Page 76 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

Guards grabbed her under both arms and forced her upright, pulling her back a step, then another. She fought with everything she had left, twisting, stomping her heel into a shin, and clawing at fingers that only squeezed tighter.

“Sebastian!”

He surged up off his knees despite the men holding him down, close enough for one desperate second that his hand caught her face, rough and hard and shaking, thumb pressed against her cheekbone like he meant to memorize the shape of it before they tore him back.

Then his mouth pressed down on hers, harsh and clumsy, nothing like the slow patience he’d always shown her before. She kissed him back just as fiercely, rain and her tears streaming between their mouths, the entire clearing shrinking to nothing but the desperate, bruising press of him.

“I willnae leave ye,” she whispered against his lips, broken and fierce all at once.

His eyes closed, just for a moment, like the words had landed somewhere deep enough to hurt.

Then Kerr’s men dragged him backward, and the guards holding her yanked her in the opposite direction, causing the distance between them to suddenly widen, with mud, rain, and firelight consuming him entirely.

“Sebastian!” Alba screamed his name until her throat gave out, fighting every step of the way as they dragged her toward the black line of the trees.

The moment they crossed beyond the clearing, the guards patted down the waiting man roughly, found nothing, and shoved him toward her before going back into the tree line as if they had never been there at all.

Alba did not wait to see them go. She spun on her heel and drove herself toward the firelight glowing faintly through the trees, mud sucking at her boots, rain stinging her eyes, every part of her screaming his name inside her skull even as her throat gave out from screaming it aloud.

A hand closed around her arm before she had gone three steps.

“Easy now, lass.”

She wrenched against it, twisting hard enough to nearly go down in the mud, clawing at fingers that only tightened. “Let go of me! I have to go get him out of there!” Her voice cracked apart entirely. “He is still in there! They still have him, I have to go back!”

“Alba!” Hamish’s voice, low and rough, close to her ear. “Look at me.”

She did not give up. She kept fighting him, pulling both of them a full step back toward the clearing before his grip finally prevailed, pulling her against his chest and pinning her arms with a steady, unyielding strength.

Nay… This isnae happenin’.

“I willnae ask ye again to look at me,” he said, quieter now, “because I ken exactly what ye’re feelin’ right now, and I willnae waste breath tellin’ ye to calm down. But ye’re about to run straight into forty armed men with nothin’ in yer hands, and that helps him nae at all.”

The words landed somewhere past the roaring in her ears. Alba went still, chest heaving, rain running down the back of her neck.

“He kissed me like he wasnae comin’ back,” she said, and hated how small it sounded.

“Aye, well.” Hamish’s jaw worked once. “Men say all manner of foolish things when they think it’s the last thing they’ll ever say to a woman.”

She turned in his grip, finally, and looked past his shoulder, and stopped breathing entirely.

They were everywhere.

The hillside that looked empty and black an hour ago was now alive with men, dozens of them, crouched low along the ridgeline and hidden within the deeper shadow of the trees, plaid and steel catching faint glints of moonlight and firelight between the rainy mist.

MacGregor colors. MacKenzie colors. And beyond them, further back where the hill rose steepest, a third banner she recognized instantly, even soaked through and hanging limp. The wolf’s head of Dunalasdair, Alasdair MacRae’s own men, standing shoulder to shoulder with the others as if they had always meant to.

“What?” She turned in a slow circle, taking in all of it, the sheer scale of it, men she had not known existed an hour ago now standing not fifty yards from where she had been tied to a rope. “What is this?”

Hooves squelched through the mud behind her, and Fergus rode up alongside them already in full mail, sword drawn, his face set in a grim, focused look.

“Fergus.” Alba stared at him, then past him at the ranks of waiting men, then back at him again like she could not make the pieces sit together. “Ye had a plan?”

“Of course we bloody had a plan,” Fergus said, not even glancing down at her, his eyes fixed on the faint glow of Kerr’sfire through the trees. “Ye think that man rode in there alone because he’d nae thought further than the front gate?”

“He surrendered his sword. He went to his knees in the mud, and he let them take him.”

“Aye, and he’ll have both hands back around that sword’s hilt within a quarter of the hour,” Fergus said. “Kerr thinks he’s won because a desperate man does desperate, foolish things. Sebastian’s spent three days makin’ certain Kerr believed exactly that.”