Page 37 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

She went through the stack again, more deliberately this time, until she found the one she wanted. Not the green one with her ribbon, which she had grown fond enough of to keep close, but a slimmer volume with a cracked red spine. It was the sort of book Katherine had once smuggled into her father’s castle wrapped inside a shawl because it was, by any polite measure, considerably more scandalous than sermons or shepherdesses.

She had read perhaps a third of it before her father discovered its existence and burned it, along with two others, in the solar hearth. She had assumed it was lost forever.

Apparently, Magnus’s library held a second copy.

She tucked it beneath her arm, checked her reflection long enough to confirm that her hair had not escaped its pins, and left her chamber. She knew exactly what her purpose was. She had decided, quite firmly, that if the Laird of Ben Cruachan intended to dictate what she read, she would dictate where she read it.

The path to the loch ran west past the stables, then down through a stand of birch that thinned as the ground began to slope. She had walked it once before, with him, on the second morning of her inspections, and she remembered the turn well enough not to need Becky’s directions.

She adjusted the book beneath her arm, lifted her skirts clear of the damp grass, and started down the path.

* * *

Magnus had waded in chest-deep an hour past, once the western fences were checked and the last of the mud scrubbed from his hands proved beyond simple washing.

The water was cold enough to numb him from the neck down, which suited him fine. He had swum the length of it twice, dunked his head to clear the day from his brain, and was working his way back toward the shallows when he heard the crunch of boots on gravel. The tread did not belong to any of his men.

He knew the sound of her tread by now. Quick, deliberate, the small extra weight she put on her heel.

He surfaced properly, water sluicing off his shoulders, and found her perched on the flat grey rock at the edge of the bank, ankles crossed, skirts arranged with a precision that suggested considerable thought had gone into the picture she intended to make.

She had a book open in her lap.

“I thought,” she said pleasantly, not looking up, “that our outing should be more romantic in nature than an inspection.”

He said nothing. Water dripped from his hair down the back of his neck.

She turned a page with two fingers, cleared her throat, and began reading aloud. “And beneath the stars, his heart knew no peace, for the lady’s voice haunted him like a summer song…”

Magnus exhaled through his nose. “Elspeth.”

She did not look up. “Her lips moved as though poetry itself had chosen to dwell there…”

“Elspeth.”

“And though he fought against it, his entire soul longed only to silence her with a…” She paused. Looked up. Studied the page with an expression of profound concern. “Oh dear, the page is damaged.”

He stared at her.

She sat there in pale wool, her curls coming loose from their pins and catching the wind off the water, ankles crossed, reading aloud in an unhurried voice.

He disliked poetry. He had said so more than once with conviction. He disliked romance in the abstract and stars in the specific, given the wolves that tended to accompany them. He particularly disliked the way her tongue lingered on words that had no business being that long.

What he disliked most, standing chest-deep in the freezing water with his men half a mile off and no earthly excuse to get out, was that the entire sum of his objections amounted to a single overwhelming urge to make her stop talking by whatever means necessary.

“Ye’re very annoyin’,” he huffed, because it was true, and because it was easier to say than the alternative.

“Aye?” She grinned down at him, unbothered, closing the book over one finger to mark her place. “And yet I daenae see ye displayin’ yer impressive livestock knowledge as prettily as ye did at the Gatherin’.”

“I ken enough about livestock.”

“Clearly.”

His eyebrow came down. She smiled again—wider this time, the particular smile that meant she knew precisely what she was doing and had no intention of stopping—and opened the book back to her page.

“Like a song carried upon the evenin’ breeze…”

Magnus had had enough of arguing from the water. He turned and started for the bank, wading through the shallows. His kilt, soaked through, dragged heavily against his legs with every step, water sheeting off him in the grey afternoon light.