Page 56 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

He sat with it a moment, the whetstone gone still in his hand, and found the silence stretching longer than he’d meant it to, longer than was comfortable for either of them, in the low lamplight with the memory of the corridor sitting unresolved between them.

She held his gaze, waiting.

He looked at the flush rising high in her cheeks, at her lips, parted slightly around whatever retort she’d decided not to finish, and found his attention narrowing to…

Those lips.

He reached for his cup instead and drank, because it seemed considerably safer than continuing to look at her mouth and think about it.

Elspeth’s eyes narrowed, tracking the movement.

“That cup is yer father’s. I ken that much already.” She tipped her head. “What I daenae ken is why a bit of blackened wood gets carried from room to room like it might walk off if ye set it down.”

He looked down at it. Worn smooth at the rim from years of handling, the only thing that had survived the fire O’Brien had started. The only piece of his father he had left that wasn’t carved from memory and hung on a corridor wall.

He had no wish to explain any of that.

“Ye wouldnae understand,” he said. “Ye daenae even drink.”

Something dangerous crossed her face, quick and sharp.

“Oh?” she murmured. “I daenae drink?”

She crossed to the small shelf where the whisky sat before he’d fully registered her moving, poured herself a measure considerably more generous than propriety allowed, and swallowed it in one clean motion.

Magnus stared. “That was one cup.”

“Was it?”

She poured a second. Drank that too without so much as a cough, without the faintest sway that ought to have followed two measures of whisky taken in quick succession by a gently bred woman who claimed no experience with spirits.

“I was raised an only child,” she said, setting the cup down with deliberate care, “by a father who forgot I existed most days, in a household full of servants who found me entertainin’ enough to teach me whatever I asked. I ken how to drink, Magnus. I ken how to tend livestock. I ken how to run a household from top to bottom without a single soul’s guidance.”

She paused. “I can do a great many things ye havenae troubled yerself to learn about me.”

He said nothing. He found he had, once again, nothing ready to say.

The fight went out of her shoulders all at once, the proud line of them dropping into something smaller, closer to admission than defiance.

“I simply want to see the stars,” she added, quieter now, her eyes dropping to his collar rather than his face. “I want to walk beside ye and see the man behind the Laird.”

He watched her. Her cheeks had turned a deep crimson, whether from the whisky or the argument, he couldn’t say. Her eyes had brightened, sharp and clear despite the drink, and her hair had come loose at her temple during the course of the evening, one curl falling free against her jaw in a way that made his hand itch with the unhelpful urge to tuck it back.

She stood there, angry and flushed and utterly certain of herself, and he found his carefully maintained distance sliding sideways without his permission.

“Ye want to see the stars,” he said.

“Aye.”

He set his cup down. He was not certain afterward what had prompted him to take the step that followed. Maybe it was the whisky in her, or the fight still bright in her eyes, or simply thirteen years of careful restraint finally running thin against a woman who refused to be managed by any of his usual methods.

He stepped closer. “Then stop askin’ books and poets for them.”

“And where should I ask?”

He was close enough now that he could smell the whisky on her breath, warm and sharp. Beneath it was the unmistakable scent of lavender—the same scent that had haunted him since the auction, since the ride home with her rigid and small against his chest, since every hour he’d spent trying and failing to think of her as merely a practical arrangement.

“Me,” he said. “I will show ye the stars.”