Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Sebastian climbed into the attic the following morning. Stubbornness drove him up the narrow stairs, nothing else. He needed the grim satisfaction of proving he could sleep on bare timber without complaint.
Alba had taken his chamber. He had survived freezing battlefields. He would survive her.
“Take these below,” he ordered.
Two maids froze by the rafters, arms full of bedding. He threw a fresh pile of blankets at them without looking. They grabbed the loads in a panic and disappeared. Their footsteps faded down the spiral stone staircase. Then, only the creak of the roof beams and the soft settling of dust remained.
He cleared the floor. He shoved a cracked chest aside, then a stack of old shutters. His boot caught on a rolled canvas. He assumed it was a map until the heavy linen slipped.
He stopped.
It was not a map.
The portrait leaned against the far wall, life-sized, oil-on-panel, framed in age-darkened, carved oak.
Alba looked back at him. She sat beside the loch, the same one visible from his stolen eastern tower.
Painted sunlight shimmered in the dark silk of her hair.
Her mouth was slightly open, caught mid-laugh.
It was an expression she never allowed herself in his presence.
The artist had to know her.
The brushstrokes captured the precise curve of her shoulder, where her dress slipped. They had faithfully depicted the faint dusting of freckles across her nose and throat. Her hands rested loosely in her lap. She appeared completely at ease in her own skin.
Sebastian stood there; the seconds stretching.
His chest went dead still. His eyes moved across the painted canvas, the same way they moved across her in the corridor—cataloging details he had no right to know. The narrow span of her waist. The pale line of her neck. The warmth of laughter he had never been given freely.
Heat slammed low into his stomach, sudden and violent.
“Christ,” he muttered.
He gripped the linen and dragged it sharply back over the canvas. He turned his back on it.
The attic was suddenly airless. Dust choked his throat.
He descended the stairs in hard, rapid strides.
He cut through the back passage, shoved through the heavy door at the base of the tower, and walked directly out across the Eastern Grounds.
The loch glittered dully through the dense tree line.
He broke through the brush and hit the riverbank at a brutal pace.
The water was freezing. He did not care.
He waded straight in. The shock seized his legs, biting through leather boots and wool trews. It crawled upward with every step, a numbing vise. He stopped when it hit his waist. He braced both hands against his thighs, his jaw locked tight as he stared at the flat, gray surface.
The biting cold helped. Marginally.
He stayed there, submerged, his breath pluming in the crisp air. A MacGregor boy crossing the bank on some errand stopped and stared. Sebastian glared back. The boy wisely bolted without a word.
Sebastian exhaled harshly through his teeth and looked back toward the high stone fortress. Alba’s window glowed faintly behind the bare branches. A dark shadow moved behind the glass, crossing back and forth as she managed whatever catastrophe the day had brought.
He looked away first. He dragged a wet, trembling hand across his face.
The portrait had to go. He would hide it somewhere he could never accidentally stumble across it again.
Somewhere south of the Highlands entirely.
* * *
She had been avoiding the corridor near the east staircase all morning.
Not deliberately. Or rather, she had been telling herself it was not intentional, just as she kept telling herself that the quality of her sleep last night—shallow, restless, with her hand pressed flat against the cold stone wall beside the mattress as if testing whether it was still real—had nothing to do with the dim corridor.
It had nothing to do with the heavy press of his forehead against hers. It had nothing to do with the rough, low way his voice had sounded when he said her name.
She was avoiding the east staircase. She knew it. She climbed the west one instead.
The kitchens smelled of thick woodsmoke and bread. The heavy warmth hit her face as she pushed through the thick door. It was exactly what she needed—something immediate, requiring her to be present, useful, and fully focused on something other than what happened the night before.
The MacGregor families had been arriving in staggered clusters for two days now. The women, children, and elderly came behind the soldiers. Slower, quieter.
She had watched them settle into the rooms she had prepared.
She observed the children find corners and claim them.
She saw the women move through the unfamiliar space of the Great Hall, with their hands pressed close to their sides, maintaining the careful, compressed posture of guests who still did not believe they were allowed to occupy space.
The dinner was her idea. A genuine one, not a strategic move or a counter in the game she’d been playing since the morning he'd first ridden through her gates. Those people had nothing to do with Sebastian’s occupation of her home. She was not going to make them feel the burden of it.
She crossed toward Cook. “We’ll need more bread. And ale. Plenty of it.” She glanced toward the back corridor where the stores were counted. “The families that arrived this morning havenae eaten a proper meal in days. I want the meal tonight to feel like somethin’.”
Cook nodded, already turning toward the fire. “Whatever ye need, me Lady.”
Alba squeezed her arm once, briefly, and turned back toward the doorway.
Sebastian stood with one broad shoulder propped against the heavy oak frame, arms folded tight across his chest. He was perfectly, maddeningly calm.
His doublet was unlaced at the collar, exposing the dark hair at his throat.
His dark hair still carried the crisp cold of the outdoors.
He looked like a man who had been awake since before dawn and found the brutal hours entirely unremarkable.
Must he be everywhere?
“Another hospitality gesture?” he asked.
