Page 22 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

“Better than Uncle Sebastian,” Brian added, with the serene certainty of someone reporting an observable fact.

Alba pressed her lips together very firmly.

"Well," she said, "most men who've spent the day haulin' stone and shoutin' at farmhands generally do smell that way." She said with a hint of amusement in her voice.

Hamish, somewhere behind her, made no attempt whatsoever to contain himself.

Sebastian’s eyes narrowed. He said nothing, which was somehow louder.

Brian looked at her for another moment with those serious dark eyes, then held out the wooden horse. Not offering it, showing it. An introduction to something important. “This was me father’s,” he said.

Alba looked at the small, battered horse in her hand and felt something shift gently in her chest, like a door opening that she had not meant to unlock.

“Then it’s a very fine horse,” she said, smiling widely.

Brian pulled it back against his chest, satisfied. He looked at the castle behind her, then at her again. “Is it really yers?”

She opened her mouth.

“Aye,” she said. “It is.”

She heard Sebastian quietly exhale beside her but kept her gaze away.

By midday, Brian had appointed himself her shadow.

He was beside her in the kitchen when she checked on the noon meal, standing close enough to observe everything she said to the cook without joining in. He was three steps behind her in the storerooms when she walked through the inventory with John. He appeared without explanation in the stables while she checked the new horses, sitting on a hay bale with his wooden horse on his knee, watching her work.

She did not ask him to leave. She did not make a fuss about his presence. She simply talked to him when the conversation came naturally and let him be quiet when it did not, and sometime inthe middle of the afternoon, he moved from three steps behind to walking beside her, which she also did not remark upon.

She was organizing rooms for the arriving families, walking through the Upper Corridor with a list of names and a mind focused on which rooms had southern light and which ones were too cold for children. She felt the weight of the day in her lower back and temples; she decided she needed just one hour—one single hour in the Library without MacGregors, Sebastian, or any decisions about anything that mattered.

She told John she was unavailable until supper.

She slipped into the Library through the side door and stood in the quiet of it letting the familiar smell of old leather, dust, and cold stone do the work of a deep breath.

The light through the south-facing window was thin and pale. The shelves along three walls held the accumulated reading of several MacLaren generations. Histories, maps, old Gaelic poetry her father had collected, practical volumes on agriculture and animal husbandry that she had consulted more than once in the last three years.

She crossed to her favorite chair beside the window.

A boot was visible beneath the reading table.

One small boot, attached to one small leg, belonging to one small boy who was lying underneath the table with a book proppedopen against the table leg. The book was substantially larger than he was and appeared to be a land survey of the western Highlands from the previous century.

Alba stopped, looked at the boot, and then looked at the book.

“I can still see yer boots,” she said.

A pause. Then Brian’s face appeared slowly around the edge of the table. “I am hidin’,” he said.

“Aye, I can see that.” She crossed to the table and sat down on the floor beside it, her back against the bookshelf, legs stretched out in front of her. The cold of the stone came through her skirts immediately. She ignored it. “From what?”

Brian considered this with the seriousness it apparently deserved. He looked at the ceiling for a moment, then back at her. “Everythin’,” he said.

He spoke with a flat, hollow tone, his small shoulders sinking into his chest as he let his chin rest fully on his knees. He did not look at her, nor did he cry; he simply turned the heavy vellum page of the massive book with a slow, clumsy swipe of his dirty fingers, staring at the faded ink lines as if the dark space beneath the oak table and the heavy, dusty scent of the old book were the only boundaries left that nobody could take away from him.

Something in Alba’s chest pulled tight and then slowly released.

She reached up toward the shelf above her without standing, running her fingers along the spines until she found the one she wanted.