Page 84 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

The stable boy took considerably more convincing than Elspeth had expected.

“A stand, ye say. For a cup.” Tam’s grandson turned the scrap of wood over in his hands, squinting at it as though it might explain itself. “What sort of cup needs its own stand, me Lady?”

“An old one. Wooden, plain, about this wide.” She measured it with her hands. “It needs something to sit in that’ll keep it from tipping or cracking further, and I thought if it had the Wallace crest carved into the base, it might look less like an accommodation for a cracked old thing and more like something meaningful.”

“Ye want me to carve a crest.”

“Aye.”

“On a stand. For a cup.”

“Aye.”

He’d looked at her the way Duncan sometimes did, as though weighing whether the request was worth the trouble of questioning further. He eventually shrugged and went to fetch a blade and a proper piece of oak, muttering something about strange requests from strange quarters that Elspeth chose not to hear too closely.

It had taken him the better part of two days, working in whatever hours he could spare between his other duties. When he’d finally brought it to her—a simple round base, deep enough to hold the cup steady, the Wallace crest worked into the wood with more skill than she’d expected from a boy who spent most of his hours mucking stalls—she’d turned it over in her hands and felt something in her chest settle, the way it hadn’t quite settled since the swans.

She left it on Magnus’s desk herself, rather than trust it to a servant, setting the cup carefully into its new stand and angling it just so before she lost her nerve and left the room.

She did not leave the room. She told herself she was waiting to see his reaction, purely out of curiosity. She sat in the chair farthest from the desk, hands twisting together in her lap, untwisting them the moment she noticed, and twisting them again a moment later regardless.

Magnus came in a while after supper, a ledger under one arm, clearly expecting an empty room, and stopped two steps past the threshold.

“Elspeth.”

“I didnae mean to startle ye.”

“Ye didnae.” He set the ledger down, and it was then that his eyes found the desk properly, found the cup sitting where it always sat, except not quite as it always did—elevated now, cradled, the crest catching the last of the evening light through the window.

He went very still.

“I asked Tam’s grandson to make it,” Elspeth said, because the silence had gone on a beat too long for her comfort. “I thought practical men likely prefer practical presents, and given yer reaction to the last gift I gave ye, I wanted something considerably less likely to hiss at ye or chase ye across the yard.”

Magnus didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he slowly crossed to the desk and lifted the cup free of its new stand, turning it once in his hands before setting it aside and picking up the stand itself, studying the carving with an attention that made her fingers twist tighter together in her lap.

“It’s meant to keep it from cracking further,” she went on, because his silence was doing considerably more to unsettle her than words would have. “It’s cracked already along the base, and I thought if it kept tipping the way it does on that shelf, it’d only get worse, and ye clearly…” She stopped before she said something she couldn’t take back easily. “I just wanted to help. However clumsily.”

He ran his thumb slowly over the carved crest, back and forth, the way a man tested a blade’s edge or a horse’s leg, checking for something he couldn’t quite name even to himself.

“Who carved this?”

“Tam’s grandson. The stable boy. He’s quite skilled, ye ken, for someone who spends most of his days covering his boots in mud.”

“Aye. He’s always had a steady hand.” Magnus didn’t look up from the stand. “I didnae ken he could carve like this.”

“Nor did I, until I asked.”

He set the cup back into its new place, carefully, adjusting it slightly until it sat centered, and stood there looking down at it a moment longer than the task strictly required.

Elspeth held her breath.

She had been holding it for some while now, waiting for some sign, some word, anything at all that would tell her whether she’d finally managed to give this man something that didn’t send him fleeing across his own courtyard.

He looked up at her.

Does he like it?

How will I ken if ye like it when ye look at me like that?