Page 7 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

“Marriage.”

The single word landed between them like a flat stone falling into mud.

Alba looked at him, her breath catching. A cold sensation swept through her chest, quickly followed by a blazing heat. She recognized the second feeling much more clearly. It was pure, unrestrained fury.

“Are ye mad? Absolutely nae.”

He said nothing, his dark blue eyes unblinking.

“Nay.” She stepped forward, her leather boots snapping against the floorboards. “Ye storm into me home with swords drawn, take me castle, take me chair, pour me own whisky…” She stopped abruptly. She took one careful, shaking breath through her nose to steady herself. “And now ye expect me to hand ye me name as well. Because ye asked.”

Something dark and dangerous moved fast through his dark eyes. It was there and gone in a heartbeat.

“Careful, Lady Alba.”

“Or what?” The reckless words came out before she could properly weigh them.

He stood up slowly.

The heavy oak desk still stood between them, but it suddenly felt like almost no barrier at all. He was big in a way that was not just about height. The kind of massive, intimidating size that came from a warrior’s body tested repeatedly in blood and still standing. The room was small. The fire behind her had burned down to low, glowing embers. She was suddenly painfully, inconveniently aware of all three facts at once.

She did not step back.

Sebastian exhaled once, slowly, the broad planes of his chest expanding, and when he spoke again, his voice had dropped into something rougher, deeper, and infinitely more careful.

“I need stability before winter freezes the passes.” His voice had dropped, rougher now, the controlled surface of it cracking slightly at the edges.

He moved around the side of the desk, not toward her, standing in open space. “Me people need land.” A pause, his gaze dropping briefly to the floor before coming back up. “Me nephew needs safety. A home that willnae be taken again.”

His throat moved as he said it. One swallow, barely visible, was quickly controlled. Alba’s anger caught that, just slightly, enough to make her heart stutter.

“I made a vow to me brother.” The words came out quieter than everything before them. He was not asking for sympathy. He was simply laying a fact down between them. “The night he died, he didnae ask me to protect Brian. He already kent I’d do that. What he asked…” Sebastian stopped. His jaw worked once. “What he made me swear was that I’d give the boy a home. A family. A mother.”

The word sat in the air between them, heavy and specific.

“He was six years old and he’d just watched his father turn back into a burnin’ Hall.” Something moved across Sebastian’s face, brief and unguarded, before it was locked away again behind the hard planes of his expression. “I swore it. And I daenae break me vows.”

Alba said nothing. She was very still.

“If we marry,” he continued, his gaze locking onto hers, “MacLaren stays protected. Yer title remains untouched. No clan will dare challenge a holdin’ with me name standin’ behind it.”

“Besideme,” she corrected sharply. “That was yer word on the road.”

“Aye.” His arms stayed loose at his sides.

“Ye meant over me.”

“Nay.” A beat. “I have nay personal interest in ye. Me nephew needs a capable woman to care for him. Ye’ll do just fine.”

The absolute flatness of his delivery was almost impressive.

Ye’ll do.

Alba turned the words over in her mind and felt the shape of them land with their full, precise weight. Not a compliment. Not an insult. A cold assessment of her utility delivered in her own home, behind her own desk, beside her own hearth. As though the only question worth asking was whether she met the minimum requirements for a role she had never been consulted about filling.

She had spent three years proving to every gray-haired man on the Clan Council that she was more than a widow keeping a seat warm. Three years of riding out in every storm, signing every contract herself, standing in every difficult room without flinching. She had earned every inch of what she had.

And this man had walked into her home four hours ago and reduced it to:ye’ll do.