Page 62 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

“Aye.”

She dug her fingers into the folds of her skirt, out of his sight, and made herself hold his gaze.

“For which part, precisely? The part where ye carried burning beams out of a shed with yer bare hands, or the part before it?”

Something flickered across his face at that, gone before she could name it. “Ye ken which part.”

She did.

But she’d wanted him to say something else. She wasn’t certain what, only that “It willnae happen again” had landed in her chest like a door shutting, and she hadn’t been fast enough to get a hand in the gap before it closed.

“I do.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “I’d like to hear ye say it aloud, so we might both be clear on what it is ye’re so determined to apologize for.”

He did not oblige her. “It willnae happen again,” he repeated instead, as though that might make it truer, and inclined his head to her the way he might have inclined it to a visiting dignitary he’d just as soon not entertain twice. “Sleep well, me Lady.”

Then he turned and walked back down the corridor, his boots even and unhurried on the stone. He did not look back once, not even when she quietly called his name.

She stood in the doorway with the blanket around her shoulders and the ghost of his fingers still warm against her ear, and found she was trembling. Not from the fire, not from the cold stone under her bare feet, not from anything approaching fear at all.

* * *

The eastern wall took the entirety of the morning to inspect properly, stone by stone, mortar by mortar.

Magnus ran his palm along seams that had stood since his grandfather’s time, looking for anything soft enough for a man to have worked at with a blade in the dark. He found nothing.

That told him less than he wanted it to. A patient man left no marks a hasty one would.

“Ye’ve gone over that same stretch twice now,” Duncan said, falling into step beside him with two horses in tow, Jinny’s edge freshly whetted and belted at Magnus’s hip where she’d stayed since dawn. “Ye’ll wear a groove in it with yer hands before ye find anything the fire didnae already tell us.”

“The fire told us someone got close enough to lay oil and leave again without a soul the wiser.” Magnus took the reins of the grey gelding and swung himself up into the saddle. “I’d like to ken how.”

“Through the postern gate. Half the household forgets it exists most days, us included.”

“Then we start there. Double the watch on it, and put a bar across it besides, one that cannae be lifted from outside.”

They rode the border at a walk.

Magnus read the ground. A broken bracken stem here, a hoofprint half-filled with rain there, none of it conclusive, all of it worth noting. Three separate times, he stopped his horse and sat still in the saddle, listening to nothing in particular, the way he’d learned to do at seventeen when listening was the only thing standing between his people and whatever might have come for them out of the trees.

He nudged the gelding forward, and Duncan followed.

They found the tenant families gathering split kindling near the mill, old Tam directing three of his grandsons. Magnus reined in long enough to ask after the roof he’d mended a fortnight ago.

“Held through the storm fine, me Laird. Better than the church roof, if the priest’s grumbling is to be believed.” Tam squinted up at him, taking in the soot in the creases of his knuckles despite a full morning’s scrubbing. “It looks like ye took care of the fire yerself, me Laird, rather than ordering others to.”

“Someone had to carry the beams.”

“Aye, but nae usually the Laird himself.” Tam said it mildly, but there was something under it, a question shaped like an observation.

Magnus chose not to answer the question underneath. He never had been much good at leaving that sort of work to other men, not since the year he’d learned exactly how quickly a household could be left with no one to do it.

He checked the mill wheel, the grain stores, the shepherd’s near pasture where the ewes had scattered wide during the storm and needed counting twice before he trusted the number.

He found a lame ewe and splinted her leg himself with two lengths of green willow, kneeling in the mud with Jinny’s hilt digging into his ribs. Duncan held the animal’s head and made unhelpful observations about how a man who’d sworn off softness had certainly found his way back to nursing livestock quickly enough.

“It’s an ewe, Duncan, nae a philosophical position.”

“Never said it was.”