Page 40 of The Laird's Masked Passion

“If ye tell anyone about the cloth, I will murder ye in yer sleep.”

His mouth curved in the dark.

“There she is,” he murmured.

“What daesthatmean?”

“It means I feared terror had made ye dull.”

A pillow struck his shoulder. Colin laughed once, softly, and let it remain between them. But after the chamber quieted again, he kept his eyes open in the dark.

He had bought a bride to settle a debt. He expected resentment, inconvenience, and perhaps a woman who would weep until he learned to ignore it. Instead, he had been given Elspeth Fraser: sharp-tongued, frightened, brave, and lying beside him with a strip of linen still clenched in her hand as though she might yet defeat marriage by strangling it.

He ought to have found that troublesome.

He did.

He also found it far more dangerous than he had expected.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Elspeth expected the morning after her wedding night to feel different… more ruined, perhaps, more tragic and more suitable for poetry written by women who stared wistfully from towers and died before supper. Instead, she woke with her body wholly intact, her dignity somewhat bruised, and a strip of linen still clutched in one hand.

For several minutes, she lay still and stared at it. Then she turned her head. Laird MacKenzie was already awake.

He was sitting near the window, half-dressed, sharpening a small blade with slow, even strokes. Morning light cut across his face, finding every stern angle and leaving the rest in shadow. He did not look like a man who had spent the previous night laughing at his wife’s preparations for terror. He looked like a man who never laughed at his life and might punish anyone who suggested otherwise.

Elspeth sat up, pulling the covers to her chest. “Have ye been sitting there watching me sleep?”

His gaze did not lift from the blade. “Nay.”

She narrowed her eyes. “That was too quick.”

“I was watching the door.”

“That is also unsettling.”

Now he looked at her. One dark brow rose. “Would ye prefer I watchedye?”

Heat climbed into her face before she could command it away. “I would prefer ye turned intae a crow and flew out the window.”

His mouth moved. Then he stood and she remembered, most inconveniently, that the man had a body under all that severity, a body she had seen too much of by the loch, and too little of in the dark, and far too much of in her thoughts since.

He tossed the blade onto the table. “Dress. We go tae breakfast.”

“Oh, dae we?” she asked. “How graciously phrased. I hoped marriage might include invitations rather than military summons.”

“It may, when yer husband has married a woman capable of obeying a simple one.”

Elspeth climbed from the bed with as much dignity as she could manage while searching for her slippers. “Then I pity ye, for ye have clearly chosen poorly.”

“Aye,” he said dryly. “I begin tae suspect as much.”

Skye came in soon after, carrying a gown of deep blue wool and a face full of questions she dared not ask while Colin remained in the room. Elspeth permitted herself to be dressed, pinned, laced, and inspected, though every tug of the bodice reminded her that she was not a guest in this castle. She was its lady.

His lady.

The thought sat badly with her.