Page 30 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

She had meant: two days left to leave. She was deeply, privately certain that he had not heard it that way at all. She stood there for a long moment, the cold stone solid and real beneath her palm.

Then she climbed the stairs to her chamber, set the lantern down on the table, and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark.

For the first time in five days, Alba MacLaren had absolutely no idea what she was going to do, and the worst part was that she was no longer entirely sure what she wanted.

Chapter Eleven

Sebastian climbed into the attic the following morning. Stubbornness drove him up the narrow stairs, nothing else. He needed the grim satisfaction of proving he could sleep on bare timber without complaint.

Alba had taken his chamber. He had survived freezing battlefields. He would survive her.

“Take these below,” he ordered.

Two maids froze by the rafters, arms full of bedding. He threw a fresh pile of blankets at them without looking. They grabbed the loads in a panic and disappeared. Their footsteps faded down the spiral stone staircase. Then, only the creak of the roof beams and the soft settling of dust remained.

He cleared the floor. He shoved a cracked chest aside, then a stack of old shutters. His boot caught on a rolled canvas. He assumed it was a map until the heavy linen slipped.

He stopped.

It was not a map.

The portrait leaned against the far wall, life-sized, oil-on-panel, framed in age-darkened, carved oak. Alba looked back at him. She sat beside the loch, the same one visible from his stolen eastern tower. Painted sunlight shimmered in the dark silk of her hair. Her mouth was slightly open, caught mid-laugh. It was an expression she never allowed herself in his presence.

The artist had to know her.

The brushstrokes captured the precise curve of her shoulder, where her dress slipped. They had faithfully depicted the faint dusting of freckles across her nose and throat. Her hands rested loosely in her lap. She appeared completely at ease in her own skin.

Sebastian stood there; the seconds stretching.

His chest went dead still. His eyes moved across the painted canvas, the same way they moved across her in the corridor—cataloging details he had no right to know. The narrow span of her waist. The pale line of her neck. The warmth of laughter he had never been given freely.

Heat slammed low into his stomach, sudden and violent.

“Christ,” he muttered.

He gripped the linen and dragged it sharply back over the canvas. He turned his back on it.

The attic was suddenly airless. Dust choked his throat.

He descended the stairs in hard, rapid strides. He cut through the back passage, shoved through the heavy door at the base of the tower, and walked directly out across the Eastern Grounds. The loch glittered dully through the dense tree line. He broke through the brush and hit the riverbank at a brutal pace.

The water was freezing. He did not care.

He waded straight in. The shock seized his legs, biting through leather boots and wool trews. It crawled upward with every step, a numbing vise. He stopped when it hit his waist. He braced both hands against his thighs, his jaw locked tight as he stared at the flat, gray surface.

The biting cold helped. Marginally.

He stayed there, submerged, his breath pluming in the crisp air. A MacGregor boy crossing the bank on some errand stopped and stared. Sebastian glared back. The boy wisely bolted without a word.

Sebastian exhaled harshly through his teeth and looked back toward the high stone fortress. Alba’s window glowed faintly behind the bare branches. A dark shadow moved behindthe glass, crossing back and forth as she managed whatever catastrophe the day had brought.

He looked away first. He dragged a wet, trembling hand across his face.

The portrait had to go. He would hide it somewhere he could never accidentally stumble across it again.

Somewhere south of the Highlands entirely.

* * *