Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
The watchtower had been abandoned longer than she had been alive, judging by the state of the stairs leading up to it. It was a crumbling spiral of stone that had lost its rail two turns from the top, and made every step something of a negotiation.
Elspeth had gone up there for no better reason than curiosity, and because Becky had mentioned it existed in the same breath she had mentioned the loch. Over the last several days, she had developed a keen appreciation for anything that might be hiding something.
The room at the top of the tower was small, round, and smelled of dust and old rope. A single arrow slit let in a blade of grey light that fell across the floor and caught, of all things, the corner of a folded wool blanket shoved beneath the remains of a broken bench.
She crouched and pulled the blanket free. Beneath it, stacked with a neatness that told her exactly whose hands had arranged them, sat four books.
She lifted the top one and turned it over. She ran her fingers over the familiar green spine with its gilt lettering worn thin at the edges. She opened it to the page she had marked, and there, tucked precisely where she had left it, was her ribbon.
“Ye absolute rascal,” she uttered, and the empty tower gave her no argument.
She went through the others quickly, checking each spine, laughing sharply when she found the volume with the shepherdess and the exiled prince tucked directly beneath a slim book of verse she had not even known was missing.
He had not merely relocated her books. He had curated a private hoard of foolish notions and hidden it in a ruin, presumably believing no woman in her right mind would climb a set of crumbling stairs in search of poetry.
She sat back on her heels with her arms full and allowed herself several long, satisfying seconds of pure vindication. It tasted, she decided, rather like the first sip of whisky he did not know she could muster.
She carried the whole stack down the stairs with considerably more care than she had climbed it, and was still deciding which book deserved pride of place on her shelf when she came around the side of the hall and found Becky crossing the yard with an armful of linens.
“Has the Laird finished with the western boundary?” Elspeth asked, adjusting her grip on the books.
Becky glanced at the stack, then back at her mistress’s face, choosing not to comment. “Nae yet, me Lady. He sent word he’d stop at the loch after, to wash before supper. Said nae to wait for him.”
Elspeth went very still.
“The loch,” she repeated.
“Aye. Should be there within the hour, I’d imagine, given his pace.”
Elspeth looked down at the books in her arms. She looked back up at Becky. “Thank ye, Becky.”
She carried the stack the rest of the way to her chamber, set them down on the bed with care, and stood there for a moment, considering.
Magnus had told her in his own flat, immovable way that the books contained foolish notions.
That they might encourage further discussion of courtship and stars and poetry, as though discussion itself were a hazard to be managed alongside a stubborn goat or a leaning fence post. He had decided, without asking her, that she ought not to have them.
Very well.
She was not, at present, without options.
She went through the stack again, more deliberately this time, until she found the one she wanted.
Not the green one with her ribbon, which she had grown fond enough of to keep close, but a slimmer volume with a cracked red spine.
It was the sort of book Katherine had once smuggled into her father’s castle wrapped inside a shawl because it was, by any polite measure, considerably more scandalous than sermons or shepherdesses.
She had read perhaps a third of it before her father discovered its existence and burned it, along with two others, in the solar hearth. She had assumed it was lost forever.
Apparently, Magnus’s library held a second copy.
She tucked it beneath her arm, checked her reflection long enough to confirm that her hair had not escaped its pins, and left her chamber.
She knew exactly what her purpose was. She had decided, quite firmly, that if the Laird of Ben Cruachan intended to dictate what she read, she would dictate where she read it.
The path to the loch ran west past the stables, then down through a stand of birch that thinned as the ground began to slope. She had walked it once before, with him, on the second morning of her inspections, and she remembered the turn well enough not to need Becky’s directions.
She adjusted the book beneath her arm, lifted her skirts clear of the damp grass, and started down the path.
* * *
Magnus had waded in chest-deep an hour past, once the western fences were checked and the last of the mud scrubbed from his hands proved beyond simple washing.
The water was cold enough to numb him from the neck down, which suited him fine.
He had swum the length of it twice, dunked his head to clear the day from his brain, and was working his way back toward the shallows when he heard the crunch of boots on gravel.
