Page 63 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

By midday, he’d covered the entire border and found nothing further, no second oil-stain, no broken lock, no sign that a man had come or gone anywhere he oughtn’t.

That should have settled something in him. It didn’t.

A single point of entry, cleanly used and cleanly abandoned, was not the work of a man testing his defenses once and giving up. It was the work of a man who had gotten exactly what he came for and had no reason yet to try again.

Fear.

That was what the oil had wrought. Not damage, not truly. The furnace shed could be rebuilt in a fortnight, and would be. What couldn’t be so easily rebuilt was the quiet that had settled over the household since dawn. Servants moving a little faster than usual, voices dropping a little lower near the windows, old Tam’s grandsons casting glances at the tree line they wouldn’t have bothered with a week past.

O’Brien—if it was O’Brien—hadn’t needed to burn the castle down. He’d only needed to remind Ben Cruachan that it could burn.

Magnus stopped the gelding on the rise above the loch. He sat there for a long moment, looking back at his own walls, thinking of the year he’d rebuilt every one of them stone by stone with his own hands because there’d been no one else left to do it, and thinking of exactly where he had been standing when the fire started.

He had been in the armory. He had been in the armory with his hands full of Elspeth and his attention elsewhere, and a man had walked close enough to his own furnace stones to pour oil on them without a single soul raising an alarm.

That would not happen again. He had already given the order. Doubled watches, armed men at the border, Jinny back at his hip where she’d stayed for thirteen years before he’d let himself set her aside even for an evening.

He would not be caught unarmed in his own home a second time, and he would not again let himself go so far into anything, or anyone, that the walls around him ceased to exist.

Which unavoidably brought him to Elspeth.

He turned the gelding back toward the keep and let the animal pick its own pace down the slope while he turned the matter over in his mind.

He had said what he’d said at her door because it was true. He could not afford to lose himself again, not with O’Brien testing the walls, not with an entire household depending on him keeping his head. That part he stood behind.

But it sat considerably less well.

He had walked away from her looking wrecked and wrapped in another woman’s blanket, with soot still on her cheek, leaving her with an apology that had sounded even to his own ears like a man apologizing for a fault rather than trying to explain a necessity.

He had not meant it to land as regret, but he suspected it had.

Duncan, riding beside him, seemed to read something of it on his face, because he didn’t offer his usual commentary. He only said, after a while, “Ye’re broodin’.”

“I’m thinkin’.”

“Aye.” Duncan said nothing more.

Magnus owed her an apology. Not the one he’d already given, which had been true in its substance and clumsy in its delivery, but a different one. For the manner in which he had left, for the careful distance he’d kept the length of that corridor as though touching her again might undo every order he’d just given about watches and borders and armed men.

He knew exactly where to find her.

He turned toward her chamber, and found that he had absolutely no notion what he intended to say to her once he arrived. Only that whatever it was, it would need to be a good deal more honest than anything he’d managed the night before.

Chapter Eighteen

The pacing started sometime after midnight, when Elspeth had given up any pretense of reading and was holding the book open in her lap, staring at the same page she’d been staring at for the better part of an hour.

It came through the wall in slow, even strides. Floor to wall, floor to wall, the particular rhythm of a man working something out with his feet because his head hadn’t managed it sitting still.

She sat up.

“Magnus Wallace, will ye stop pacing already?” she muttered to the wall, as though it might carry the words through to him.

The book slid from her lap, forgotten.

She sat there in the dark, listening. Six strides, a pause, six strides back, over and over, long enough that she began counting without meaning to, long enough that she started composing, and discarding, three separate things she might say to him if he ever stopped doing it and came to a door instead.

Eventually, a door did open somewhere down the corridor, and closed again. Silence followed.