Page 90 of The Highland Laird’s Hellion Bride

“Nay ye daenae need to look at it. Look at me.”

He did, and something shifted in the ordering of his attention. She could feel it in his hand, in the way his shoulders dropped a fraction.

The counting stopped. His feet found the beat, as if they’d known it all along and needed permission to stop being soldiers about it. Then they were moving properly, actually moving, turning through the middle of the hall with something that could honestly be called grace if one was being generous and adequately surprised.

Elspeth’s breath caught.

He was watching her face, and she thought very briefly that she understood now what the children had meant about the staring.

The fiddle reached its bridge and circled back, and they turned with it, Magnus’s hand warm and certain on her waist.

She was two days from becoming Lady Wallace, and she found she was not frightened of that at all.

Then he noticed the hall.

The ribbon-threading had stopped. Mrs. McAulay stood with both hands clasped beneath her chin. Duncan had put down his cup. The girl on the chair had stopped directing candles. Even the boys with the barrel had set it down and were watching.

Magnus’s hand dropped from her waist. He stepped back, cleared his throat, and turned toward the door.

“I need to go for today’s border patrol, and there’s a gate hinge in the east paddock that needs seein’ to,” he said to no one in particular, and left before anyone could tell him that it had been seen to yesterday.

* * *

The western glen was quiet in the wrong way.

Magnus pulled up at the ridge and sat still, letting the horse settle beneath him. Below, the tree line ran dark and unbroken along the foot of the hill, the burn caught the late afternoon light between the rocks, and nothing moved.

That was the problem. No deer at the water. No birds along the upper branches. Something had moved through here recently enough that the glen hadn’t yet gone back to its default noise.

He dismounted and led the horse the last few yards to the soft ground at the edge of the tree line.

The tracks were there.

Two horses, unshod, which meant someone didn’t want them traced to a stable. They’d come in from the northwest, stood a while—the ground was churned in a loose circle where they’d held position—and left the same way they’d come.

He crouched and pressed two fingers into the nearest print. The edges were sharp. Yesterday, or last night at the latest.

He stood and looked back toward Ben Cruachan. From here, the castle sat in full view, the courtyard visible, the main gate, the track down to the village. He could see the smoke from the kitchens. He could see, if he looked, the window in Elspeth’s chamber.

He looked a moment longer than he needed to. Then he turned back to the tracks. He followed the line of them along the tree edge for thirty yards before he found the second thing. A branch, broken clean at shoulder height on the uphill side, the pale wood bright beneath the bark. Not wind. Not deer. A man standing, leaning, watching long enough to want something to rest against.

Magnus stared at that broken branch for a long time.

He knew who had stood here. He’d known before he dismounted, if he was being honest with himself, which he generally tried not to be about O’Brien, because being honest about O’Brien meant sitting with thirteen years of a debt that hadn’t been paid. He’d found it easier to function without doing that too often.

He’d been fifteen when his father’s men had started trusting the wrong man. Sixteen when he’d come home from training to find the ash.

He’d spent thirteen years since then building back everything that fire had taken—the walls, the crops, the people, the trust—and telling himself that he wasn’t building it in fear. That he was building it because it needed building, because his people needed a laird and his father’s name needed a clan still standing beneath it, and not because he was afraid of what happened to the things he let himself want.

He snapped the branch from the tree and dropped it, before walking back to his horse.

The ride back was fast. He didn’t push the horse harder than was wise, but he didn’t slow down for the rougher ground either. By the time he came through the western gate, the yard was bustling with wedding preparation, villagers carrying wood and musicians arguing about something near the stable doors. Not one of them needed to see whatever was on his face right now.

He spotted Duncan above the crowd near the water trough, talking to two of the guards with a cup in one hand.

Magnus came up beside him without breaking stride. “Walk with me.”

Duncan glanced at him, took in whatever he saw, set the cup down on the trough wall, and fell into step. He didn’t ask questions while they were still in the yard. That was one of the things Magnus had always valued about him.