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“I swear to you, he’s a menace,” another voice added—Mattias.
“He sure doesn’t look the type, though,” the first voice replied. “I mean, he’s handsome enough.”
“Appearances are deceiving,” Tarley said.
“I’m not so sure about that,” the first voice giggled.
“Brinna,” Tarley warned.
The voice belonging to Brinna laughed harder.
Once in the kitchen, Tarley took Lachlan’s dish once more and dropped it into a bucket of water before joining him at the work island where everyone else had crowded around. He looked at the faces, wondering why he was there.
There was Credence, a woman he’d learned was named Mrs. Barnwell, Mattias, the large man Tarley had called Papa, and two women. One of them was smiling, her gray eyes bright, her hair like colored wheat threaded with sunlight and copper rather than the brown of Tarley’s. The other, he’d seen earlier, dark haired, dark eyed, but her face seemed to slip through his mind and into obscurity as if she’d never been there at all. Each time looking at her felt like he both knew her and had never seen her before.
Of them all, he was the odd one out. The stranger. Tarley was the reason he was standing there at all, which made him look over at her.
“She’s up there now,” Credence said.
Tarley kept her gaze fixed on Credence. “Have we heard anything?”
“Not since she went up.”
“I’ll get everyone some tea,” Mrs. Barnwell said, though the rest of them refused, not ‘wanting to put her to any trouble.’
Lachlan leaned toward Tarley as side conversations broke out. “You wanted to speak with me?”
“Not here,” she said, still avoiding his gaze, which made Lachlan wonder what she wasn’t willing to say in front of her family. The thoughts he came up with made his insides heat, but he doubted her intentions had anything to do with that, even if he was hopeful. She’d rejected him, and Lachlan realized he was absolute rubbish at trying to decipher her.
“Scarlett?” Credence asked.
The party turned collectively toward the stairs where Tarley’s mother stood, her cloak draped over an arm along with a bag she carried. “She has her memory.”
There seemed to be a shared sigh of relief.
Scarlett’s gaze scanned the party and stopped on him, jumped to Tarley and then back. Her disconcerting gray eyes narrowed. “You’re the man Tarley found?”
He nodded. “Saved.”
Her frown deepened as she studied him, as if looking into the depths of his soul and measuring his quality. When she seemed satisfied with her study, she turned to Tarley. “She wants to see you.”
“Me?”
“I told her about you,” Scarlett admitted, her eyes back on Lachlan, “and the mysterious stranger near death in the woods.”
“You think I had something to do with this?” Lachlan stepped forward, shocked at the accusation he heard in her voice.
He heard Tomas and Mattias shift behind him. Lachlan knew it was defensive because he was defensive.
“It is strangely convenient, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Mother–” Tarley stepped slightly between Scarlett and Lachlan. “He didn’t have anything to do with it. The timeline doesn’t work.”
Scarlett waved a hand. “Details.”
“I wouldn’t hurt the queen,” Lachlan said.
“And how would we know that?”
