Chapter 2
Chapter Two
The storm came in from the north without apology.
Alba felt the change before she saw it, a sharp shift in the atmospheric pressure that pressed cold and purposeful against her cheeks as she urged her mare higher along the narrow mountain pass.
Behind her, her men struggled to keep pace, their horses blowing hard, nostrils flaring as their hooves fought the treacherous, gravel-slick grade.
The mountains on either side rose gray and indifferent into low, heavy cloud.
Below them, the valley was already completely swallowed in thick white mist.
“Me Lady.” John O’Connor pulled his gelding alongside her, his jaw set with the stubbornness she had learned to read in three years of riding beside him. “We should turn back before the storm worsens.”
“If any man wishes to return,” Alba said, her voice steady as she stared straight ahead between her mare’s ears, “he may. I will ride ahead and meet the merchants meself.”
Behind her, one of the younger guards groaned with theatrical suffering. “God forbid the Lady rides alone, and we spend the rest of our lives explainin’ it to the village.”
The corner of her mouth lifted despite herself, her skin tightening against the biting wind. “Go home to yer wives and bairns,” she said softly. “I am more than capable.”
Nobody turned back.
They never do.
That was the thing about trust, it was not given in grand gestures. It was built in small ones, repeated until they became solid.
Three years of riding out in every blinding storm, negotiating every single contract herself, standing in every difficult room without flinching. Her men had watched all of it. And here they were, still behind her, still grumbling, still following.
Alba adjusted the thick leather gloves around her fingers and studied the valley below.
The merchants would reach the crossroads before dusk if the roads held.
Wool and grain, enough to see MacLaren lands through winter without borrowing from neighboring clans at interest rates specifically designed to strangle.
She had run the numbers twice. The margin was thin, but it was there, provided she secured the contracts today and not tomorrow.
Men waited for women to fail. Alba had stopped being surprised by it. She had simply stopped failing.
The sound of horses cut through the wind without warning.
Her guards reacted before she did. Swords half-unsheathed, steel scraping against scabbards, bodies instinctively shifting forward. Five riders emerged from the tree line ahead, spreading across the narrow road. Large men. Travel-worn. Armed.
Alba’s spine went cold. She sat straighter in her saddle.
The tallest one led his horse forward slowly. He was massive, broad-shouldered, with dark hair pushed back from a face that had seen much more hardship than comfort. His hard eyes scanned her party once, efficiently.
“Fine horses for merchants,” he said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble.
“Fine roads for thieves,” Alba answered, her voice dropping an octave.
One of her guards drew in a sharp breath. The strangers’ hands moved toward their hilts with a slow, deliberate ease that was somehow more intimidating than quickness.
Alba kept her eyes locked on the tall one. He was the one who mattered. The others were merely waiting for whatever he decided.
“If ye intend to rob us,” she said evenly, “ye’ve chosen poor timin’. We’ve nae supplies yet. Ye’d do better waitin’ for the merchants alongside us.”
His dark gaze dropped to the crest pinned to her green wool cloak.
“MacLaren.” Something shifted in his expression, his jaw tightening slightly. “The old mad Laird MacLaren?” A heavy pause. “Thought he was dead.”
“He is.” She held his gaze, refusing to blink against the cold air. “Who are ye, that ye ken his name?”
“Who are ye, that ye wear his crest?” His eyes moved across her face, searching, without a single shred of warmth. “He had nay heirs, that much I ken.”
“He had me,” Alba said, her chest rising as she stared him down. “I run his lands now.”
The tall Highlander looked at her for a long moment in a way she could not quite understand. Then one corner of his mouth shifted, not quite a smile, not quite mockery; something that hovered in the uneasy space between the two.
“Is that so?”
He stepped his massive horse fully forward into the light. “I am Sebastian MacGregor.”
The name landed like a heavy stone dropped into still water.
Behind her, she heard it pass through her men in a single, low exhale.
The Beast of Blackthorn.
She had heard the stories. Every clan in the Highlands had heard them. A warrior so relentless in battle that men had begun checking the shadows before they slept. The kind of reputation that spread because enough people had seen the blood it was built on.
Alba kept her face exactly where it was, a mask of calm despite the sudden ice in her stomach.
“Yer name precedes ye, warrior.”
“I am nae a warrior anymore.” His dark gaze swept briefly toward the misty valley, something moving across his expression too quickly to catch.
When it returned to her, it was steady again.
Decided. “I am the Laird of Clan MacGregor.” His broadsword lifted slowly, not threatening, simply present between them.
“And I am lookin’ for a new home for me people. ”
Her pulse slammed once, hard, beneath her ribs.
“Then keep ridin’,” she said.
“I cannae.” His blue eyes did not move from hers. “Seems yer Castle has a vacancy.”
She opened her mouth to strike this statement back with a retort.
Shouting erupted violently from somewhere down the hill behind them.
“The merchants!” one of her guards barked, spinning his mount.
