Page 106 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

“It was practical. Ye wanted flowers.” He dropped his hand from his neck and looked at her directly. “I have little experience with…” He stopped again. His jaw moved once. “With any of this. As ye may have noticed.”

“I did,” she said pleasantly.

He exhaled slowly through his nose.

She was watching him, her eyes bright, the corner of her mouth quirking up. She had had ash on that cheek yesterday morning; he had wiped it away with his thumb, and she had let him without pulling back. He had had to stop himself from pressing his lips there instead.

“Are ye frightened?” he asked cautiously. “Of today. After everything.” He looked toward the gate, the yard, the castle. “After everything that happened.”

Elspeth was quiet for a moment. She looked down at her hands, where Agnes was steering Morag in a wide ceremonial circuit of the vegetable beds, and then back at him.

“I spent me whole life dreaming of princes,” she said. “Men who arrived on horseback with poetry ready and perfect hair and absolutely no opinions about livestock.”

Magnus waited.

“And I find…” She looked up at him squarely. The teasing was gone now, replaced by something else. “I find I prefer beasts. Ones who rebuild fallen cottages with their own hands and argue with sheep and are unreasonably afraid of geese⁠—”

“Swans.”

“Swans,” she corrected, without missing a beat. “And who come charging into danger covered in blood for the women they love, even when those women were foolish enough to go out in the dark alone looking for stars.” She tilted her head. “So, nay, I’m nae frightened.”

Magnus looked at her. He thought about the ribbon in his coat pocket, the one he had carried from the stables yesterday. He reached in, found it, and held it out without speaking.

She looked at it in his palm. Then at him.

“Ye said ye wanted ribbons on the morning of our wedding,” he said.

She took it from his hand slowly, and he watched her face while she did, the thing that moved across it, bright and unguarded, and felt something in his chest that had been braced and rigid for thirteen years stop holding.

He smiled. It arrived without warning, rare enough that he felt the unfamiliarity of it, but it came, and he did not put it away.

Elspeth looked at him, smiling, and her own face did something that undid him.

From across the garden, Agnes’s voice carried back to them. “Morag ate a ribbon again.

Chapter Thirty

The morning had been a chaos of the best kind.

Becky had cried twice while pinning Elspeth’s hair and blamed it on a loose thread both times. Mrs. McAulay had appeared in the doorway three times to make sure everything was proceeding correctly. Each time she had declared herself satisfied and left, and each time she had returned within four minutes with a new concern.

Katherine sat on the bed, munching on an apple and offering commentary that was occasionally helpful and consistently opinionated. Agnes stood in the corner, observing the proceedings with her arms folded.

“The left side,” Katherine said around a bite. “The curl on the left is lower.”

“It’s meant to be lower,” Becky said firmly.

“Is it?”

“Aye.”

“It looks lower than proper.”

“Katherine,” Elspeth said to the mirror.

“Aye?”

“Eat yer apple.”