Page 21 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

Sebastian watched her go.

Then he turned toward the window, pressed two fingers against the cold stone sill, and stood there breathing slowly until the tangle in his chest eased into something manageable.

The North Corridor room would be very small.

He pushed off the wall and went to find Hamish because if he stood in that corridor alone for one more minute, he was going to do something that would make Sunday’s deadline entirely irrelevant.

Chapter Eight

The MacGregors arrived just after sunrise, when the sky was still pale, and the frost on the cobblestones had not yet begun to melt.

Sebastian was already in the courtyard when the gates opened. He had been there since before first light, standing with Hamish in the cold, neither of them speaking much.

Alba heard them—the slow creak of wheels on the frozen road, the low sound of voices too tired to speak loudly, horses blowing hard after a long night’s travel. She was already in the courtyard when the first carriages rolled through the gates, and what came through them struck her somewhere she had not prepared for.

Women with children pressed against their sides, gripping small bundles that represented everything they had managed to carry out of a burning home. Men stood slumped against the wooden sides of the carts, their shoulders slack and their heads hanging low, yet their bloodshot eyes remained wide, fixed on the mudbeneath their boots. Not one of them sat down; they shifted their weight from one foot to the other in a restless, mechanical rhythm, their grimy hands twitching against their belts as if the moment they stopped moving, the sheer weight of the road would collapse their knees right into the slush.

Alba stood by the courtyard steps, watching a small, shivering girl drop her ragged doll into the slush. The girl stared at it. She was perhaps four years old, her dark hair plastered flat against her forehead from the journey, a too-large shawl knotted loosely around her thin shoulders by someone else’s hands. She did not cry. She simply stood there in the cold, looking down at the doll.

Alba’s feet moved before she could decide. She crossed the two steps between them, crouched, and picked up the doll from the slush. The girl looked at her—not at the doll first, but at her face, checking—and then carefully took it with both hands and pressed it to her chest.

Alba straightened. The rigid certainty she had carried through five days of strategy and confrontation shifted beneath her like ground that had looked solid and was not.

Beside the nearest cart, a young mother was trying to lift a sleeping boy from the back without waking him, her arms shaking slightly with the weight of him after three days on the road.

An older woman sat perfectly upright in a carriage with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes fixed on nothing. A man in his middle years stood with his forehead briefly pressedto his horse’s neck, one fist knotted in the mane, before he straightened and turned to help someone else.

These are nae an army.

She had spent five days constructing Sebastian MacGregor as the obstacle. The problem. The immovable barrier between her and everything she had spent three years holding together.

And he was all of those things; she did not mean to forget that. But the people passing through her gates in the gray morning light had not come to invade her Hold. They had lost their homes. They had packed what they could carry, put their children in carts, and traveled for three days in the cold because there was nowhere else to go.

“The East and North Wings are prepared,” she told Hamish, who materialized beside her with his customary quiet efficiency. “Fires are already lit in every room. The cook has enough porridge and bread for everyone. Get the bairns fed first.”

Hamish looked at her for a brief moment before he nodded. She did not wait for a response. She was already moving toward the nearest carriage, helping an older woman with a bundled infant navigate the carriage step, directing a young mother with three small children toward the warmth of the Great Hall, and pointing two exhausted men toward the stables, where the horses needed tending.

She had been doing this for an hour, moving through the steady stream of arriving families, when she heard the boy.

The quick, uneven thud of small, unbuckled boots hit the wet cobblestones, splashing gray slush with each frantic step. The boy’s head was pulled low, his elbows pumping hard by his sides, and his chest was heaving as he tripped over a loose stone, only to lunge forward and accelerate, his eyes completely focused on Sebastian.

She turned at the sound and saw him crossing the courtyard at full speed, entirely determined, making straight for Sebastian, who had come through the gate on the far side. The man crouched just in time to catch the boy against his chest, one large hand coming up to grip the back of his head, and held him there for a moment that he clearly had not planned to allow himself to have.

Alba looked away. The moment felt private in a way that made watching it feel wrong.

She was guiding a cart of household goods toward the south storage entrance when she noticed that the boy had separated from Sebastian and was now standing four feet away from her, studying her with a serious, unblinking look.

Dark hair. Dark eyes. Sebastian’s jaw already outlined itself in miniature. He was clutching a battered wooden horse in one hand and looking at her as if she were a problem he was trying to solve.

He must be his nephew.

She crouched down to his level.

“I am Alba,” she said. She glanced up briefly. Sebastian had moved within a few feet without making a sound. “I am taking care of this castle and the people in it. Ye must be Brian.”

The boy considered this information. Nodded once, slowly. Then his expression shifted to something clearly a conclusion rather than a question. “Ye smell nice,” he said.

Alba blinked. Beside her, Sebastian made a sound that was not quite a cough.