Page 45 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

“I can see that.”

“Ye’ve been seein’ quite a lot, Cousin.”

Magnus did not dignify that with a response.

MacKinnon, three cups of whisky into the afternoon and considerably looser for it, raised his own toward the hearth. “Amazin’, truly. Yer household’s transformed, me Laird. When’s the handfasting?”

Magnus did not look up from the ledger. “One week from yesterday.”

Across the hearth, Elspeth’s head snapped up. He met her gaze and then fixed his eyes back on a column of figures that had, for the last quarter hour, stubbornly refused to add themselves correctly.

Hamish, apparently unbothered by anything so tedious as adult conversation continuing without him, looked at the two of them with open curiosity. “Are ye like Ma and Da?”

“Nay, lad,” Duncan said too quickly, too delighted. “They dislike each other, apparently.”

Mrs. MacKinnon, who had said very little all afternoon beyond gentle corrections to her children, laughed outright. “Exactly like yer ma and da, Hamish.”

Hamish frowned. “Really, me Laird?”

Magnus looked up. Elspeth had gone very still, watching him with an expression he could not read. Something caught between challenge and curiosity, waiting to see what he would say.

“Aye,” he said.

“Aye,” Elspeth echoed a beat later, her voice light, almost playful.

Isla, who had been quiet throughout all of this, working diligently at the ribbon plait Elspeth had shown her, looked up with a small frown that suggested she had been paying considerably more attention than anyone had credited her for.

“That cannae be true,” she declared.

“And why’s that, dearie?” Elspeth asked.

The girl shrugged, unbothered by the weight of what she was about to say. “Because ye stare at each other so much. Ma and Da never do.”

Magnus looked down at his ledger. Elspeth found something extraordinarily interesting in the bottom of her teacup.

Duncan made a sound that started as a cough and ended as an open, delighted laugh, loud enough that he had to set his whisky down before he spilled it on MacKinnon’s sleeve.

MacKinnon was already laughing, and the children joined him.

“Out of the mouths of bairns,” Duncan managed, wiping at his eyes.

Magnus did not look up. He told himself he did not need to look up because he had not been staring, not in any manner that warranted comment from a ten-year-old who had no earthly business observing anything at all.

He happened to know, without needing to look, precisely how Elspeth’s mouth curved when something amused her, a small tug at one corner before the rest of her face caught up.

He knew the particular shade her cheeks turned when she laughed outright, a rosy tint spreading quickly from her cheekbones down to her jaw. He knew that she tucked loose curls behind her left ear when she was nervous, always the left, never the right, though he could not have said why he had noticed that or when. He knew now that she held frightened children against her left shoulder rather than her right.

These were, he told himself, simply things a man observed, living in close quarters with another person. Practical observations. Nothing more.

He turned his attention back to the ledger.

Unfortunately, the figures had grown considerably more difficult to read than they had been an hour ago, the columns blurring slightly no matter how hard he fixed his eyes on them.

He found himself listening for the sound of her voice picking the story back up across the hearth, and a small, stubborn part of himself was relieved when she did.

* * *

The letter to Katherine took three attempts before Elspeth was satisfied with it.