan ledgers were scattered at one end of the bench, shoved aside to make room for him.

She stared at the pillow long enough for him to understand exactly what she had deduced, then she snapped her gaze back to his face.

The sting of the confirmation was sharper, hotter than she had anticipated. But knowing a reality and seeing the physical proof of it—the folded fur, the misplaced pillow where he broke his back every night to avoid her—were vastly different violations.

“Ye made me a promise,” she said, keeping her voice level, refusing to allow a single tremor to betray her anger. “Four outings. Fresh air, ye said. Things to see in the glen.” She held his cold gaze. “It has been three days since that wager was made.”

Edward did not blink. He reached down and picked up his quill.

“I am occupied,” he said, his voice flat, dropping his eyes to the parchment. “Clan matters demand me attention.”

The metal nib made a sharp scratch on the paper.

The dismissal was so total, so practiced, that for a moment Chloe just stood there, stunned by the sheer arrogance of it. He was not even looking at her. Instead, he was writing, or pretending to write, his head bowed, his hand moving across the page as if she had already disappeared from his mind.

The heat flared up fast and hot in her chest.

She crossed the remaining distance between them in three swift strides and slammed her open hand flat against the center of his desk, directly over his ledger.

She did not raise her voice. She had learned through ten years of servitude under people who owned her body and soul that a raised voice was a tool easily dismissed by the powerful. What was impossible to dismiss was a person who refused to move.

“Look at me,” she commanded softly.

A long, agonizing pause stretched out. Slowly, Edward lifted his chin, his pale eyes burning into hers.

“I did nae come to this fortress by choice,” Chloe said, her voice dropping into a fierce, low register. “I was bartered like a bolt of cloth and wed to a stranger before the ink on the debt was dry. I have said nae word against it. I have learned yer household, earned yer people’s trust, and kept meself from yer path when ye made plain ye wished it so.”

She pressed her palm harder into the oak. “But ye gave me yer word, Edward. Four outings. Yer presence at the table. That is nae a grand ask of a husband; it is the smallest ask there is. And I will nae pretend it doesnae matter simply because it is easier for ye if I do.”

She leaned forward slightly, her palm pressing harder into the oak. “But ye made me a promise. And I am nae askin’ ye to love me. I am nae askin’ ye to want me, or to transform this arrangement into somethin’ it was never intended to be. I am askin’ ye to keep yer word. That is all. And if ye willnae come to find me, Edward, then I will come to find ye. As many times as is required.”

The peat fire popped in the grate.

Edward stared at her for a long moment. Then he stood.

He did not move around the desk slowly or with calculation. He simply rose to his full height and approached it, and the room shrank accordingly. He stopped close, not touching but close enough that she had to hold her ground with conscious effort.

“Are ye finished?” he said.

“That depends on whether ye intend to answer me.”