Page 33 of Promised to the Forbidden Laird

“A considerate fear.”

“For the person beneath ye.” Donaldina handed him a stone. “Make yourself useful.”

He accepted it without argument. By late afternoon, the rain weakened to a steady drizzle. Dun Ard stood bruised but secure. The palisade had been reinforced, the grain stores protected, and most of the water directed away from the lower cottages.

The courtyard filled with exhausted villagers wrapped in borrowed blankets. An elderly MacNicol approached Roy. Donaldina recognized him as one of the men who had whispered that Roy should never have crossed Dun Ard’s threshold.

The old man removed his cap. “Me granddaughter was in that cottage.”

Roy looked toward the child sleeping against her mother’s shoulder.

“She… would have drowned.”

Roy said nothing.

The man swallowed. “Thank ye for staying.”

Roy’s expression shifted, faintly uncomfortable beneath gratitude.

“There was work tae be done.”

The old man nodded as though the answer confirmed something important. Others came afterward. A carpenter thanked him for saving the grain stores. A mother pressed bread into his hand because he had eaten nothing. The owner of the little terrier gripped his sleeve and solemnly promised that the dog would never again be allowed near floodwater.

Donaldina watched from beneath the arch. Roy accepted none of it as praise. He spoke as if his actions had been inevitable, as if any man possessing strength would naturally spend it upon those who needed it.

Yet, Donaldina knew that was not true. She had known many powerful men. Few ever forgot to ensure others noticed their power.

Roy looked across the courtyard and found her watching. For a moment, neither moved. His hair was wet, his shirt torn, and mud streaked the scar upon his jaw. He looked less like the stranger who had entered Dun Ard beneath the authority of the King and more like a man who earned his place one lifted beam at a time.

Roy raised the bread the old woman had given him.

“Have ye eaten?”

Donaldina almost laughed. He stood half-frozen, bruised and bleeding, yet his first concern was whether she had taken supper.

“Nae,” she admitted.

He broke the loaf and held out half. Donaldina crossed the courtyard to accept it.

Around them, MacNicol and MacIver men worked side by side beneath the clearing sky. They passed timber, shared tools, and argued over repairs with the ease of men too tired to remember they had once been enemies.

Dun Ard had still not fully accepted him… but the storm did what royal parchment, threats, and council feasts could not. It gave the clan a reason to trust him.

Donaldina feared it gave her one as well.

CHAPTER NINE

Roy refused her three times.

The first refusal was immediate. “Nae.”

Donaldina was poised across the table in Lachlan’s solar, with both hands resting upon the open ledger between them. Morning light pressed weakly through the narrow window, gray with the promise of further rain. The room smelled of old parchment, peat smoke and the salt damp that found its way into every stone of Dun Ard.

She looked at him without blinking. Roy had faced cavalry charges with less certainty of impending difficulty.

“I havenae yet asked the question,” she frowned.

He lifted an eyebrow. “Ye came in carrying two wooden swords.”