“Are ye followin’ me?” she said.
He looked at her steadily, ignoring the question. “Is it another hospitality gesture?”
“Of course.” She kept her chin level, her hands easy at her sides.
“The families arrived yesterday with almost nothin’.
A proper meal and a lit Hall cost me very little and give them somethin’ to hold on to.
” She let the pause land between them. “Ye’d understand the instinct if ye tried it occasionally. ”
Sebastian nodded once, slow and deliberate. “Good.” His blue eyes stayed fixed on her face. “I had a similar idea.”
“Really? What?”
“Yer maid informed me ye’d give anythin’ necessary to help the people feel welcome.”
Something in the weight of his tone made her stomach tighten. It was not the words themselves. It was the exact, calculated placement of anything.
“Yes,” she said carefully. “I would.”
He stepped aside from the doorway. Alba looked past his massive frame into the corridor and went dead still.
Wooden crates lined the passage wall, stretching along its length in neat rows.
Open crates revealed their contents. She could see the fabrics from here.
The deep green of her best wool gown was folded on top.
The ivory of the fur-trimmed cloak she kept for feast days lay beneath it.
The bronze silk she had been saving was layered underneath.
Her cloaks. Her furs. The blue linen with the embroidered hem, which had taken a seamstress three weeks to make, she had worn only once.
Almost every gown she owned. Stacked. Ready.
The fury arrived quickly and intensely. She inhaled it in a calm, steady breath. He was watching her, and she refused to let him see any reaction.
She stood there with the anger burning at the back of her throat, and then she thought of the young mother she'd watched lift a sleeping boy from a cart with shaking arms, the morning the first carts came through the Gate.
She thought of the older woman who had kept her hands folded in her lap and her eyes fixed on nothing; the little girl who had dropped her doll.
She turned back to Sebastian.
His expression had not changed. It never changed.
“The women who arrived have almost nothin’,” he said. His gaze moved over her in one deliberate sweep. It was unhurried, tracking from her high collar down to the hem of her gown. “Since ye’re plannin’ this grand dinner, I assumed ye’d be glad to help them look presentable.”
She inhaled once, sharp and measured, through her nose.
“That is a wonderful idea.”
He stepped closer.
She did not step back. She refused to yield. But he moved with so much confidence that he dropped his head. When he spoke near her ear, his voice dropped to just above a murmur, warm and rough against the cold air of the kitchen.
“Aye?”
Heat climbed her throat without her permission. It settled hot in her face, and she was furious at every single inch of it.
“I am sure the MacGregor women will look beautiful in these dresses,” she said. Her voice came out perfectly even. She was proud of the steel in it.
“I imagine so.” He did not step back. The warm glow he emitted reached her through the kitchen air, close enough that she could smell woodsmoke, cold wool, and that intoxicating quality that was simply him. “I imagine ye’ll look especially lovely greetin’ guests in nothin’ but yer chemise.”
Her breath caught.
It was one small, entirely involuntary hitch of air in her chest. She felt certain he heard it; he was standing close enough to hear her pulse.
She had something ready; she always had something ready, but the words dissolved before they reached her tongue.
For one humiliating half-second, she simply stood there with warmth flooding her cheeks and his low voice sitting exactly where he’d placed it.
Sebastian straightened. She braced herself.
“Ah, daenae worry, lass.” The corner of his mouth curled.
It was not quite a smile, not quite a smirk, but something that sat between the two and was far more insufferable than either.
He glanced toward the crates. “Ye still have plenty of dresses left.” A pause.
“Even if I wanted to give them all away, I wouldnae have enough people to do so.”
He laughed softly, effortlessly, as if it was all a joke he was in on. He seemed completely unfazed by the fact that she was standing two feet away with a look that could kill. Then he stepped aside, gestured cheerfully toward the hallway, and waited.
Alba walked past him, her chin held high. Her hands hung loosely at her sides, and every muscle in her body strained painfully to look unhurried. She avoided looking at the crates and at him. Her pace was steady, and her back stayed straight all the way to the turn in the corridor.
His voice followed her around the corner, perfectly pleasant.
“The bronze silk should suit Hamish’s wife particularly well, I think.”
She turned the corner.
The moment she was out of sight, she pressed her back flat against the freezing stone wall. She closed her eyes and let out one long, silent breath through her nose.
He had outplayed her at her own game. Using her maid, who freely offered information during the usual morning routine without suspecting any need for caution.
With her own generosity, which he had taken and arranged, standing in a kitchen doorway, waiting to act, his face showing that unbearable calm.
She pressed her fingers briefly to her lips.
The chemise comment. The wicked timing of it. The half-second before she’d recovered. He had seen her break. She knew he had seen it, and he would almost certainly file it away to use again.
She opened her eyes, straightened her spine, and walked back toward the Great Hall.
She had a dinner to organize. The bread was rising.
Ale was coming up from the cellar. She had thirty things demanding her attention before sundown, and none of them involved Sebastian MacGregor’s mouth.
None of them involved his laugh. None of them involved the way he said “lass” like it was a weapon sharpened specifically for her skin.
She was already thinking about all three.