Page 12 of Promised to the Cursed Laird

She looked at the dark ahead.

MacKinnon land, she thought. Contracted tae a man I've never met until a few moments ago. A man who had come in the middle of the night tae retrieve a bride he'd never met either, and has so far said⁠—

She turned over the conversation. She was beginning to form an opinion of him, but she wasn't sure yet whether she liked it. She was quite sure it was going to matter.

The road bent east and the forest gave way briefly to open moorland, and for one moment the sky above them was enormous and dark and full of stars.

She waited until the stronghold lights had disappeared behind the tree line before she spoke.

"MacKinnon," she said, and the name felt strange in her mouth, like a word she had spent years using as shorthand for something hostile and was now applying to the warm body behind her, a pair of hands on the reins, and a man who had come through a postern gate in the middle of the night to retrieve her. "Ye need tae let me go."

He said nothing.

"MacKinnon." She tried to turn in the saddle and his arm tightened across her middle, not cruelly, but with the certainty of a man who had decided something and was not going to be argued out of it by movement. "I'm speaking tae ye."

"I heard ye," he said.

"Then answer me."

"There's nothing tae answer," he said. "Ye were contracted tae my land. Ye're going tae my land. That's the answer."

She felt heat rising in her chest with the fury of a woman who has spent an entire day being moved from one set of hands to another. She held it down because fury on horseback in the dark on an enemy's road was a luxury she couldn't afford.

"My brother has other plans for me," she said, keeping her voice level. " He's going tae appeal tae the Crown, argue that the Accord should be dissolved given what happened in the war, and until that appeal is settled⁠—"

"Until that appeal is settled," Marcas said, "the Accord stands. And while it stands, the only plan that matters is the one the King sealed in Edinburgh."

"Ye're very comfortable hiding behind a king's decree."

"I'm very comfortable following lawful obligation," he said. "Aye."

She stared at the road ahead and breathed through her nose and told herself that her body's response to the warmth of his chest at her back was entirely a function of the cold night air and had nothing whatsoever to do with the man producing the warmth.

She did not entirely believe it.

He was larger than she'd expected. That was the first thing she'd registered when he crouched beside her in the courtyard, the sheer fact of him, and it had not diminished on horseback. He moved with the contained, unhurried confidence of a man who had never once in his life needed to make himself seem larger than he was, and she found this profoundly irritating because it made him harder to dismiss.

He's a warlord, she told herself firmly. He held the eastern pass while Chisholm men died in it. He is taking ye tae his land because he considers ye a contracted obligation, nae a person, and the warmth of him is just warmth and his arm around ye is just containment and⁠—

"Ye should know," she said carefully, "that my brother believes ye're dangerous."

"I'm aware of what Fearchar Chisholm believes about me."

"He said ye held the eastern pass⁠—"

"I held the eastern pass," he said. "Aye. That's what happened in a war, Neilina. Men hold passes." He didn't raise his voice. "I didnae say I was harmless. I said what yer brother wants has nothing tae do with what happens next."

"And ye dinnae see how that might be troubling," she said, "tae a woman being told by yet another man that someone else has decided what happens tae her."

The horses moved. The forest was very dark and very quiet.

"That's a fair point," he said, after a moment.

She had not expected that.

"Why did ye come?" she said after a while.

"I told ye⁠—"