Page 28 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

“Hooded.” Tam met his eyes for the first time, his gaze dead serious. “Dark cloak, dark horse, hood pulled far forward. I couldnae see more than that.”

“Did he see ye?”

“I was deep in the trees. Daenae think so.” Tam stopped turning the cap, his fingers clamping down on the wool. “I daenae like it, me Laird. I’ve been on these grounds for thirty years, and I daenae like the look of it.”

“Ye were right to tell me.” Magnus kept his voice even. “Ye’ll say nothing to the others until ye hear from me. No detail, no speculation.”

“Aye, me Laird.”

“Good man.”

Magnus walked back to the horse.

Elspeth looked down at him the moment his heavy boot hit the stirrup, and then she looked straight ahead again. She did not ask a single thing.

His large arm settled back across her waist, his hand gathered the leather reins, and the horse moved forward.

The castle road was familiar beneath the horse’s hooves, every twist and turn of the stone identical to every other return he had made, but the landscape had fundamentally changed.

The high ridge above the Brennan boundary was visible for the next quarter mile. A sharp, dark line carved against the grey sky, the skeletal pine trees standing along its spine like sentinels.

He looked at it once. A single, cold glance. Then he turned his eyes to the heavy timber of the castle gates and kept his gaze fixed right there.

O’Brien.

The name did not enter his mind with fury; it had been far too long for this. Thirteen years was long enough that what remained in his chest was not anger or the all-consuming hate that had nearly destroyed him. It was something much older, quieter, and considerably more dangerous.

A certainty.

He had rebuilt Ben Cruachan stone by stone, and Ewan O’Brien had watched him do so from the shadows. He had negotiated the trade routes, restored the empty granaries, repaired every single cracked wall, and trained every man who could hold a weapon, and O’Brien had watched that too.

And then, Magnus had ridden to an auction and brought home a betrothed. Something in that action, a permanent shift in the shape of Ben Cruachan’s future, had finally moved the man off the ridge he had been standing on for thirteen years.

Good. Let him move.

The stable lad caught the horse’s bridle at the gate. Magnus dismounted and reached up, his large hands finding Elspeth’s waist to help her down.

Her small hands gripped his forearms for balance. When her boots hit the ground, he immediately looked past her to the gate, then to the courtyard, then up at the high stone walls. He ran the same survey he always did, but this time he cataloged every guard’s position and found the defense insufficient.

“Thank ye,” Elspeth said softly. She gathered the heavy wool of her shawl closer around her shoulders and made her way inside.

Magnus stood alone in the damp courtyard for a long while, watching the door long after it had closed behind her. The brown dress had suited her, as he had suspected it would, deepening the color of her eyes to something closer to bark than moss.

He had not meant to notice that when he chose it.

He scowled at the door, as though it had done something to deserve his displeasure, and then went on to find Duncan.

His cousin was waiting in the dim corridor outside the study. It meant some tension had already reached him through the air.

Duncan read the truth in his face before Magnus could even speak a syllable, and the casual lightness that usually draped him like a loose cloak dropped away cleanly.

“Come in,” Magnus said, throwing open the heavy oak door.

He told him about Tam. All of it, in precise order, without a single embellishment. Duncan listened with his arms folded tight across his chest, his face hardening as he built the problem internally, cataloging the details, arranging the defenses. He did not interrupt once.

When Magnus finished speaking, the room was dead quiet.

“The southern ridge,” Duncan said, his voice flat. “The tracks we found from before.”