Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Alba stood with her back pressed flat against the rough stone wall, Sebastian MacGregor towering directly in front of her. The muffled roar of the celebration had receded into a distant, irrelevant hum at the far end of the passage.
She was aware, with an uncomfortable, prickling specificity, of how the entire world had narrowed down to this exact grid of space. This dim corridor, this man, and a heavy, suffocating silence that was asking her a question she had spent nine days refusing to answer.
“This is a terrible idea,” she had said.
He had agreed with her, but none of them shifted from their position.
The iron wall sconce at the end of the corridor cast a weak, flickering light across the wet stone. It reached him in fragments. It shone along the harsh line of his jaw, the dark intensity of his eyes, and the broadness of his shoulders, which blocked the passage behind him like an iron gate.
He stood close enough that she could feel the heat radiating off his chest in the damp chill of the air, close enough that she would have had to turn sideways to slip past him without brushing against his leather doublet. He was simply looking down at her.
I should walk away. Right now.
She had a letter sitting on the study desk addressed to Margaret MacKenzie, a two-day deadline she had meticulously built a strategy around, and a very clear, very cold sense of exactly what she stood to lose if she let this corridor become anything other than a corridor.
She looked at his mouth.
His hand found hers in the dark.
It was not a grip, not the commanding, unyielding hold he had used on the road when he had hoisted her onto his horse as though the decision had already been made for them.
This was entirely different. His calloused fingers closed around hers slowly, giving her ample time to pull away, to lash out, to retreat. When she did not move, his fingers tightened just slightly, just enough to register his weight, and he drew her forward one single step from the stone wall.
The warmth of his chest met her immediately. Solid. Heavy. The scent of him—rain, woodsmoke, cold mountain air, and something deeper that was simply him—rushed into her senses, dissolving the five days of stubborn discipline she had clung to.
“Tell me to let go,” he said. His voice was low, rough around the edges, vibrating through the small space between them.
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
The honest answer was sitting directly behind her teeth, completely out of reach.
The truth was that she did not want him to let go.
She had not wanted him to let go since the moment on the dance floor, when his arm had locked around her waist, when she had felt his heartbeat thudding against her own ribs and understood, with the cold clarity of a wave crashing over her, that this had stopped being strategy days ago.
She had simply been too proud to admit it.
“Alba.”
Her pulse was a deafening roar in her own ears.
“Ye took me home by force,” she whispered.
“Aye.” He did not blink. He did not look away.
“Ye threatened me into marriage.”
His jaw tightened, a muscle leaping under the stubble. “I gave ye choices.”
“Terrible choices.”
“They were the only ones I had.” His voice dropped into a lower, darker register. “I’d have made different ones if I could.”
Alba looked at his mouth before she could stop herself.
His breathing changed. She heard the slight catch, the sharp shift in the rhythm of his chest against her hand, and the knowledge that she had done that. That the simple, silent direction of her eyes had broken his composure, moved through her veins like a current.
He brought her hand up.
It was not a thought-out decision. She could see that clearly. The way his eyes followed the movement a half-second after his arm had already made it, as if part of him had moved before the rest of him had agreed.
He slowly turned her hand in his, his thumb pressing into the center of her palm, and held it against his jaw.
The stubble felt rough beneath her fingertips.
The skin underneath was warm. His eyes remained fixed on hers, dark and steady, but his jaw moved against her palm in a way that was far from steady.
She forgot, briefly, how to form words.
“Ye say ye hate me,” he said, his voice dropping into a rough growl, the control costing him visible effort. “But ye keep lookin’ at me like that.”
She tried to pull her gaze back to his eyes. It went directly to his mouth instead. She could not seem to stop doing it, a realization that was humiliating and entirely beyond her management.
“Like what?” she whispered.
He did not answer. Instead, he turned his head, just slightly, just enough, and pressed his lips to the inside of her wrist.
A moment of stillness, his mouth against the thin skin above her pulse point, where her heartbeat was absolutely betraying her. He stayed there one breath, two, his eyes closing briefly, a man allowing himself something he had been refusing for days.
Then he lifted his head and looked at her.
“Like that,” he said quietly.
The word nay existed somewhere in her vocabulary. She was certain it did. She had used it against him in various forms for five consecutive days with considerable conviction, and she could locate it now if she only tried hard enough.
Instead, her free hand came up and caught the front of his doublet.
Sebastian went completely still for one suspended second, as if the gesture had found him not braced for it, as if Alba MacLaren taking a fistful of his shirt had undone something in him more thoroughly than anything else in nine days of siege.
Then the last of whatever he had been holding in place gave way entirely, and he closed the remaining distance between them.
The lantern she was still somehow gripping in her left hand swung sideways. She braced herself without thinking, her right hand coming up flat against his chest, and then his mouth crashed down onto hers; the last of her thoughts went entirely dark.
His mouth was rough, certain, and hungry in a way that told her he had been fighting this exact moment for days and was finished fighting.
She gasped against his lips, and the moment she did, he caught her.
