Chapter Eight
The storm cleared overnight, leaving the world washed bright and fierce.
The morning sky arched cold and blue above Raven’s Berry. Every pine needle glittered. Burns ran fuller. The glen below shone in wet greens and russet gold. Far off, where the land dropped toward the western edge, the sea flashed silver beyond broken cliffs.
A perfect day.
The laird took her riding.
At least, he called it riding. Claire privately called it a calculated temptation to see whether fresh air and magnificent views might make her forget he had kidnapped her.
It was not entirely unsuccessful.
They rode with only two men behind, more distant than close. The path wound above the loch, then through a stand of Scots pine where the air smelled resinous and clean. Needles softened the ground. Light fell in shifting bars across the track.
“This is unfair,” Claire said with a false petulant tone.
He glanced at her, his mouth quirked with humor. What the humor did to his green eyes. “The horse?”
She snorted. The action appeared to have become a habit since she had been kidnaped. “The scenery.”
“Aye, English. ’Tis difficult to argue with my Scottish cliffs and lochs.”
His cliffs and lochs? “I was prepared to be unimpressed.”
He cocked a brow at her. The arch of his brow transformed him from merely handsome into a man far too easy to admire.
. How could the shifting of his brow prompt such a reaction? “And yet?”
She looked toward the water below, where wind shivered the surface into blue-black scales. “And yet Scotland appears determined to show off.”
He laughed, low and warm.
The sound slipped through her far too easily in a shiver of awareness.
They emerged from the pines onto a ridge where the world opened in all directions—glens cut deep through the land, waterfalls thin as ribbons in the distance, dark mountains shouldering up beneath white clouds. The sea wind reached them there, sharp and salted.
Claire drew the reins tight and simply stared.
No two views were alike.
One slope wore heather like velvet. Another broke into raw stone and yellow grass. A glen below held a river twisting and glittering through alder and birch. To the west, the sea beat itself white against black rock.
His appraisal sent tingles along her neck.
“What?” she asked.
“Ye look different when ye forget to be angry.”
She waited a moment before answering. Claire must tread carefully.
Their banter felt right, felt . . . felt inspired in a world ready to force her to marry a man she did not know.
But it was based on a false relationship.
They had no future, no matter how Laird Lachlan Cameron set her heart to pounding. “That is a telling observation.”
“Aye.”
She turned in the saddle, her curiosity shoved aside her worry. “And what do I look like?”
His gaze moved over her face with unsettling steadiness. His green eyes darkened to the loch at night and she nearly tumbled in. “Like a woman the Highlands might keep.”
For one reckless moment, she wished the choice were truly hers. “I am not a lost lamb for your hills to adopt.”
“Nay.” His voice deepened. “Ye’re far more trouble than a lamb.”
The air between them grew unexpectedly tender, lighter than before, but also deeper. Banter, yes. Yet beneath it ran a current she could not ignore.
She looked away first.
Toward the sea.
Toward anything not green eyes and impossible restraint.
# # #
’Twas a mistake to bring her to the ridge.
Or perhaps the mistake had begun the moment he chose not merely to hide her, but to show her.
This woman seemed to prompt him to make mistake after mistake.
The Highlands had always been a language to him—storm, stone, glen, tide, all of it saying what words could not. He knew how the sea wind reached the inland cliffs on cold mornings. He knew where red deer gathered at dusk, where hawks nested, where snow lingered longest in spring.
Now he found himself wanting Claire to see all of it.
Wanting her wonder.
Wanting, worse still, to be the man standing beside her when the wonder changed her.
She turned in the saddle, sunlight touching her hair, and looked at him with a mix of suspicion and intelligence—both maddeningly dear.
He gripped the reins tighter.
This was not some passing hunger.
Hunger he knew.
This was the beginning of something slower, sharper, and far less manageable.