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He closed the space between them in a single stride, his large hands coming up to gently grip her upper arms. He did not pull her into an embrace, but he held her firmly, anchoring her to the ground.

“Look at me, Mabel,” Caelan commanded softly.

She dragged her wide, terrified blue eyes back to his face.

“He is coming to talk,” Caelan assured her, his voice a low, vibrating promise that carried over the howling wind. “Nothing more. Fergus Comyn cannae force anything while ye remain under me protection. He will sit in me hall, he will speak his piece, and then he will leave. Nay decision will ever be made concerning yer future without yer explicit consent. I swear it to ye.”

Mabel stepped forward, closing the distance between them. She did not pull away from his grip. She tilted her head back, looking directly into the dark, swirling depths of his eyes.

“How can ye do this?” Mabel asked. Her voice was no longer trembling with fear. It was shaking with a raw, desperate heartbreak.

Caelan frowned, his thick eyebrows pulling together. “Do what?”

“How can ye stand there, promising to protect me with yer very life, while calmly discussing the possibility of another man becoming me husband?” Mabel demanded. The words tore out of her throat, laced with a bitter, searing pain.

Caelan went still. His hands tightened fractionally on her arms.

“It is a political reality,” Caelan forced himself to say, repeating the tired, hollow lie he had been using for weeks. “He is a sitting laird. He intends to offer a formal suit.”

“I daenae care about his suit!” Mabel cried out, her small hands coming up to press flat against the hard, solid muscle of his chest. “I care about ye. I care about us.”

“We kissed, Caelan,” Mabel reminded him, her voice dropping into a breathless, pleading whisper. “We kissed twice. And neither of those moments felt like a political duty. Neither of those moments felt like a mistake.”

Caelan squeezed his eyes shut for a fraction of a second. The memory of her soft mouth parting beneath his, the sweet, intoxicating taste of her surrender, crashed into his mind with devastating force.

“If those kisses meant anything to ye,” Mabel continued, her voice breaking on a sob she fiercely refused to shed, “if ye feel even a fraction of what I feel when ye touch me, how can ye still expect me to smile politely while another laird walks into yer home to claim me?”

His first thought was that he could not.

The feral, possessive monster inside his chest roared to life, violently rejecting the very image of Fergus Comyn standing beside her. He would never allow another man to touch her. He would never allow another man to look at her golden hair, to hear her clear, bright laughter, or to claim the fierce, unyielding loyalty of her heart.

He opened his eyes. The raw, desperate hurt shining in her striking blue eyes gutted him.

Caelan moved before his logical mind could stop him. His hands slid from her arms, wrapping possessively around her waist. He hauled her flush against his frame, eliminating every single inch of space between them. The sharp scent of her lavender soap flooded his senses, intoxicating and absolute.

Mabel gasped softly, her fingers curling tightly into the fabric of his dark tunic. She tilted her face up to his, her lips parting in breathless anticipation.

He leaned down. His gaze dropped to her mouth. The sheer, overwhelming need to consume her, to brand her as his own and silence all her doubts with the physical truth of his desire, raged through his blood like a wildfire. He felt the soft, erratic flutter of her breath against his jaw. He was inches away. A fraction of a movement, and she would be his.

But as he looked at her beautiful, innocent face, a dark, toxic shadow fell over his mind.

He remembered the blood on his hands. He remembered the execution in the Great Hall, the brutal, necessary violence that defined his entire existence. He remembered the terrifying, empty look in the eyes of the men he had slaughtered.

I will ruin her.

Caelan’s entire body locked into rigid, unyielding stone.

He stopped. His face was hovering mere inches from hers, but the burning, desperate heat in his gray eyes vanished. It was replaced by a cold, impenetrable sheet of ice.

He slowly, deliberately pulled his hands away from her waist. He took a full step backward, rebuilding the massive, terrifying wall of the Black Laird between them.

Mabel blinked, her hands falling uselessly to her sides. The sudden, freezing absence of his body heat left her shivering in the wind.

“What happened between us changes nothing,” Caelan stated. His voice was utterly devoid of emotion.

Mabel stared at him, her lips still parted, her chest heaving with shallow breaths. “Caelan.”

“Me responsibility is to honor the promise I made to yer father,” Caelan continued, looking at her with a brutal detachment that tore her heart straight down the middle. “I promised to secure yer future. And I will do exactly that, even if it means standing aside while another man offers ye the life ye actually deserve.”