Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
The study was supposed to be empty.
Sebastian had checked the Great Hall, the kitchens, and the South Corridor before deciding that an hour of quiet with the supply ledgers was both possible and deserved. He had earned it.
The day had included a boundary dispute between two MacGregor families over adjacent rooms, a MacLaren farmer who had arrived to complain about fence posts, and a two-hour conversation with John O’Connor about the spring planting schedule that had been genuinely useful and had also taken two hours.
He pushed open the study door.
Alba was behind the desk with a candle at her elbow and an open letter in front of her.
She was holding his seal, the heavy silver signet Hamish had salvaged from the desk drawer, which now apparently belonged to whoever arrived first, and pressing it down firmly into a pool of bubbling, blood-red wax.
Her brow was slightly furrowed; her attention was fully focused on the linen paper.
Sebastian stood in the doorway and looked at her sitting in his chair, at his desk, using his seal, in the room he had specifically told her three days ago was his study. He stood perfectly still, his knuckles resting against the oak frame, and breathed slowly, carefully through his nose.
“How many times must I tell ye that liberties like this come after ye carry me name?”
“I am still mistress of this castle.” Without a glance in his direction, she lifted the silver stamp with a smooth, vertical pull, inspected the sharp ridges of the crest left behind in the hardening wax, and set it down on the blotter with a soft clink. “The papers have nae been signed yet.”
He crossed toward the desk, his heavy boots measuring the floorboards with a slow, unhurried weight.
“Aye. That is a favor to ye at present.” He stopped directly on the opposite side of the oak table, leaning down slightly to plant his palms flat on the wood, forcing her to look up or remain in his shadow. “Ye’re either signed in, or ye’re out. Those are the only two positions available.”
Alba lifted her gaze from the letter. Her eyes were perfectly cool, the deep blue of river ice.
“Perhaps I do have somewhere else to go after all,” she said, her voice dropping into a light, almost conversational lilt.
Before she could pull the paper back, Sebastian reached across the expanse of the desk, his massive hand covering the corner of the sheet, and hooked his fingers to spin the parchment toward himself.
He did not pick it up. He simply tilted it into the candlelight just enough to read the bold, elegant ink script on the front.
Lady Margaret MacKenzie.
He straightened, releasing the paper, and kept his facial muscles locked in absolute stillness.
The MacKenzie lands. Fergus MacKenzie, a former man-at-arms to Alasdair MacRae was one of the most formidable Lairds in the Northern Highlands. He built his reputation not through inheritance but through the kind of sustained, intelligent violence that other men studied and tried to emulate.
Sebastian knew him by reputation, the way every serious Highland Laird knew him.
He had briefly considered MacKenzie territory himself after the fire before calculating that the proximity to Kerr’s attention made it a liability rather than a refuge.
He had even let Kerr believe he was heading there, buying himself the time to turn south instead.
Kerr would eventually see through the misdirection. Sebastian had never pretended otherwise. A man like Malcolm Kerr—methodical, patient—did not make noise and did not leave a trail forever.
This meant that the time Sebastian had bought with that deception was finite. Weeks, perhaps. Not months.
Alba’s lands had been the safer choice precisely because they were unremarkable.
A widowed Lady. No Laird. Strong walls with no particular reputation attached to them, nothing that would draw Kerr’s eye south before Sebastian had the Holding secured, the Clan settled, and enough teeth behind those walls to make the answer to Kerr’s arrival something other than a massacre.
If Alba traveled north to MacKenzie lands and Kerr was already watching that territory, if her presence there caused the threat to turn south again, back toward the people Sebastian had specifically brought here to keep them out of Kerr’s reach…
He cut the thought off. Looked at her.
“Ye ken the MacKenzies,” he said.
He tapped the folded edge back toward her. His voice came out leveled, stripped of the grit it carried a moment ago.
“Fergus MacKenzie is me cousin’s husband.
” She pulled the letter back into her space without hurry, using the smooth side of her thumb to press down the crease of the fold.
“Margaret will have me. I am certain of it.” She leaned back in the heavy carved chair, looking up at him.
