Page 105 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

“Katherine sat with her half the night.”

Magnus looked into his cup. “I ken.”

He had heard their voices through the wall. They spoke low, and Elspeth occasionally laughed. He had lain in his room awake, listening to it until he was sure she had stopped and fallen asleep.

Liam turned his cup in his hands. “Ye did well.”

Magnus said nothing.

“I’m saying it because it needs saying and ye’ll nae say it yerself.” Liam glanced at him sideways. “Ye did well. Now, let the day be good.”

He walked away before Magnus could find an answer for that, which was probably deliberate.

Magnus stood in the yard a while longer. When Agnes’s voice sounded near the kitchen garden, he turned and went toward it. She was crouched beside Morag with great seriousness, threading the last of the ribbons into the goat’s beard, replacing the one Morag had eaten yesterday. Her tongue was pressed between her teeth in concentration.

Beside her, Elspeth sat on the low garden wall with a basket of flowers in her lap, separating stems and passing Agnes the ones with the longest ribbon of leaf for weaving. They were talking, Agnes asking something, and Elspeth answering with her whole attention.

He stopped at the garden gate.

Elspeth had her hair down, not properly dressed yet, a shawl over her shift. Her wrists were wrapped in clean linen. She was passing Agnes a stem of heather while listening intently, and she had not yet noticed him.

Magnus looked at her in the morning light and thought that a man ought to have known this feeling earlier rather than arriving at it covered in blood and considerably more shaken than was dignified.

Agnes looked up. “Morag has three ribbons now,” she announced.

Morag confirmed this by lifting her bearded chin with immense pride.

Elspeth turned. She held his gaze for a moment, reading the expression on his face, and then looked at Agnes. “Will ye take her for a walk so the ribbons settle properly?”

Agnes considered the logic of this, accepted it, and led Morag toward the far end of the garden.

Magnus stepped through the gate. He stopped two feet from the wall she was sitting on, which put them at eye level for once. She looked at him with her head tilted, her hands folded in her lap over the basket, and said nothing.

This was rather unusual for Elspeth; he understood she was giving him the space to speak first.

“Ye’re well.” It was more of a statement than a question.

“Aye. Mrs. McAulay ’s seen to me wrists. They’re nae as bad as they looked.” She turned her hands over once, showing him the linen wrapping. “Yer arm?”

“Fine.”

“Ye keep saying that.”

“It keeps being true.”

She looked at him steadily. He looked at the basket of flowers. He picked up a stem of a white bloom, turned it in his fingers, and set it back down.

“I said things in that lodge that I…” He stopped. His hand went to the back of his neck. “I wasnae at me most composed.”

Elspeth’s mouth curved. “Declarations of eternal devotion are rather effective courtship techniques, I find.”

He looked at her. “Courtship. We’re to be wed in four hours.”

“Aye, and it only took ye a kidnapping to work up to it. Most men manage flowers first, but I’ve always appreciated efficiency.”

“I did bring ye flowers.”

“Ye brought me wildflowers and called it practical.”