Page 27 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

The distance between them was not large. He did not close it. He stood where he was, his chest rising and falling in the shadows, and looked at her and waited. He had learned in the wars that waiting was what worked, and because some part of him understood that whatever happened next needed to come from her.

Her chin lifted, the skin of her throat pale in the gloom.

“Ye followed me,” she stated.

“Aye.”

"Ye have somethin' to say, then?"

"I did." He studied her, the weak candlelight barely reaching the pulse at her throat, which was giving her away completely. "Seem to have forgotten it."

"That's unlike ye."

"Aye." A faint, humorless curve touched his mouth. "Ye have that effect."

She held his gaze, chin lifted, refusing to be the one who looked away first. "This is a terrible idea."

"I ken." He did not step back. "Have kent it since the road."

"And yet ye followed me anyway."

"And yet." He reached out, slow enough that she could have stopped him, and closed his hand around hers in the dark.

Chapter Ten

Alba stood with her back pressed flat against the rough stone wall, Sebastian MacGregor towering directly in front of her. The muffled roar of the celebration had receded into a distant, irrelevant hum at the far end of the passage.

She was aware, with an uncomfortable, prickling specificity, of how the entire world had narrowed down to this exact grid of space. This dim corridor, this man, and a heavy, suffocating silence that was asking her a question she had spent nine days refusing to answer.

“This is a terrible idea,” she had said.

He had agreed with her, but none of them shifted from their position.

The iron wall sconce at the end of the corridor cast a weak, flickering light across the wet stone. It reached him infragments. It shone along the harsh line of his jaw, the dark intensity of his eyes, and the broadness of his shoulders, which blocked the passage behind him like an iron gate.

He stood close enough that she could feel the heat radiating off his chest in the damp chill of the air, close enough that she would have had to turn sideways to slip past him without brushing against his leather doublet. He was simply looking down at her.

I should walk away. Right now.

She had a letter sitting on the study desk addressed to Margaret MacKenzie, a two-day deadline she had meticulously built a strategy around, and a very clear, very cold sense of exactly what she stood to lose if she let this corridor become anything other than a corridor.

She looked at his mouth.

His hand found hers in the dark.

It was not a grip, not the commanding, unyielding hold he had used on the road when he had hoisted her onto his horse as though the decision had already been made for them.

This was entirely different. His calloused fingers closed around hers slowly, giving her ample time to pull away, to lash out, to retreat. When she did not move, his fingers tightened just slightly, just enough to register his weight, and he drew her forward one single step from the stone wall.

The warmth of his chest met her immediately. Solid. Heavy. The scent of him—rain, woodsmoke, cold mountain air, and something deeper that was simply him—rushed into her senses, dissolving the five days of stubborn discipline she had clung to.

“Tell me to let go,” he said. His voice was low, rough around the edges, vibrating through the small space between them.

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

The honest answer was sitting directly behind her teeth, completely out of reach. The truth was that she did not want him to let go. She had not wanted him to let go since the moment on the dance floor, when his arm had locked around her waist, when she had felt his heartbeat thudding against her own ribs and understood, with the cold clarity of a wave crashing over her, that this had stopped being strategy days ago.

She had simply been too proud to admit it.