Page 68 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

He didn’t deny it, which was answer enough, and set another stone with rather more focus than the previous one had required.

She read on.

The bees from the lower slope had followed the wildflowers up as far as the tower’s shadow, working the small yellow blooms that had rooted between the stones. Somewhere below them, a curlew called, long and mournful and lovely in the way of things that had no notion they were being listened to.

She read a poem about heather in bloom, and one about a fisherman’s wife watching for a boat that didn’t come. Magnus set the last of the loose stones back into place just as she reached the closing lines of that one, and sat back on his heels to survey his work.

“There,” he said. “That’ll hold another fifty years, at least.”

“Ye say that with such certainty.”

“I built the first half of it. I ken its bones better than most.”

She smiled at that, closed the book over one finger to mark her place, and looked out past him toward the glen spreading green and silver below, the loch catching what pale light made it through the morning haze.

“This was a fine outing, Magnus.”

“Better than an inspection ride?”

“Considerably. Though I confess I’m still uncertain what precisely we’ve inspected today, beyond a tower and yer capacity to carry a poetry book without reading it.”

“I’ve read it,” he said quietly, not looking at her. “More than once.”

She opened her mouth to press him on that—on which poems, on why, on when exactly a man who claimed to have no patience for verse had found the time to read an entire volume more than once. It was in that pause, book open on her lap, his admission hanging unanswered between them, that she noticed the light had changed.

The pale morning haze had thickened, the soft grey gone heavier, darker at the edges, rolling in low and fast off the western hills the way weather did in this country when it meant business rather than merely threatening it.

A gust caught the pages of the book and nearly tore them from her grip.

Magnus was already on his feet, his gaze fixed on the same darkening sky. Whatever ease had settled over the last hour was gone from his face in an instant, replaced by the same flat, assessing look she’d seen him wear the night the furnace shed burned.

“We need to move,” he said. “Now.”

The rain didn’t build gradually. It simply arrived all at once, the sky opening like something had cut a seam in it. Elspeth had barely tucked the poetry book inside her cloak before Magnus grabbed her by the wrist and led her down.

“The path,” she said, already half-slipping on wet stone. “It’ll be treacherous now.”

“Aye. So we go carefully and quickly, both at once.”

He didn’t let go of her wrist the whole way down, taking the worst of the scree ahead of her, angling his body between her and the steepest drop without once making a show of it.

By the time they reached the horses, her slippers had given up, soaked through and squelching with every step.

Magnus lifted her into the saddle rather than waste the time it would take her to manage it herself, his hands closing briefly around her waist in a way that would have undone her more thoroughly had there been a spare moment to notice it properly.

They rode.

The rain came sideways before they’d cleared the first mile, driven by a wind that hadn’t been there an hour ago. Elspeth bent low over the mare’s neck and let the animal find her own footing on ground gone treacherous and dark, trusting Magnus’s shouted directions over her own judgment, since his came from thirty years of knowing this land and hers came from four days of largely getting lost in it.

“Left at the burn!” His voice carried back to her, half-swallowed by wind. “The ford’s washed if the water’s up. Daenae try to cross where ye did before!”

She followed him left.

The burn had indeed risen, brown and fast where it had been a clear trickle that morning, and he led her a quarter mile upstream to a narrower crossing before doubling back toward the castle at a pace that left no breath for conversation.

By the time Ben Cruachan’s walls rose grey and solid out of the downpour ahead of them, Elspeth had stopped feeling the cold, her whole body singularly focused on staying in the saddle and keeping the mare’s head pointed the right direction.

It was only once they’d clattered into the shelter of the stable yard, the roof cutting the worst of the rain off all at once, that she felt the full weight of how soaked through she’d gotten settle over her at once, heavy and cold and without dignity.