“So ye see, I am nae quite as without options as ye assumed.”
Sebastian said nothing.
The irritation beneath his ribs was familiar enough. He had felt it since the road, the kitchens, the tower storage, the empty chamber, and with every calculated move she had made over the past five days. But this was different.
The idea of Alba MacLaren traveling to MacKenzie’s protection, sleeping under another man’s roof, eating at another man’s table, being kept safe by another man’s walls, moved through him cold and sharp and considerably stronger than mere irritation.
He disliked it very much.
“Send the letter,” he said.
She blinked. Her hands went completely still against the paper. It was the first time in five days he had seen her surprised by him, and the smallness of it, the brief, sudden parting of her lips and the quick expansion of her dark eyes, did something entirely unhelpful to his chest.
“I am nae stoppin’ ye,” he said. He took a step backward, straightening his shoulders as he turned toward the door. “But ye’ve two days left on our agreement. Send yer letter. And then come to the celebration ye planned and remember that whatever ye decide, these people deserve one good evenin’.”
He turned and hauled the heavy timber door open, stepping out into the drafty corridor before she could find the response she was already reaching for.
* * *
His people had not sounded like this since before the fire.
Sebastian stood near the stone entrance, his shoulder propped against the masonry, a horn cup of whisky held loosely in his right hand. He watched his people, his and hers both, mixed across the long tables, MacGregor tartan overlapping MacLaren wool.
The initial, stiff caution softened into the loud, competitive noise of two clans realizing they shared the same names and the same complaints.
He felt something in his chest that he could not quite identify.
Not happiness. Not quite. Something more cautious than that.
The awareness of something good that was still very frail.
The music helped. A MacLaren fiddler had found two MacGregor pipers near the hearth, and the three of them had apparently decided that their respective repertoires were more complementary than competitive.
The sound they were making was filling every corner, bouncing off the ceiling, getting into the blood whether you intended it to or not.
“Ye look furious,” Hamish said, dropping his weight against the wall beside him.
“I am fine.”
“Aye.” Hamish lifted his own horn cup, taking a slow sip without breaking his gaze from the crowd. “Same thing with ye.”
Sebastian looked across the Hall.
Alba was at the far end, near the second long table, and the distinct quality of the problem became instantly clear. She was wearing the green dress. He had seen her in it before. It was the same dress—the same heavy silk, with the same square cut across the collarbone.
But the high candlelight from the iron chandeliers was doing something to it tonight that it had not done in the dim corridors or the frozen courtyard.
It moved with her; the fabric was shifting from dark moss to bright emerald.
It caught the light along the curves of her waist and the small of her back, beckoning his gaze back to her time and time again.
Her dark curls were loose around her shoulders, bouncing as her head moved. She was laughing at something one of his men had said, her head tilted back, one hand rising to touch the bare skin at her throat—completely unguarded in a way she rarely was when he was nearby.
The sound of her laugh reached him across the roaring Hall. He felt it like a cold draft at the base of his neck.
The man beside her, a MacGregor smith by the size of his shoulders, said something else, smiling broadly. As he spoke, his hand came out and rested briefly, familiarly, on Alba’s forearm to draw her attention.
Sebastian was moving before the thought had fully formed in his mind. He covered the length of the Hall in a straight, unbroken line, his size clearing a path through the servants without him having to glance at them, and stopped beside Alba.
The young smith saw Sebastian’s clenched jaw and the dark look in his eyes and immediately stepped back into the crowd. Sebastian paid him no particular attention; he merely acknowledged the fact of his presence, which seemed to be enough.
Alba looked up at him. Her expression shifted from surprise to instant recognition, then to something much more complicated and tense—all within a single breath.
“Dance with me,” Sebastian said.
She blinked once, her hand dropping from her throat. “That sounded remarkably like a command.”
“Aye.”
“And if I refuse?”
“I willnae ask again.”
Her eyes narrowed, the warmth of her previous laughter vanishing into an instant spark of resistance. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could finish deciding what she intended to say, he put his large hand flat against the curve of her waist and moved her toward the center of the room.
She followed, her silk skirt swirling against his boots, which he took as consent.