Page 53 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

Elspeth said nothing. She understood, without needing him to explain further, precisely what that meant. A man who had lost every likeness of the people he loved, and had them painted back into existence from nothing but what remained in his own head, because the alternative was letting them fade.

“Do ye miss them?” she asked quietly.

He didn’t answer immediately.

The rain filled the silence where his voice should have been, and Elspeth found herself watching the side of his face rather than the portraits, watching the muscle that ticked once in his jaw before he spoke.

“For thirteen years,” he said, “I’ve rebuilt fences. Roofs. Fields. Cottages.” He said it flatly, reciting a list he had recited to himself a hundred times before. “If somethin’ breaks, I mend it. If someone needs somethin’, I provide it.” He paused. “If I stop movin’…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He shrugged one shoulder, and the gesture said more than any words could have.

Elspeth lowered her gaze to her candle, watching the small flame gutter in a draft that had found its way through some gap in the old stone.

“Do ye ken that I dreamt of princes when I was younger?” she said.

She felt him turn toward her then, felt the shift of his attention even without looking up.

“Princes?”

“Aye.” She let herself smile, faint and a little rueful. “Because reality was disappointin’. And princes danced with their princesses beneath the stars, and never once complained about the cold or the mud or the fact that their fathers wanted somethin’ else for them.”

He studied her, his expression unreadable in the low light, and then his eyebrow lowered.

“Princes sound exhaustin’,” he remarked.

Elspeth laughed before she could stop herself, the sound escaping soft and startled into the cold corridor. “They probably are.”

Magnus cleared his throat and shifted, some unspoken signal that the conversation had reached its natural end, and made to step past her toward the stairs.

Elspeth moved aside to give him room. Her slipper found the one patch of stone that had gone dark and slick beneath a slow drip from the roof above, and her foot went out from under her before she’d registered the danger at all.

She had a half second of pure, weightless panic, one hand grasping at empty air, and then his arm slipped around her, catching her before the thought of falling had fully finished forming.

His other arm came up to brace on her shoulder, steady and sure, and she found herself caught against him with her feet not quite settled beneath her, the whole of her weight given over to his hold.

The storm hammered on above them, thunder rolling long across the roof, but it seemed, for the space of several heartbeats, to belong to some other part of the castle. Here, in this narrow corridor, there was only the low guttering candle between them, the warmth of his hands through her shift, and the sudden awareness of exactly how little distance remained between his mouth and hers.

His expression gave nothing away. But his hands were warm, warmer than she’d expected, and something about the stillness of him, the careful, deliberate way he held her upright without moving to release her, sent heat through her chest.

Her breath came uneven.

“Thank ye,” she managed.

Magnus swallowed. She watched his throat bob, watched him search for something to say that wasn’t what he was clearly thinking and finally land on: “Daenae fall again.”

“That almost sounded carin’.”

He didn’t answer that. Instead, he leaned down slowly, and she thought—she was almost certain—that he meant to argue the point, to tell her gruffly that it had meant nothing of the sort, that concern for a woman’s safety on a slick floor was simply practical, the way flowers on a nightstand were practical.

He kissed her instead.

It came without warning. His mouth found hers hard and sure, one hand sliding from her shoulder up into the loose fall of her hair, and she made a small startled sound against him that dissolved almost instantly into something else.

His arm tightened around her waist, drawing her fully against him, and she felt the solid heat of his chest through the thin fabric of her shift, felt the low sound that rumbled in his throat when her fingers curled into the front of his shirt and held on rather than pushing away.

She kissed him back with everything she hadn’t known she’d been holding in reserve. Her free hand slid up along his jaw, feeling the rough stubble beneath her palm.

Magnus angled his head to deepen the kiss, and a small distant part of her noted that this was considerably more than the kiss at the loch, considerably more dangerous, standing here in a dark corridor with the storm raging above them and nothing but his arms keeping both of them upright.