Page 36 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

A man watchin’ an empty gate is a man who’s lost an argument he didnae ken he was having.

The horse behind him stamped once. He turned back to look at it.

The rope had gone slack in his other hand while he was not paying attention. He had to gather it up again, hand over hand, forcing his attention back where it belonged—on the animal in front of him and not on the particular sway that had carried a woman out of sight around the corner of his own keep.

He clenched his teeth and hauled the lead taut.

The chicken squawked, huffy at being jostled. He set it down, and it stalked off with its feathers ruffled, offended at what had transpired throughout the morning.

Duncan’s voice carried across the yard, something about the grain wagons and the eastern road, and Magnus answered him without ever hearing a word of that question. His attention snagged again on the empty archway where the courtyard opened onto the keep.

He caught himself doing it and stopped. He made himself look at the horse instead, at the rope in his fist, at anything that was not a woman’s skirts vanishing around a corner, and found the effort of it considerably more work than the horse had been.

The dog that had abandoned him for her returned with its tail low and settled back against his boot as though nothing had happened at all.

Magnus looked down at it. It looked back up at him, unbothered. He decided the animal had the right idea and tried, with limited success, to follow its example.

Chapter Eleven

The watchtower had been abandoned longer than she had been alive, judging by the state of the stairs leading up to it. It was a crumbling spiral of stone that had lost its rail two turns from the top, and made every step something of a negotiation.

Elspeth had gone up there for no better reason than curiosity, and because Becky had mentioned it existed in the same breath she had mentioned the loch. Over the last several days, she had developed a keen appreciation for anything that might be hiding something.

The room at the top of the tower was small, round, and smelled of dust and old rope. A single arrow slit let in a blade of grey light that fell across the floor and caught, of all things, the corner of a folded wool blanket shoved beneath the remains of a broken bench.

She crouched and pulled the blanket free. Beneath it, stacked with a neatness that told her exactly whose hands had arranged them, sat four books.

She lifted the top one and turned it over. She ran her fingers over the familiar green spine with its gilt lettering worn thin at the edges. She opened it to the page she had marked, and there, tucked precisely where she had left it, was her ribbon.

“Ye absolute rascal,” she uttered, and the empty tower gave her no argument.

She went through the others quickly, checking each spine, laughing sharply when she found the volume with the shepherdess and the exiled prince tucked directly beneath a slim book of verse she had not even known was missing.

He had not merely relocated her books. He had curated a private hoard of foolish notions and hidden it in a ruin, presumably believing no woman in her right mind would climb a set of crumbling stairs in search of poetry.

She sat back on her heels with her arms full and allowed herself several long, satisfying seconds of pure vindication. It tasted, she decided, rather like the first sip of whisky he did not know she could muster.

She carried the whole stack down the stairs with considerably more care than she had climbed it, and was still deciding which book deserved pride of place on her shelf when she came around the side of the hall and found Becky crossing the yard with an armful of linens.

“Has the Laird finished with the western boundary?” Elspeth asked, adjusting her grip on the books.

Becky glanced at the stack, then back at her mistress’s face, choosing not to comment. “Nae yet, me Lady. He sent word he’d stop at the loch after, to wash before supper. Said nae to wait for him.”

Elspeth went very still.

“The loch,” she repeated.

“Aye. Should be there within the hour, I’d imagine, given his pace.”

Elspeth looked down at the books in her arms. She looked back up at Becky. “Thank ye, Becky.”

She carried the stack the rest of the way to her chamber, set them down on the bed with care, and stood there for a moment, considering.

Magnus had told her in his own flat, immovable way that the books contained foolish notions. That they might encourage further discussion of courtship and stars and poetry, as though discussion itself were a hazard to be managed alongside a stubborn goat or a leaning fence post. He had decided, without asking her, that she ought not to have them.

Very well.

She was not, at present, without options.