Page 54 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

His hand slid from her hair down the line of her spine, slow and deliberate, and she felt it everywhere. Every inch of skin beneath the thin shift was achingly aware of exactly how close he stood, how little separated them, how thoroughly he had stopped pretending this was anything but exactly what it was.

Thunder cracked directly overhead, close enough to rattle the shutters at the corridor’s end, and the flash of it lit the space between them white and stark for the length of a single heartbeat.

In that flash, she saw his eyes. They were dark and utterly without the distance he wore like armor every other hour of the day. What she saw there instead was hunger, plain and unguarded, a want he had clearly been fighting since the loch and had just catastrophically lost the battle against.

It stole the breath clean out of her.

And then, just as quickly as it had begun, he stepped back.

The retreat was abrupt enough that she swayed, catching herself against the wall.

He stood a full pace away now, his chest rising hard, one hand dragging back through his disheveled hair as though he could physically pull himself back into order.

He looked, for one unguarded moment, genuinely alarmed. Not at her—she understood that even before he spoke—but at himself, at whatever line he’d just crossed without permission from the careful, controlled man he insisted on being at every hour that wasn’t this one.

His eyes moved over her face, quick and searching, checking her for some injury she didn’t have.

“Are ye well?” His voice came out rough.

She nodded, because she couldn’t trust her voice to do better.

He held her gaze a moment longer, something flashing behind his eyes that she couldn’t read and he clearly had no intention of explaining. Then he inclined his head once, short and formal.

He turned and walked back down the corridor toward the stairs without another word, his stride quick and even. He did not look back once, not at the turn, not at the last flicker of candlelight before the dark swallowed him whole.

Elspeth stood alone in the corridor, one hand pressed flat against the cold stone wall, her candle guttering low in the draft, and listened to the storm beat on overhead while her pulse hammered considerably louder in her ears.

* * *

The armory smelled of oil and cold iron, a narrow stone room lined with racks of blades that caught what little light came from the single lamp Magnus had lit before settling into the chair at its center.

He’d taken Jinny and set to work with the whetstone in long, even strokes, the sort of task that required just enough attention to occupy a man’s hands without requiring anything at all from the rest of him.

It was not working particularly well.

He could still feel the shape of her against him. The give of her mouth beneath his, the way her fingers had fisted in his shirt rather than pushed him away, the small startled sound she’d made before she’d kissed him back with a force that had very nearly undone every last piece of his self-control.

He had lost control. Again. Twice now, in the space of a fortnight, after thirteen years of never once losing it at all.

For thirteen years, he’d have sworn to any man living that he did not do things without deciding to do them first. He decided when to ride out, when to sign a contract, when to climb a roof at dawn rather than wait on a man with a ladder. He did not, as a rule, find his hands movin’ before his head had given leave.

His hands had moved anyway. Twice now. And both times, the leave his head gave came well after the fact.

He turned the blade in his hands, checking the edge in the lamplight, and set the whetstone against it once more.

“Ye’ve survived worse than that, Jinny,” he muttered.

The door creaked, and he looked up. Elspeth stood in the doorway, one hand on the latch, her expression somewhere between startled and deeply skeptical.

“Were ye speaking to a sword?”

He set the whetstone down. “Aye.”

“Why?”

“It’s listened to me longer than most people.”

She blinked at that, several times in quick succession, and he watched her decide that the matter did not warrant further pursuit, whatever her opinion of it might be. She stepped fully into the room instead, arms folded, chin lifted.