Page 61 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

She didn’t.

“Ye’re covered in soot,” he said.

“So are ye.”

“Aye.” He stood up, his jaw set. “Come. Ye should be abed. Ye’ve been sitting out in wet skirts half the night.”

“So have ye.”

“I’m nae the one who nearly fainted hauling a goat twice her own weight.”

“I didnae faint.” She stood up anyway, if only to prove her point, and swayed only very slightly, which she elected not to mention. “I set the goat down deliberately.”

“Mm.” He didn’t argue further, only offered her a hand she hadn’t strictly needed.

Once she’d taken it, he kept it tucked in the crook of his arm as they left the kitchen behind.

That was the last easy thing between them for the length of the walk that followed.

He kept her hand steady in the crook of his arm through the dim corridors, careful of the uneven stone underfoot where a servant had dropped a lamp earlier amid the chaos. No one had yet swept up the oil-slicked shards, and they both said nothing. Not about the fire, not about anything that might have required him to look at her rather than the corridor ahead.

Elspeth held herself upright, chin level, and told herself that was simply good posture and not an attempt to look like a woman who hadn’t spent the better part of an hour replaying a kiss she wasn’t meant to be thinking about.

A shutter banged somewhere above them, loosened by the storm, and Magnus didn’t so much as glance toward it, which told her plainly enough where his attention actually lived tonight, and it was not on loose shutters.

She glanced sideways at him twice and got nothing back either time—his gaze fixed ahead, his grip on her hand no different than it might have been on a servant’s elbow steadying her over a loose flagstone. She found herself wanting, absurdly, to trip on purpose just to see if it changed anything.

She did not do it. Pride, if nothing else, forbade it.

They reached her door in silence, and he stopped and released her hand the moment they’d crossed the threshold, as though her touch had become something to be set down rather than held.

Her hand went cold at once, missing his warmth.

“Ye should rest,” he said.

She studied his face, looking for whatever had been there in the armory, the low, unguarded thing that had watched her come apart on a weapons chest not six hours ago. She could not find it now.

What she found instead was a man standing at parade rest outside her door, jaw set, eyes fixed somewhere past her shoulder, as though the corridor wall had suddenly become the most interesting feature of the castle.

Say it plainly, then. Ask him outright.

“And ye?”

He looked toward the window at the end of the corridor, where the last of the lightning was flickering faint and distant behind the hills, more memory of a storm than the storm itself.

“Someone wished to frighten me people tonight.” A pause, brief and deliberate. “I intend to find out who.”

Her chest tightened. She pressed her palms flat against her skirts to keep from reaching for him.

“Magnus.” She kept her voice low, for no reason she could have named except that the hour seemed to call for it. “About earlier…”

He stepped back before she’d finished the sentence, putting the width of the doorway between them as neatly as if she’d raised a blade.

Her breath caught.

“I apologize.” His voice had gone flat, formal, a stranger’s voice wearing a familiar face. “I lost control of meself. It willnae happen again.”

“Ye’re apologizing.” She said it slowly, testing the shape of it, because surely she’d misheard. Something cold settled low in her stomach, the kind of cold that came from wanting one thing badly and being handed the opposite of it, wrapped politely. “For that.”