The tread did not belong to any of his men.
He knew the sound of her tread by now. Quick, deliberate, the small extra weight she put on her heel.
He surfaced properly, water sluicing off his shoulders, and found her perched on the flat grey rock at the edge of the bank, ankles crossed, skirts arranged with a precision that suggested considerable thought had gone into the picture she intended to make.
She had a book open in her lap.
“I thought,” she said pleasantly, not looking up, “that our outing should be more romantic in nature than an inspection.”
He said nothing. Water dripped from his hair down the back of his neck.
She turned a page with two fingers, cleared her throat, and began reading aloud. “And beneath the stars, his heart knew no peace, for the lady’s voice haunted him like a summer song…”
Magnus exhaled through his nose. “Elspeth.”
She did not look up. “Her lips moved as though poetry itself had chosen to dwell there…”
“Elspeth.”
“And though he fought against it, his entire soul longed only to silence her with a…” She paused. Looked up. Studied the page with an expression of profound concern. “Oh dear, the page is damaged.”
He stared at her.
She sat there in pale wool, her curls coming loose from their pins and catching the wind off the water, ankles crossed, reading aloud in an unhurried voice.
He disliked poetry. He had said so more than once with conviction. He disliked romance in the abstract and stars in the specific, given the wolves that tended to accompany them. He particularly disliked the way her tongue lingered on words that had no business being that long.
What he disliked most, standing chest-deep in the freezing water with his men half a mile off and no earthly excuse to get out, was that the entire sum of his objections amounted to a single overwhelming urge to make her stop talking by whatever means necessary.
“Ye’re very annoyin’,” he huffed, because it was true, and because it was easier to say than the alternative.
“Aye?” She grinned down at him, unbothered, closing the book over one finger to mark her place. “And yet I daenae see ye displayin’ yer impressive livestock knowledge as prettily as ye did at the Gatherin’.”
“I ken enough about livestock.”
“Clearly.”
His eyebrow came down. She smiled again—wider this time, the particular smile that meant she knew precisely what she was doing and had no intention of stopping—and opened the book back to her page.
“Like a song carried upon the evenin’ breeze…”
Magnus had had enough of arguing from the water. He turned and started for the bank, wading through the shallows. His kilt, soaked through, dragged heavily against his legs with every step, water sheeting off him in the grey afternoon light.
Elspeth’s eyes went wide, then squeezed shut with theatrical speed. “I am nae lookin’,” she announced, her chin lifting. “Like a song carried upon the evenin’ breeze…”
He climbed the bank in three strides.
“Elspeth.”
“—and though he fought against it, he longed only to silence her…”
He kissed her before she could finish the sentence.
It was not gentle. It was not, in any sense, planned. His hand found her jaw, tilting her face up to his. She made a small, startled sound against his mouth, and he hungrily swallowed it without realizing he had ever meant to do so.
He told himself he had done it only to stop her talking. The excuse lasted about as long as it took him to think about it.
A man who wanted silence pulled back the instant he got it. He did not pull back. His hand stayed right where it was, and he discovered he had no intention of moving it.
She went rigid for the length of one heartbeat. Then her free hand came up, fisting in the front of his shirt, and she kissed him back with a passion that undid every last piece of his intention to keep this brief.
He tasted of salt and something warmer beneath. He felt her fingers tighten in the wet linen at his chest and instinctively reached for more of her, one arm sliding around her waist, drawing her half off the rock and against him.
She made a low sound against his mouth, not a protest, and her book slid off her lap, landing on the grass with a soft thud neither of them noticed.
When he finally broke the kiss, they stared at each other.
Her lips were parted, her cheeks flushed a vivid crimson that had nothing to do with the chilly wind brushing her skin. Her hand still clung to his shirt, not willing—or able—to decide to let go.
“That,” Magnus said when he trusted his voice to remain steady and detached, “was considerably more effective than poetry.”
Elspeth opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. This time, no sound emerged at all, which he found more satisfying than he had any right to.
Then she recovered the book from the grass, and without further ceremony, struck him lightly on the shoulder with it.