Page 91 of Wanted By the Wicked Highlander

“Aye, most men would say the same and mean it less than ye do.” Fergus grinned. “Margaret still insists ye’ve gone soft since the weddin’.”

“I have nae gone soft.”

“Ye smile now. Regularly. It’s unsettlin’ for a man who spent three years scowlin’ at anyone who so much as looked at ye.”

“I had less to smile about then.”

“Fair point, that.”

Sebastian found Alba later that afternoon, exactly where he expected her, in the Great Hall, seated at the head of the long table with a stack of ledgers before her, arguing amiably with Philomena over the household accounts while a pot of tea went cold between them.

“We daenae need three new tapestries for the West Corridor,” Alba was saying, not looking up from the parchment in front of her. “One will do fine.”

“One will look sparse next to the new hearth Sebastian built.”

“Then we’ll live with sparse.”

“Ye’ve become remarkably stingy for a woman married to a laird with a full treasury.”

“I have become sensible for a woman who kens exactly how quickly a full treasury becomes an empty one.” Alba finally glanced up, catching sight of Sebastian in the doorway, and something in her expression shifted, softened, the argument with Philomena forgotten for a moment. “Ye’re back early.”

“Hamish claims the training’s nearly done for the day. I thought I’d rather spend the rest of it arguin’ with ye about tapestries.”

“There’s nothin’ to argue. I have already won.”

“Have ye?”

“Philomena agrees with me. Daenae ye, Philomena?” She turned to look at her. “Ye ken,” she added, setting the ledger aside entirely now, “we could simply commission one tapestry that looks expensive enough to satisfy Philomena and cheap enough to satisfy me.”

“That is nae how tapestries work, me Lady.”

“It could be, if the weaver is willin’ to lie about the cost.”

Philomena, wisely, said nothing at all, and busied herself instead with refilling the now-cold pot of tea, clearly unwilling to be dragged further into a fight she had no intention of losing on either side.

That evening, the Great Hall filled with the ordinary noise of a household settling into supper. Servants moving between tables, Brian recounting some elaborate and almost certainly exaggerated tale of his day’s adventures to anyone who would listen. Isobel and Alasdair were seated near the hearth, deep in quiet conversation of their own, Fergus attempting, with limited success, to convince Lily that supper came before dessert rather than the reverse. They came to visit often; it was already a big family.

Sebastian took his seat beside Alba at the head of the table, close enough that her shoulder brushed his when she reached for her cup.

He found himself, not for the first time, simply observing the whole of it unfold around them. The noise, the warmth, the particular fuss of an ordinary evening in a Keep that had once stood cold and half-empty before she had walked into it and refused to leave.

It struck him, watching her laugh at something Isobel murmured across the table, that he would have traded every stone wall he had ever claimed by force for this single ordinary evening, and counted it the better bargain by far. A year of ordinary evenings, stacked one atop the other, and he still had not tired of them.

“Why are ye starin’?” Alba said quietly, without looking at him.

“I am nae starin’.”

“Ye are starin’ at everyone like ye cannae quite believe it’s real.”

“Maybe I cannae.” He reached for her hand beneath the table, threading his fingers through hers. “A year ago, I’d have called any man mad who told me this was how I’d spend me evenings.”

“And now?”

“Now I cannae imagine spendin’ them any other way.”

Down the table, Brian’s voice rose suddenly over the general noise. “Uncle Sebastian, Fergus says ye once fought ten men with yer bare hands! Is that true?”

Sebastian glanced toward Fergus, who had the decency to look faintly sheepish over the rim of his own cup.