Page 20 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

“Ye put me belongings in tower storage.”

“Of course, aye.” She smiled again. “I am consistent, if nothin’ else.”

He did not move an inch toward her. His massive shoulders were stiff, and his hands hung loosely at his sides, curled into tight fists with knuckles stark and white against his tanned skin. His chest rose and fell in a slow, artificially deep rhythm, while his unblinking eyes drilled into hers. The muscle along his scarred jaw alternated between flexing and relaxing, like a ticking clock.

She found it considerably more entertaining than she should have.

She planned to see him out of this castle before Sunday. She intended to make his stay so unfathomably inconvenient, so endlessly uncomfortable, and so completely troublesome at every turn that he would weigh the effort against the reward and decide to find a more manageable place elsewhere.

She had three days. She had a plan. She was in an excellent mood about it.

* * *

God help him.

Sebastian stood in the corridor in yesterday’s clothes, having slept four hours on a garrison pallet beside three crates of candle tallow, and looked at Alba MacLaren smiling at him in the morning light.

She had emptied his chambers. She had relocated his belongings to tower storage. She had put his own displaced clan members in the rooms she’d cleared, which was so precisely calculated to make him look unreasonable for objecting that he had spent a portion of the previous night, before the pallet’s raw timber had finally rendered him unconscious, genuinely admiring the architecture of it against his will.

And now she was standing in the corridor telling him about a celebration she was organizing. For his people. With the expression of someone doing him an enormous personal favor.

He was furious with her.

He was fully aware of this without any doubt. Her cheeks were red from the cold in the hallway. The sunlight was pouring through the high window at an angle that illuminated the curve of her neck, the dark loose curl that had escaped her hair and rested against her cheek.

When she smiled like that, fully, deliberately, two shallow dimples appeared briefly at the corners of her mouth. He had not previously noticed the dimples. He wished, with some feeling, that he still had not.

A woman had no business being that composed, that infuriating, and… He cut the thought off at the root before it could fully form, filed it away somewhere he did not intend to revisit, and kept his expression completely leveled.

She was trying to drive him out. He understood that completely. Every move since day one had been part of the same campaign: to make the occupation too costly, too uncomfortable, and too persistently inconvenient to sustain.

The approach was, objectively, quite good.

He was still furious.

“Ye’re very pleased with yerself,” he said.

“I am organizin’ a celebration,” she replied, entirely innocent. “Foryerpeople. I thought ye’d be grateful.”

“Ye sent me belongings to tower storage.”

“I have mentioned the celebration, have I nae?” She looked at him with wide, helpful eyes. “I thought perhaps a fine meal would compensate for any minor inconvenience.”

Sebastian looked at her for one long moment while the heat and irritation moved through him and tangled together in a way he was becoming increasingly unable to keep separated.

Because she was doing this on purpose. Every bit of it, including the smile and the sunlight and the dimples that had no business appearing at this particular moment, and somehow standing in a corridor at half past eight in the morning wanting simultaneously to hold her neck and to push her gently backward into the window light just to see what she looked like in it.

He was losing his mind. That was the only reasonable explanation.

“The trouble is, me Lady,” he said, dropping his head slightly, his tone flattening into the quiet rasp he used when giving a direct, unyielding command on a battlefield. “I am losin’ me patience.”

She maintained eye contact for a moment, her smile steady but her posture subtly shifting from one heel to the other. Her hand moved to hold the wool of her skirt as her eyes flicked down to his jawline and back, gauging the space between them in a tense, silent pause.

Then she smiled again, slightly differently than before.

“I will have someone bring yer belongings down from tower storage,” she said. “There’s a perfectly adequate room off the North Corridor. Small, but functional.” A pause, light as air. “I am sure a good laird willnae mind.”

She turned and walked back down the corridor toward the kitchens, unhurried, her dark hair catching the light as she moved away from him.