Page 48 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

"Did ye?"

"She took the knife away."

"Good," Sebastian said, with no room for argument in it. He closed Brian's small fist back around the carrots and straightened to his full height. "Ye keep yer fingers. I need ye whole for sword drills come spring."

Brian's whole face lit, the carrots momentarily forgotten. "Ye said we'd start in spring?"

"I said it once. I'll nae be saying it twice, so daenae make me regret it standin' in a kitchen."

Brian, sufficiently warned, clamped his mouth shut over what was clearly a great deal more he wanted to say, and instead beamed up at his uncle.

“Yer nephew,” she said, keeping her voice entirely level and practical but gentle, “tried to kill the potatoes.”

“I was practicin’,” Brian shot back immediately. He released her skirts and proudly held up the carrots in one dramatic, outstretched fist. “And I did the carrots.”

“Aye.” Alba looked down at the orange shards. “We can see that.”

“And who won?” Sebastian asked.

His voice was careful. She could hear the distinct, strained carefulness of it. “Me,” Alba answered immediately.

“Unclear,” Brian muttered, looking down at his carrots.

Cook abandoned the pretense entirely. The deep laugh that had been building since the knife incident came out fully, warm and genuine, filling the kitchen.

Alba looked up. Sebastian was looking directly at her.

Not at Brian, not at the mangled carrots, not at the flour on her cheek that she was becoming increasingly, intensely aware of. Ather. He wore an expression she had not witnessed in him before, unguarded in a way that had nothing calculated in it, nothing strategic. The genuine amusement moved openly across his rugged face because he had not had time to decide whether to let it show.

It softened him entirely.

She had seen him tightly controlled, furious, strategically pleasant, and deliberately unreadable. She had not once seen him look like this. It was considerably worse than any of the other versions.

She looked away first. She snapped her gaze back to the carrots, to the worktable, to the entirely manageable task of deciding what to do with the architectural remains of Brian’s contribution. She was not going to follow that look into any danger.

She was leaving tomorrow.

“If ye’re stayin’,” she said, reaching for the knife and turning her back to the carrots, her voice brisk, practical, and betraying nothing, “ye can make yerself useful. The bread needs a second knead, and Cook’s patience has already been tested far beyond its natural limits.”

Brian immediately transferred his fistful of carrots toward Sebastian. “Uncle Sebastian kneads things very well. He’s very firm.”

“I have heard,” Alba said.

She did not look at Sebastian when she said it.

But she heard him. The low, quiet exhale of a man standing in a crowded kitchen doorway with flour hanging in the air, his nephew at his feet, and something raw in his expression that he had not, this time, managed to put away before shesawcould recognise it in his tone.

She kept her eyes locked on the carrots.

I am leavin’ tomorrow.

She was almost certain she was leaving tomorrow.

* * *

The morning had slipped well past noon, and the carriage was not going to ready itself.

That was what Alba told herself when she left the Solar with her wool cloak half-fastened and her mind moving significantly faster than her feet.