Page 38 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

He stood frozen in the doorway, saying nothing.

It was the third time this morning. The groundskeeper at dawn, the urgent question about the linen allocation, and now this. A few days of armed occupation, his name carved into every ledger, and his hardened men stationed on every gate; and yet, when something needed deciding, the castle still turned instinctively in her direction.

He pushed off the oak doorframe and walked.

He needed air. He needed the biting cold and open space, and something brutal to do with his hands before the suffocating tangle in his chest resolved itself into something he could not take back. He crossed the frozen courtyard, collecting the heavy iron axe from the chopping block where he’d left it that morning. He set a thick log upright.

The axe came down. The wood split clean.

He set another.

The maid going to Alba first was not a problem he could solve with a written contract. He understood that now, with a cold, practical clarity that offered nothing comforting. A signature changed a legal title. It did not change in ten days, or three years before that. It did not alter the deep, cellular knowledge of a household built entirely around one person’s authority.

A castle would take considerably longer than a strict deadline to relearn its master.

I need her. That would be the raw fact beneath my request.

He had needed her long before he fully understood it, from the exact moment he had watched her effortlessly manage Hamish in the kitchen corridor on their second morning and filed the memory away without comment.

He could hold the stone walls. He could feed the Clan. He could settle the border disputes, walk the perimeter lines, andmake the agonizing decisions that kept hundreds of people alive through a brutal winter. But the thing she did—the way the castle itself vibrated and responded to her presence, the immediate instinct in the household, the accumulated trust of three years in every small, unremarkable interaction—that was not something he could replicate, replace, or run a Holding without.

He set another log. The axe came down with a violent crack.

He had kissed her in that dark corridor the night before. She had kissed him back, deep and desperate, and then she had murmuredtwo daysin a voice that had meant something he had not fully let himself hear until he was lying alone in the dark afterward.

He had lain in the cramped garrison room, staring at the water stain on the ceiling and turning her words over and over. He realized, too late and too clearly, that she had not meant two days the way he had wanted her to mean it.

She had meant two days left until she walked out of his life forever.

He buried the iron axe deep into the timber block and left it vibrating there.

Hamish was crossing the south yard. It was either a bizarre coincidence or a calculated move; but with Hamish, it was rarely a coincidence.

“Walk with me,” Sebastian barked.

They took the High Wall walk. The cold up here was different; sharper than at the sheltered courtyard. It was a moving, biting wind that got deep into the joints, requiring a hard forward motion to manage. Below them, the vast glen stretched out white and utterly still. The jagged mountains were quickly disappearing into a low, heavy gray cloud that was building from the north with serious, winter intent.

“The servants go to her first,” Sebastian said, his voice flat.

Hamish said nothing. That silence meant he’d noticed it, too.

“Every damn time,” Sebastian muttered, his eyes tracking the perimeter. “The maid this mornin’. Campbell at dawn about the south field drainage. I am standin’ ten feet away, and they walk right past me to find her.”

“Aye.” Hamish’s thick leather boots clicked steadily against the stone. “They do.”

“This needs to change.”

Hamish remained quiet for three paces. “Does it?”

Sebastian snapped his head around, glaring.

“I only mean,” Hamish said, adopting that careful neutrality that meant he was about to say something Sebastian would not enjoy, “that it’s nae disloyalty, me Laird. They go to her because she kens where the linen press is hidden, why the North Drainage backs up in October, which farmhand needs a firm word, and which one needs to be left alone.”

A short pause landed between them. “That’s nae a threat to yer authority. That’s a castle that’s been damn well run.”

“I ken that.”

“Do ye?” Hamish glanced at him sideways, his brow arching.