Page 67 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

Magnus set to work without further ceremony, shrugging off his jacket and laying it over a dry patch of grass, rolling his sleeves back over forearms already marked with the fading black of yesterday’s fire.

He tested each loose stone with his palm before lifting it, turning it over, and fitting it back against its neighbors with a patience she hadn’t expected from a man who barked orders across a burning yard the night before.

She watched him work for a long while and found she didn’t much mind the silence of it. There was something settling about watching a man mend a thing with his bare hands, unhurried, absorbed, with no council waiting for his decisions and no fire demanding his attention. Only stone and mortar.

“Ye may return to the castle whenever ye please,” he said eventually, not looking up from the stone he was setting. “I ken that watching a man stack rocks isnae much of an outing.”

“Nay.”

He glanced over at her, surprised enough that his hand stilled on the stone.

She didn’t offer anything further. She only tipped her face back toward the sky, where the morning had gone soft and pale. She let him return to his work, which he did after a moment, though she caught him glancing her way rather more often than the masonry strictly required.

“No poetry today?” he asked a while later, setting another stone.

“Nay.” She said it almost lightly, though there was something underneath it she hadn’t quite meant to let show. “I’m tired of tryin’.”

He stopped working altogether.

She felt the stillness of it before she looked over and found him watching her with an expression she couldn’t immediately place.

He rose, crossed to where his satchel sat propped against the tower’s base, and knelt beside it. When he straightened, he had a book in his hand, and it took her a moment to place it, because she hadn’t expected to see it again at all.

It was the volume of nature poetry she’d gifted him weeks ago, its spine creased from handling, a ribbon marking a page well past the middle.

“Ye keep it with ye?”

He shrugged, too casual about it, though he didn’t quite meet her eyes. “It’s heavy. Useful for holdin’ things steady while I work.”

“Ye carry a book of poetry up hillsides to use as a paperweight.” She raised her eyebrow just a little.

“Aye.”

“Magnus.”

The corner of his mouth twitched, some small, reluctant thing he seemed to be actively suppressing.

“It’s a practical book,” he said, and held it out to her. “Read to me.”

She stared at him. “What?”

“That way, we both enjoy ourselves. I work.” He nodded toward the tower. “Ye read.”

She slowly took the book from him, turning it over once in her hands as though it might explain itself. Instead, she found only the familiar weight of it, the ribbon marking a page well past where she’d left off before gifting it to him, which meant he had read considerably further into it than “holding things steady” required.

She said nothing about that. She only opened it to where the ribbon lay and began to read.

Her voice found its rhythm within a few lines, falling into the cadence she’d used a hundred times reading to Katherine in another life.

Magnus returned to his work beside her, setting stone after stone while she read of moors and morning mist and larks rising at dawn, his hands steady and sure even as his head, she suspected, was only partly on the mortar.

She caught him glancing over each time her voice dropped into something softer, some particular turn of phrase that pleased her, and each time he caught her noticing, he looked back at his stones with a swiftness that fooled neither of them.

“Ye’re nae listenin’ to the poem,” she said midway through a stanza about a stag crossing a frozen loch. “Ye’re listenin’ to me readin’ it.”

“Can a man nae do both?”

“Nae with that expression on his face, nay.”