Page 8 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

“And if I refuse?” she asked, her voice dropping to a whisper.

“I will give ye until Sunday to decide.”

“That is one week.”

“Aye.”

One week.

One single week to claim her name, her lands, and every hard-won, grueling inch of authority she had fought for from traditional men who spent three years waiting for her to crumble under the weight of her widowhood.

One week before the cynical Clan Council watching her fold under a stranger’s blunt ultimatum or walk away forever from the only home she had ever fought for.

She turned her back on him toward the fire because she desperately needed one moment she could entirely control.

She heard him move behind her. Not toward the exit, stepping closer to her.

He stopped just over her left shoulder, standing so close that the powerful warmth of his large body reached her through the cold air in the room. She stared hard at the low flames in the hearth, keeping her breathing steady and her hands perfectly still at her sides.

His voice came in a dangerously low tone, right near her ear, a rough vibration against her skin. “After Sunday, ye either marry me…”

The crackle of the fire. The steady lash of the rain against the high window. The distant, echoing sound ofhismen inhercourtyard settled intohercastle as if they had always belonged there.

“Or,” Sebastian whispered quietly, his breath stirring the loose curls near her neck, “ye leave the castle.”

Alba did not move an inch.

She stood frozen in her own study, in front of her own hearth, in the homeshehad maintained alone since before the blood even dried on the stone floor of her wedding night, and she felt the heavy walls press close around her as if they were waiting to see what she would do next.

She heard him straighten up and step back. The unhurried, agonizing sound of him picking up the whisky cup from her desk, taking a slow sip, and setting the glass down with a soft thud.

Then the heavy door opened and closed, and she was entirely alone.

The long breath she had been holding captive left her all at once in a ragged gasp. Her hands were shaking violently. She pressed them flat against her thighs, smoothing the green wool of her dress, and looked at the dying fire with cold, furious clarity.

Sebastian MacGregor had made one very significant, fatal mistake tonight. He had given her a week. And Alba MacLaren had never once in her life needed more than a single day to plan a war.

Chapter Four

Alba did not sleep.

She lay in the narrow, unfamiliar bed of her second-best chamber—her own main chambers having been taken over by a man with far less right to it than he believed—and stared up at the dark wooden ceiling, listening to the heavy, rhythmic thud of MacGregor boots on her stone floors until well past midnight.

When the sprawling castle finally quieted into a tense stillness, she was still awake, running the same desperate calculation over and over in her mind like a jagged stone turning in a river, wearing itself smooth without actually going anywhere.

Seven days.

She was still running the numbers when the pale, gray light of early morning pushed under the heavy oak door, and Philomena, her maid, arrived, her dark eyes already bright with a fierce outrage before she had fully crossed the threshold.

“They moved the linen press,” Philomena announced, her voice trembling with indignation. “Me Lady, they moved it. Three enormous men with the combined intelligence of a single goat between them decided that the corridor where the linen press has stood for twenty years was a more appropriate location for a weapons rack.”

She set down the heavy water basin onto the washstand with a sharp firmness that stopped just short of a slam. “I told them to move it back. Do ye ken what they did?”

“I can guess.”

“They laughed.” Philomena pulled the thick wool curtain back from the narrow window with feeling. “Laughed, me Lady! As though I were jokin’! As though I were the unreasonable one.”

Alba sat up, tossing back the heavy blankets, her neck throbbing. Outside the window, the Highland sky stretched as a flat, colorless white.