His arm hooked around her waist and hauled her fully against him, lifting her back from the stone wall until her body came flush against his chest with a solidity that knocked the remaining breath from her lungs.
Dear God.
His other hand tangled deep into her loose, dark curls, his fingers spreading against the back of her head to lift her face, anchoring her to the kiss.
She let him. She was fully aware of allowing him, knowing this was a choice, and all of it existed at the same time in some detached part of her mind that was still observing while the rest of her had stopped functioning entirely.
He made a low, private sound against her mouth. It went through her like a struck chord, resonating in places she had carefully guarded, and her knees went so unreliable she was grateful his weight was pinning her up.
The kiss changed, deepening, losing its sharp edges as she leaned into him.
When his mouth finally left hers, an involuntary sound of protest escaped her throat.
Something she would think about with intense embarrassment later.
But then his lips were pressing against her jaw, her throat, moving slowly along the sensitive line of her neck while his breath came hard and hot against her bare skin.
“Christ,” he muttered against her skin. It was rough, completely unguarded, the voice of Sebastian MacGregor without a single piece of armor left on him.
Alba’s right hand, which had been resting flat against his chest, curled into a tight fist, bunching the thick fabric of his shirt in her knuckles.
His palm slid across her waist, not over the heavy silk of her gown but beneath its loose drape, his fingers pressing firmly against her skin through the thin shifts. His touch was warm and possessive in a way that sent a violent shiver straight through her spine from that single point of contact.
She felt him everywhere. His chest rising and falling hard against her ribs. His hand holding her head. His mouth a brand at her throat. The wall behind her had disappeared completely, leaving only him.
“Sebastian.”
His name left her lips before she could intercept it. His name, barely a whisper in the cold corridor.
He went absolutely still.
Then, slowly, his forehead dropped down to rest against hers.
They stood like that in the dark, their foreheads pressed together, both of them breathing ragged, heavy gasps while the lantern swung gently in a rhythmic arc in her grip. Outside, the rain hit the window with irregular, violent pulses that ignored the timing of things.
Alba refocused on the draft once more—the chill of the stone floor beneath her shoes and the distant, mocking lift of the fiddle music from the Hall.
Her fingers were still buried in his shirt. She had not let go.
Sebastian lifted his head. The dim candlelight caught the dark gleam of his eyes, the hard line of his jaw, the faint unsteadiness in his breathing that he had not quite managed to smooth back into control.
He looked at her directly, unhurried, accounting for everything, except that whatever he found in her face this time did not appear to help him.
She knew she should say something. There were several smart, self-protective things she could say right now that would restore the corridor to just being a corridor, Sunday to just being Sunday, and the two of them back to what they truly were to each other.
She said none of them.
His thumb moved against her jaw. A single, slow, deliberate pass.
Then he kissed her again.
This one was slower. Less desperate, but heavier.
His hand shifted from her hair to the side of her face, his thumb resting along her jawline, tilting her head gently to meet him.
She let him do it because she had stopped pretending she did not want this, and there was something almost restful about dropping the shield.
About simply being here, in the cold, with the storm outside and the Clan celebrating behind them.
His mouth on hers like it had been heading toward this exact coordinate since the road.
When he finally lifted his head, neither of them pulled away.
They stayed close, foreheads nearly touching.
Her hands lay flat against his chest now, feeling the rapid, heavy beat of his heart beneath her palms. His hands remained near her face, fingers tangled in her hair, no longer guiding but simply present.
“Two days,” she said softly.
She meant it as a reminder. To herself as much as to him.
Two days left until the deadline. Two days before Sunday, before the agreement expired, before she left this castle and headed north to Margaret, putting enough miles between herself and Sebastian for her heartbeat to return to its natural rhythm.
“Aye.” The roughness had not entirely left his voice. He brushed his thumb once, deliberately, across her cheekbone. “Two days.”
She pulled back first. Gradually, her hands slid down from his chest, and she felt the cold air rush into the space between them, filling it, with a sudden reminder that the castle was real, Sunday was real, and nothing that just happened changed a single fact waiting for them at sunrise.
He looked at her, and there was something in his expression she did not examine closely enough; a steadiness, a settled quality.
“Goodnight, Sebastian,” she said. Her voice was steady, and she felt a sharp prick of pride for that.
She turned and walked down the dim corridor toward the staircase, carrying the lantern with her, leaving him standing alone in the darkness. Her steps were steady and rhythmic against the stone, and she maintained that pace all the way to the bottom of the stairs.
Then she paused. She pressed her free hand flat against the freezing brick wall. She stood there in the dark, her heart pounding against her ribs, his name still warm on her tongue, and understood with sudden, uncomfortable clarity exactly what she had meant by two days.
She had meant: two days left to leave. She was deeply, privately certain that he had not heard it that way at all. She stood there for a long moment, the cold stone solid and real beneath her palm.
Then she climbed the stairs to her chamber, set the lantern down on the table, and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark.
For the first time in five days, Alba MacLaren had absolutely no idea what she was going to do, and the worst part was that she was no longer entirely sure what she wanted.