Page 26 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

She had been anticipating it. She had been firmly telling herself not to anticipate it for the last mile. Still, the solid warmth of his forearm arrived before she properly braced herself for it. Her skin flushed beneath her clothes.

Three fields further along, standing slightly apart from its mother at the muddy edge of the pasture, was an injured calf. Magnus spotted it from the saddle. He changed direction with a subtle shift of his weight, and the horse followed. They came up alongside the stone fence, and he stared down at the calf for a long, quiet moment.

“Right foreleg,” Elspeth said.

He glanced up at her, his dark eyes sharp. “Aye.”

He dismounted, went in through the wooden gate, and crouched in the damp grass beside the calf. The calf stood still for him. Magnus ran his large, bare hand down the young animal’s leg with a slow, even pressure. His scarred knuckles stood out against the pale hide.

The calf’s ear flicked once. Magnus said something to it, his voice too low for Elspeth to catch the words, and the calf turned its head toward his shoulder.

She watched the steady, careful way his hands moved. There was hard work in those fingers, a roughness that contrasted sharply with the gentle touch he now used. The calf settled under his hands the same way the ewe had followed him out of the gorse. Not forced, but redirected by a quiet steadiness that he exuded whenever he was near them.

He came back, remounted, and said nothing for three full minutes as the horse walked on. Then: “I’ll have it checked. Likely soft ground near the water trough.”

Then they found Morag. She was at the far end of the lower field, standing on the wrong side of a drystone fence that appeared, from what Elspeth could see, intact. She had no clear reason for being on the wrong side of it.

Magnus saw her and exhaled heavily through his nose. Elspeth felt the vibration down her back, the deep breath, the weary quality of it.

He dismounted and crossed the damp grass with his hands tucked behind his back. He stopped directly in front of Morag and stared down at her. Morag stared back.

“Ye’re becoming impossible,” he said, his voice low, even, and completely unhurried. “The fence is there for a purpose.”

Morag chewed.

“Ye were in the south pen this morning. Ye were in the Great Hall last night. Ye are now in a field ye have no business being in, and I cannae determine how ye got here.” He looked at the intact stone fence, then back at the goat. “Ye’ll tell me nothing, I assume.”

Morag swallowed. Then she began chewing something else.

“Aye,” Magnus said flatly. “I thought so.”

“This,” Elspeth muttered dryly, nodding to the goat, “is the one villager ye havenae bothered to properly introduce me to. And yet she seems to be more favored.”

Then she laughed.

It came out before she could stop it. A real, unbridled laugh, the same one the chicken had shocked out of her in the courtyard. She pressed her hand over her mouth immediately, but it did not help. The sound was already out, ringing sharp and clear across the cold, silent field.

Magnus straightened his spine and turned around. He crossed back to the horse, remounted, settled his heavy weight behind her, and stared at the track ahead.

“I was merely inspecting livestock behavior,” he said, his voice completely grave.

She bit her lower lip. Hard. The pain did not fully work to clear her face.

“Of course,” she said, her voice trembling with residual mirth. “Very thorough.”

“It is important to understand the patterns.”

“Aye. She has several.”

A long pause. “She has too many.”

She pressed her lips tightly together and stared at the jagged line of the hills, breathing carefully through her nose until the laughter finally settled in her chest.

His hand suddenly tightened around her waist as the great horse stepped sideways on a loose, wet stone. The movement was automatic, brief, a split-second correction that lasted only until he had the reins sorted and the stallion’s hooves level again. It was nothing. A purely functional gesture. But it registered.

She looked at the grey track.

He is strange. He is impossible.