Page 45 of Promised to the Forbidden Laird

Her hands stopped upon the lid. The bees continued their low humming beneath it, undisturbed by the name that altered everything within her.

Donaldina straightened slowly. Roy stood near the rosemary hedge, with the empty honey spoon still held between two fingers. The wind moved through his dark hair and pressed his linen shirt against the fresh bandage beneath it. He should have been resting. Instead, he watched her with that grave patience which made refusal feel less like defense and more like confession.

“Which records?” she asked.

“Stores, rents, boundaries, agreements with neighboring clans. Anything that might show where Dun Ard is strongest or where Cormac may find weakness.”

“But… they were Lachlan’s.”

“I ken.”

“They are private,” she whispered.

Roy’s expression did not change. “Then say nae, and I willnae ask again.”

That should have reassured her. Instead, it unsettled her further.

Most men would have reminded her of the royal accord. They would have spoken of necessity, authority, or the obligations of a woman whose brother no longer occupied his chair. Cormac would already have entered the solar and called the intrusion protection. Roy merely waited.

Donaldina looked toward the sea. Sunlight broke weakly through the clouds and scattered upon the water like fragments of tarnished silver. The sweetness of honey remained upon the air between them, mingling with salt, smoke and the crushed rosemary beneath Roy’s boots.

She had been guarding Lachlan’s records since the day he left for war. At first, she had done so because he had asked her to keep the accounts in order until his return. He stood in the solar doorway fastening his sword belt while promising that he would be home before the winter storms began. She laughed at him for trusting kings and weather with equal foolishness.

Later, she guarded the ledgers because there was no one else she trusted to understand them. Each book held the evidence of years spent preserving Dun Ard while men praised Lachlan for governing from a battlefield hundreds of miles away. Each page bore the small decisions upon which survival depended: which household could endure a levy, which roof had to be mended before winter, and which widow required grain though she had no coin with which to pay.

To show Roy those pages was to show him more than the clan’s stores. It was to reveal how much of Lachlan’s rule had quietly passed through her hands.

Donaldina covered the bowl of honey.

“Come,” she urged softly.

Lachlan’s solar retained his absence too well. The room smelled of leather bindings, dust and peat smoke long settled into the stone. Afternoon light entered through the western window and fell across the great table where maps lay weighted beneath carved stones. His chair remained behind it, broad-backed and worn smooth at the arms where his hands rested during long councils.

Donaldina never sat there. She moved around it instead and unlocked the cabinet built into the wall.

Roy closed the door behind them. The latch settled with a soft click that seemed unnaturally loud within the stillness.

His gaze traveled over the shelves, the rolled parchments, the neat stacks of correspondence and the ledgers arranged by year. He did not touch anything.

She expected him to enter as a laird entered any room, certain that whatever lay within would eventually answer to him. Yet, Roy stood just inside the door as though he understood that this place had not become his merely because Lachlan was gone.

“This one contains the stores,” she told him, setting a thick volume upon the table. “Grain, salted meat, lamp oil and winter fodder. The rents are there. Coastal holdings there. Fishing agreements in the smaller chest.”

Roy approached. “Lachlan kept thorough accounts.”

Donaldina opened the ledger. “He disliked figures.”

Roy looked at her.

“He once claimed arithmetic was an English punishment inflicted upon honest Highlanders,” she smiled.

A faint amusement touched his eyes. “Yet the accounts are exact.”

Donaldina turned a page. “Because I kept them.”

The admission entered the room more sharply than she intended. Roy’s gaze dropped to the writing.

Her writing.