Page 80 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

“I didnae steal anythin’.” She ducked under a wild swing, pierced through the man’s guard, and finished him. “I simply refused to be left behind. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

“Aye. One involves theft. The other involves me being right.”

He laughed again, and this time it carried; loud enough that a nearby Kerr man hesitated long enough for Hamish to close the distance and finish what his hesitation started.

They moved together through the havoc, their backs to each other, mud pulling at their boots, rain pouring down their faces in cold, relentless sheets.

Alba blocked a blow meant for Sebastian’s blind side with a shock that rattled up through both her arms, while Sebastian buried his own sword through the ribs of another attacker closing in on her from the opposite direction. They moved in tandem, like they were performing a choreography they had rehearsed a hundred times instead of never once in their lives.

“I think,” he gasped, wrenching his blade free, “we’re better at this together.”

She glanced toward him for one bare second in the middle of it all, breathless, hair plastered against her face, sword still dripping in her grip. “So this is ye finally admittin’ ye need me?”

“I am admittin’ nothin’ of the sort.”

“Ye just did.”

“I said we fight well together. That’s a fact of battle, nae a confession.” He caught a blow on his forearm guard hard enough to stagger him half a step, and she was there, driving her own blade past his shoulder to end the man before he could press the advantage.

“Sounded a great deal like a confession to me.”

Around them, the fighting had begun to thin. Fergus and Alasdair were driving the last of Kerr’s men back toward the tree line, MacGregor plaid closing ranks on every side until the small clearing where they stood had suddenly gone quiet. The battle’s fury had ebbed, rolling past them like a wave breaking further down the shore.

Sebastian turned and stopped fighting entirely.

He caught her face hard between both hands, sword still gripped loose in one fist, the distant clash of steel still ringing somewhere behind them as if it belonged to a different night entirely.

“Sebastian, there’s still?—”

“I daenae just want ye,” he said, cutting her off, his voice rough and unsteady in a way she had never before heard from him; not even in the darkness of the corridor night. “I need ye. Every day since ye put a sword to me throat in yer own Hall, I have wanted ye, and I have spent every one of those days pretendin’ otherwise because a need that size terrified me more than any blade Kerr ever raised against me.”

Alba froze under his hands, sword forgotten at her side.

“I love ye,” he said, and the words came out broken in the middle, like something tearing loose that had been held too tight for far too long. “I should have said it a dozen times by now. I should have said it the mornin’ after the loch, I should have said it every time ye looked at me like ye were decidin’ whether I wasworth the trouble. I am sayin’ it now because I nearly didnae get the chance to say it at all.”

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out; rain ran into the corner of her lips.

“Marry me,” he said, quieter now, his thumbs pressed against her jaw like he meant to hold her there by will alone. “Nae for the Clan. Nae for Brian, nae for any treaty or truce or convenient arrangement between our lands. Marry me because I cannae imagine another mornin’ of me life where I daenae wake up beside ye. Just say aye, Alba. Just…” His voice faltered for a moment. “Just say aye.”

Somewhere behind them, Fergus’s voice rang out over the last of the fighting, ordering men to fall back, hold the line, and tend to the wounded. The usual business of a battle winding down went on without either of them, as if the entire world had not just shrunk down to the small space between his hands and her face.

Alba’s eyes burned, and this time it was not because of the rain. “Ye couldnae have asked me somewhere dry?”

“I couldnae wait that long. Will ye, then?”

A laugh broke loose, cracked, wet and entirely undignified, and she pressed her palm flat over the back of his hand where it still cupped her jaw.

“Aye,” she said, and it came out steadier than she expected, steadier than anything had felt in weeks. “Aye, ye impossible man. Aye.”

He kissed her before the words had fully left her mouth, firm and confident, one hand sliding into her rain-soaked hair while the other kept his sword loose at his side, both of them standing in the mud and the dying light of a battlefield that had nearly cost them everything.

Somewhere close by, Hamish’s voice cut through the moment without a shred of mercy. “Ye couldnae have picked a better time for that, could ye?”

Sebastian did not break the kiss. Alba’s hand found a fistful of his ruined cloak and held on.

“Give them a moment, man,” Fergus said, though there was no real bite in it, only the rough, tired satisfaction of a man who had just watched his own plan hold together against every odd stacked against it. “The lass earned it. So did he.”