Page 24 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

Chapter Nine

The study was supposed to be empty.

Sebastian had checked the Great Hall, the kitchens, and the South Corridor before deciding that an hour of quiet with the supply ledgers was both possible and deserved. He had earned it.

The day had included a boundary dispute between two MacGregor families over adjacent rooms, a MacLaren farmer who had arrived to complain about fence posts, and a two-hour conversation with John O’Connor about the spring planting schedule that had been genuinely useful and had also taken two hours.

He pushed open the study door.

Alba was behind the desk with a candle at her elbow and an open letter in front of her. She was holding his seal, the heavy silver signet Hamish had salvaged from the desk drawer, whichnow apparently belonged to whoever arrived first, and pressing it down firmly into a pool of bubbling, blood-red wax. Her brow was slightly furrowed; her attention was fully focused on the linen paper.

Sebastian stood in the doorway and looked at her sitting in his chair, at his desk, usinghisseal, in the room he had specifically told her three days ago washisstudy. He stood perfectly still, his knuckles resting against the oak frame, and breathed slowly, carefully through his nose.

“How many times must I tell ye that liberties like this come after ye carry me name?”

“I am still mistress of this castle.” Without a glance in his direction, she lifted the silver stamp with a smooth, vertical pull, inspected the sharp ridges of the crest left behind in the hardening wax, and set it down on the blotter with a softclink. “The papers have nae been signed yet.”

He crossed toward the desk, his heavy boots measuring the floorboards with a slow, unhurried weight.

“Aye. That is a favor to ye at present.” He stopped directly on the opposite side of the oak table, leaning down slightly to plant his palms flat on the wood, forcing her to look up or remain in his shadow. “Ye’re either signed in, or ye’re out. Those are the only two positions available.”

Alba lifted her gaze from the letter. Her eyes were perfectly cool, the deep blue of river ice.

“Perhaps I do have somewhere else to go after all,” she said, her voice dropping into a light, almost conversational lilt.

Before she could pull the paper back, Sebastian reached across the expanse of the desk, his massive hand covering the corner of the sheet, and hooked his fingers to spin the parchment toward himself. He did not pick it up. He simply tilted it into the candlelight just enough to read the bold, elegant ink script on the front.

Lady Margaret MacKenzie.

He straightened, releasing the paper, and kept his facial muscles locked in absolute stillness.

The MacKenzie lands. Fergus MacKenzie, a former man-at-arms to Alasdair MacRae was one of the most formidable Lairds in the Northern Highlands. He built his reputation not through inheritance but through the kind of sustained, intelligent violence that other men studied and tried to emulate.

Sebastian knew him by reputation, the way every serious Highland Laird knew him. He had briefly considered MacKenzie territory himself after the fire before calculating that the proximity to Kerr’s attention made it a liability rather than a refuge. He had even let Kerr believe he was heading there, buying himself the time to turn south instead.

Kerr would eventually see through the misdirection. Sebastian had never pretended otherwise. A man like Malcolm Kerr—methodical, patient—did not make noise and did not leave a trail forever.

This meant that the time Sebastian had bought with that deception was finite. Weeks, perhaps. Not months.

Alba’s lands had been the safer choice precisely because they were unremarkable. A widowed Lady. No Laird. Strong walls with no particular reputation attached to them, nothing that would draw Kerr’s eye south before Sebastian had the Holding secured, the Clan settled, and enough teeth behind those walls to make the answer to Kerr’s arrival something other than a massacre.

If Alba traveled north to MacKenzie lands and Kerr was already watching that territory, if her presence there caused the threat to turn south again, back toward the people Sebastian had specifically brought here to keep them out of Kerr’s reach…

He cut the thought off. Looked at her.

“Ye ken the MacKenzies,” he said.

He tapped the folded edge back toward her. His voice came out leveled, stripped of the grit it carried a moment ago.

“Fergus MacKenzie is me cousin’s husband.” She pulled the letter back into her space without hurry, using the smooth side of her thumb to press down the crease of the fold. “Margaret will have me. I am certain of it.” She leaned back in the heavy carvedchair, looking up at him. “So ye see, I am nae quite as without options as ye assumed.”

Sebastian said nothing.

The irritation beneath his ribs was familiar enough. He had felt it since the road, the kitchens, the tower storage, the empty chamber, and with every calculated move she had made over the past five days. But this was different.

The idea of Alba MacLaren traveling to MacKenzie’s protection, sleeping under another man’s roof, eating at another man’s table, being kept safe by another man’s walls, moved through him cold and sharp and considerably stronger than mere irritation.

He disliked it very much.