Page 3 of Promised to the Cursed Laird

I hope they're nae planning tae close it, she thought.

She looked at the keep itself. The window on the upper floor was narrow. The lower window was smaller still, too small for a person. The door was heavy, reinforced at the frame, the kind of door that would hold against a heavy blow.

"I'll have the chamber prepared," Cailleach was saying.

"Aye," Fearchar said. "She'll need⁠—"

"I can speak tae my own needs," Neilina said.

Both men looked at her. Fearchar with an expression that said he had been expecting this and was disappointed it had arrived so soon. Cailleach with a flicker of assessment, quickly covered.

"Of course," Cailleach said, pleasantly. "What does the lady require?"

She had already decided what she was and wasn't going to say in this courtyard, in front of these men, with the gate open behind her and the road still possible if she simply turned her horse around right now.

She did not turn her horse around.

Because Fearchar's words were still sitting in her chest, the things he'd said about those glens, about MacKinnon's men, about the things that had been done that he wouldn't speak of plainly but she could read in the spaces around his words.

Her brother was many things. He was overprotective and he was stubborn and he had a talent for deciding what was best for the people he loved without consulting them. But he wasn't given to stories that weren't true, and the lines on his face were real, and the war had put them there.

She needed time.

Time to understand what was being asked of her and whether there was a way around it that didn't require walking into a marriage with a man she'd been told was dangerous.

MacRath's stronghold could give her that time. Briefly. On her own terms.

She looked at Cailleach.

"The lady requires her own horse saddled and unobstructed access tae the road east." She looked at him steadily. "But as I suspect that isnae something yer hospitality extends tae, I'll accept a chamber, water for washing, and supper."

A pause.

"That can be arranged," he said.

"Good," she said. "Thank ye."

She let a groom take her horse. She let a woman lead her inside. She walked with her back straight and her chin level and the inventory still running behind her eyes, measuring distances, counting steps from the chamber door to the inner courtyard, from the inner courtyard to the gate.

"Neilina." Fearchar's hand on her arm, briefly, as they reached the corridor. "This is for yer protection."

"My protection." She looked at his hand until he removed it. " I was safe enough at home." She met his eyes. "The only danger I've been placed in is the one created when a man decides tae act on what he fears instead of what he knows."

His jaw tightened. "I've my reasons."

"Ye always do," she said. "That's the trouble with ye, Fearchar. Ye've always reasons. And the person who pays for it is always someone else."

She walked into the chamber before he could answer.

CHAPTER TWO

The door to her chamber was bolted a few minutes later. She listened to it with her ear near the door and felt the resonance of it in her chest, not fear—she would not call it fear—but something older and more animal, the body's response to being closed in.

This is nae what I agreed to , she thought.

She had agreed tae stay while Fearchar arranged things. She had agreed tae wait. She had not agreed tae be locked in.There was a fundamental difference between choosing to remain somewhere and being prevented from leaving, and Cailleach MacRath had just made that distinction very clear.

She went to the window.