Chapter Ten
A few days had passed with the clansmen remaining aloof and the women ignoring her altogether. She sighed and lifted from the bed, ready to face another day similar to the last. Idleness bored her and she longed for something to help her prove her worth.
Claire glanced out the window and witnessed women sending their children after the linens blowing across the bailey by a fierce wind.
Not the clean, bright wind of yesterday, but the kind arriving before the weather changed—the kind driving long shadows over the loch, flattened the grasses in the glen, and sent gulls wheeling inland from the sea.
Raven’s Berry felt watchful.
So did Lachlan.
Claire found him in the training yard issuing orders too quietly for her to hear. Men moved with increased purpose. A rider came and went through the gate. Something in the air had tightened.
When he turned and saw her, his features hardened, then shifted into affable.
“What has happened?” she asked.
“Nothing ye need fear.”
She grunted. “Then naturally I shall fear it at once.”
He swore softly under his breath, and she knew then it was no small matter.
“Lachlan.”
Her use of his name stopped him.
He crossed to her. The wind whipped at his plaid, at her cloak, at everything unsaid between them.
“’Tis movement near the southern passes,” he said at last. “Men asking questions.”
Fear skittered up her spine, clutched her heart. “About me?”
“Aye.”
Cold moved through her, sharper than the weather. Should she be relieved someone came to rescue her? Or would a rescue throw her into an unwanted marriage to an unknown man? “My father?”
His jaw hardened and his gaze shifted between her and his men. “Mayhap. Mayhap others.”
Claire took a step toward the keep’s gate. “So, it begins.”
“It began before I took ye.”
She searched his face. The idea of pushing him for more answers warred within her. Surely, the man owed her. “And you still will not tell me all of it.”
“Not here.”
He nodded toward the gate, toward the hills, toward whatever threat rode beyond her sight.
For the first time since England, Claire did not feel like a burden in the middle of other people’s designs.
She was the center of the storm.
And Lachlan—enigmatic, infuriating, impossible Lachlan—had put himself between her and its teeth.
“Then tell me one thing now,” she said.
His gaze came back to hers. Intense and probing.
“If they come,” she said, “will you give me to them?”
The wind rushed around them, a maelstrom of her fears and the threats surrounding the clan.
“Nay,” came his curt response. Something fierce filled his gaze, protective and unmistakably possessive.
The single word carried enough weight to shake her. How had she become embroiled in the ways of men and politics? “Why?”
His eyes locked on hers, and all the humor, banter, and guarded silence between them burned away to something rawer.
“Because I should never have wanted ye beyond necessity,” he said. “And now I do.”
The yard, the wind, the keep itself seemed to still.
Claire’s breath caught and she covered her mouth with her hand.
This was no polished declaration. No courtly phrase.
It was more threatening than poetry because it was plain.
Because it was true.
He took one step closer. Not enough to touch. Enough to make it clear he could.
“And you, my English Rose,” he said, voice roughening, “should hate me more than ye do.”
Claire’s heart beat so rapidly she could feel it in her throat. “Perhaps,” she whispered.
“Do ye?”
The question hung there between wind sweeping over the loch and a storm cloud, between all they had not yet said.
Claire looked at the man who had stolen her from England, given her shelter instead of chains, and looked at her as though she were neither ornament nor bargain, but a force capable of remaking his life.
She did not answer. Not because she had no answer. Because some truths, once spoken, changed the land forever.
Outside Raven’s Berry, the storm gathered over Cliff Sand glen.
Inside Claire Ashford, another had already begun.
The thought of leaving Raven's Berry unsettled her far more than it should—it meant leaving him. And if she were to believe him, he would not let her go.