Everyone turned at once. Two merchant wagons were visible below, their drivers hauling frantically on the leather reins as the horses caught sight of armed Highlanders blocking the pass ahead.
The beasts made the entirely reasonable decision to go somewhere else immediately.
One terrified mule swung hard sideways, dragging half the wooden cart clean into the muddy drainage ditch.
The crates stacked on top went in rapid sequence, wood cracking, rope snapping, and then a truly spectacular explosion of bright red apples cascading down the muddy hillside in every direction.
One of Sebastian’s men burst out laughing, a full, helpless sound that echoed off the stone.
It was the exact wrong moment for it.
Alba saw one of her guards decide in real time, his anger flushing red along his neck.
His sword came out with a sharp “shhk”. That was all it took.
Within seconds, both groups descended into utter chaos, shouting at each other, horses spinning, men slipping sideways in the apple-covered mud with far less dignity than they arrived with.
Someone went down into the muck. Someone else tripped over his boots. A merchant’s boy scrambled up the steep bank and disappeared into the pine trees, apparently deciding this scene was no longer his problem.
Alba’s mare reared, front hooves flailing, as a loose mule came barreling directly through the middle of everything, trailing half a broken harness and what appeared to be someone’s wool hat.
“Stop hittin’ each other!” she shouted furiously over the din, hauling her horse back down with both hands, her forearms straining against the leather.
It took longer than it should have. But it stopped.
The hillside settled into a panting, mud-spattered silence broken only by the rain, which had begun in earnest while nobody was paying attention. Apple-scented mud covered almost everyone.
One of the older merchants was crying quietly at the back of his tilted wagon. John O’Connor had fresh blood on his knuckles.
Sebastian MacGregor stood right in the center of this mess, breathing hard, his broadsword still gripped tightly in his large hand, rain sliding slowly down the hard planes of his face.
He was looking at her.
Not at her men. Not at the road, or the scattered apples, or the general catastrophe surrounding him.
At her. With the same flat, decided calm he’d worn since the moment he stepped his horse forward and announced his name.
As though the turmoil had been nothing more than an interruption, and this—her, the castle, the decision already made somewhere behind those dark eyes—was the only thing that had ever actually mattered.
Alba’s chest went cold.
She had told herself that this was negotiable. That a man who needed land would weigh the cost of taking it by force against the easier option of a trade, an alliance, or a conversation. That his reputation was a weapon he used to avoid actual conflict, not to invite it.
She looked at his face now and understood, with a horrible, dropping clarity, that she had been wrong.
He was not calculating. He had already calculated. This was not a threat designed to move her toward a better offer. There was no better offer. He had looked at her and had decided.
He means to take it. He genuinely means to take me home.
Alba looked back at her three men. Good men, every one of them. John already had his bloody hand on his hilt, jaw locked, waiting for her word.
She looked at the MacGregor warriors. Ten, at least, on this road alone. More, certainly, behind them.
Her eyes moved back to John, who was already opening his mouth.
“Me Lady.”
She silenced him with one sharp look. He closed his mouth.
She turned her face back to Sebastian. Her heart was hammering against her ribs, but she refused to let the tremor reach her voice.
“If ye’re takin’ the MacClaren Castle,” she said, forcing the words out evenly, “then do it without slaughterin’ me people.”
He went very still. Something hot and dark moved across his eyes that she could not name.
“Leave them be.” She held his gaze, her jaw locked. “I will go willingly. Only leave them be.”
Rain ran down his strong jawline. He studied her the way she had seen men study land deeds, looking for the catch, for the hidden clause, for the precise place where the good terms turned bad. Whatever he found, or did not find, he made his decision without a word.
He sheathed his broadsword. He crossed the muddy ground toward her in three deliberate, commanding strides. He stopped so close to her stirrup that she could smell woodsmoke, wet wool, cold steel, and the sharp, musky scent of a man who had been riding through harsh Highland weather for days.
Then his large hands tightly grasped her waist. The warmth of his palms seeped through her thick cloak. He lifted her off her mare and onto his own horse in front of him as if she weighed nothing at all.
Alba’s breath left her body completely.
Before she could struggle, his thick forearm locked around her waist from behind, solid, heavy, and utterly immovable.
His massive chest was an unyielding wall against her back, radiating an overwhelming warmth that made her skin tingle.
She sat rigid with fury, her thighs pressed tightly against the coarse leather of his saddle, fiercely refusing to acknowledge the sudden skip in her pulse as his stallion turned back toward the valley road.
His mouth came close to her ear, his breath rising warm against the cold skin of her neck.
“Lead me to me new castle,” he said quietly, his voice a low vibration she felt in her spine. “Me Lady.”
Alba stared straight ahead between the stallion’s ears at the mist-covered mountains and the gray, indifferent sky. She did not give him the satisfaction of a response.
But down in the folds of her green cloak, where no one could see them, her fingers were shaking.