Page 23 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

She pulled it down and set it in her lap. “Then perhaps ye need King Arthur instead.”

Brian’s head emerged fully from beneath the table. His eyes fixed on the book. Then, with quick purpose, he crawled out completely and settled next to her against the bookshelf, with his shoulder pressing lightly against her arm.

She opened the book carefully, the spine cracking slightly the way it always had.

“King Arthur spent most of his life fighting monsters and impossible things.” She turned to the first page. The illustration there was faded now, an armored king on horseback before a castle, the colors dimmed to ghosts of themselves. “And every time he thought he was finished, somethin’ new came along that needed fightin’.”

Brian looked at the illustration. “Did he win?”

“Sometimes.” She turned the page. “And sometimes he just kept goin’, which is its own kind of winnin’.”

Brian was quiet for a moment, absorbing this. Then he looked up at her. “Did he have people?”

“Always,” she said. “That was the point of him.”

She reached out instinctively and pressed gently on the carved wall panel beside the bookshelf. The old mechanism moved with a soft, familiar resistance, and the hidden door groaned open in the stone, releasing cold air and darkness, along with the scent of old earth and dampness—the stillness of a space that had held secrets for longer than either of them had been alive.

Brian went completely rigid beside her.

Then, he said, “A secret room!”

The volume of it bounced off every wall in the Library simultaneously.

Alba pressed her hand over her mouth as she tried to hide her laughter.

“Aye,” she said, when she could.

Brian was already standing, leaning into the darkness of the passage with his hands on either side of the doorframe, peering in happily. He gripped the wooden horse so tightly in his fist that his knuckles had turned pale.

“Is it yers?” he breathed.

“It is now ours,” she said. “Ye and me. Nobody else kens about it.”

This was not entirely true. Morag knew, and presumably whoever had built it several centuries ago was aware of its existence. But it was true in the way that mattered: she had never shown it to anyone before.

Brian turned from the doorway and looked at her with the complete gravity of a child receiving something precious. “A secret,” he said.

“Aye.” She held his gaze seriously. “And whenever the world gets too loud, ye come here and read stories, and nothin’ outside can reach ye.”

He looked at her for a long moment. He dropped heavily back onto the stone floor beside her, his small shoulder bumping hers before sliding right under her arm, pressing his ribs tightly against hers.

Without asking or hesitating, he let his entire weight sag into her side, tilted his chin up, and rested the side of his head flat against her sleeve. His small, warm forehead pressed directly into the wool of her gown as his hands finally went loose in his lap.

Alba sat very still.

His hair smelled of woodsmoke and horses. She looked down at the top of his head and felt her heart do something complicatedand unwelcome that she had no intention of examining in the middle of a Library with a six-year-old pressed against her side.

She opened King Arthur to the first page and began again.

She read until the light through the window went thin and gray and Brian’s breathing slowed into the deep, even rhythm of someone who had finally, for the first time in a long time, felt safe enough to fall asleep.

Outside the Library door, a pair of heavy riding boots paused on the oak floorboards. The faint, rhythmic click of a leather scabbard shifting against a belt cut through the silence, followed by a long, drawn-out breath that whistled quietly through a nose that had been broken once.

Then, the weight of the footsteps shifted, the leather creaked, and the heavy soles retreated down the corridor without the iron latch ever moving.

She did not look up.

But her hand, resting open on the page, went very still.