Page 65 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

She told herself it was simply the lateness of the hour. She did not believe herself even slightly, and gave up trying to by the time she’d climbed back into bed, staring up at the canopy and replaying the whole conversation in her mind. The pacing, the three knocks, the careful list of his faults he’d clearly worked out in advance and delivered anyway despite how plainly it cost him to say any of it aloud.

An outing. An actual one, chosen rather than dictated, with mud allowed and instructions left behind for once.

She should have been thinking of that. Instead, she found herself thinking of the way his voice had dropped when he’d made his promise. Of the door closing somewhere inside her chest at the sound of it, and of how thoroughly unfair it seemed that a man could stand in a doorway offering her exactly what she’d asked for and manage to take something else away in the same breath.

She did not sleep again for a while.

When she finally did, it was with the shawl half-tangled around her shoulders and a smile she couldn’t quite account for.

When Becky came to wake her at first light, the first thing out of her mouth before good morning, before anything sensible at all, was to ask what state her second-best boots were in, because apparently they were bound for the stables directly after breakfast, and she had absolutely no intention of being late.

The stables smelled of hay and horse and rain drying off the cobbles. Magnus was already there when she arrived, saddling the grey mare himself rather than leaving it to a stablehand, which struck her as its own small oddity.

He looked up when she came in and stared at her a beat longer than she was accustomed to. It was not the quick, assessing glance he usually spared her, checking for mud or missing gloves, but something slower, unhurried, the look a man gave something he was deciding whether he was allowed to want.

“Ye came,” he said, which was an unnecessary thing to say, given that she was standing directly in front of him.

“Ye did invite me.”

“Aye.” He finished with the girth strap and came around to offer her a hand up, which he had never once done in four days of inspection rides, generally leaving her to manage the mounting block herself while he sat already ahorse, reins loose, waiting with poorly disguised impatience.

She took the proffered hand. His grip was careful, deliberate, steadying her elbow as she settled into the saddle with a gentleness that felt, if she was being honest, considerably more unsettling than his usual brisk indifference to whether she managed the horse or fell flat in the yard trying.

Is he plannin’ to abandon me on some hill and rid himself of me so tenderly that I willnae even notice I’ve been left? she wondered, watching him check her stirrup length with the same careful attention.

She laughed under her breath at the thought, and he glanced up at the sound.

“Something amusin’?”

“Nay. Only wonderin’ at yer manners this mornin’.”

“I have manners.”

“Ye have orders, usually. This is somethin’ else.”

He didn’t answer that, only mounted his horse with ease and led them out of the yard at a pace gentle enough that she never once had to hurry the mare to keep beside him.

They rode for a good while in something closer to companionable silence than she’d expected. The morning was cold enough that her breath plumed faintly, the hills rising green and wet-dark ahead of them, until he reined in at the foot of a steep rise crowned with the crumbling remains of an old watchtower, half of its upper stones scattered down the slope as if something had taken a fist to it.

He cleared his throat. “The recent rains loosened several stones.” He gestured toward the tower without quite looking at her. “I thought I might repair it.”

“Ye brought me on an outing,” Elspeth said slowly, “to watch ye do masonry.”

“I brought ye on an outing that involves somewhere worth seeing. The masonry is incidental.”

She tilted her head, considering whether that was worth arguing, and it was in the middle of that consideration that his gaze caught on something at her collar and stalled there, his whole train of thought visibly derailing.

“Where did ye find that?”

She glanced down at the embroidered vest laced over her shift beneath her cloak, dark green thread worked into a pattern of thistles along the hem. “I made it.”

“Made it?”

“From old curtains. Mrs. McAulay found the fabric for me. She said no one had any use for it, sitting in a chest since before ye were born, and I’ve never been one to leave good fabric idle.”

He looked at the stitching a moment longer, something flashing behind his eyes that she couldn’t read. “It’s well made.”

“Thank ye.” She felt the compliment land somewhere warmer than the words themselves quite accounted for, and covered it by nudging the mare forward toward the base of the slope. “I’d have thought ye too busy inspecting fences to notice a woman’s stitchwork.”