Page 32 of Promised to the Cursed Laird

"I dinnae know if I can promise ye trust," she said finally. "Nae yet. Ye took me from MacRath's, whatever the reasons behind it, and ye announced a wedding date without asking me a single thing about it first, and those are nae small wounds tae set aside because ye've a fine view from yer battlements and an unhappy story about yer mother."

"I'm nae asking ye tae set them aside."

"Then what are ye asking?"

He considered the question honestly, the way he'd have considered a question of tactics, because he found he owed her that much precision.

"One promise," he said. "For tonight. Nae for the marriage, nae for the week, nae for anything beyond these next few hours. Rest tonight, Neilina. Dinnae try the door again, dinnae try the window, dinnae spend the dark hours plotting another escape. Give me one night where I dinnae have tae choose between trusting ye and finding ye locked in a storeroom again." He held her eyes. "Tomorrow ye can go back tae hating every decision I make. Tonight, just rest."

She studied him a long moment, the wind pulling at her hair, the moon catching the grey of her eyes, and he watched her weigh it carefully, thoroughly, refusing to hand out anything she hadn't fully decided to give.

"One night," she said finally.

"One night."

"And if I wake tomorrow and decide I've changed my mind about all of it⁠—"

"Then ye'll tell me plainly," he said, "and we'll argue it properly, in daylight, where I can actually answer ye instead of announcing things over stew like a fool." A faint, rueful edge came into his voice. "I'll grant ye that much was poorly done."

That, finally, won something close to a real smile out of her and she looked back out at the water with the wind still pulling at her cloak, and he thought, that he would happily stand on these cold stones the rest of the night just to keep her looking like that a while longer.

"Come," he said instead, because the wind was sharpening and she'd been shivering longer than she'd let herself admit. "I'll walk ye back."

She let him, and this time, when his hand found the small of her back to guide her toward the stair, she didn't pull away from it.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Marcas came for her before she'd finished dressing the next morning, no warning beyond a single knock and her name through the door, and when she opened it, he was already dressed for riding, cloak and boots.

"Come with me," he said.

"Where?"

"Ye'll see."

She should have been suspicious of that. A week ago she would have been, would have stood in the doorway cataloguing every possible trap in the phrase before she moved a single step. Instead, she found herself reaching for her own cloak, some new and uneasy trust already at work in her before she'd consciously granted it permission to be.

She followed him into the corridor. This is what he does. He asks naething and explains naething and somehow ye find yerself walking beside him regardless.

He led her down through the stronghold by ways she hadn't seen. It was not the grand stair she'd been brought up by on arrival, but a narrower servants' route, then a low arched passage that opened into a courtyard she didn't recognize, followed by another passage, and another, until she'd lost any clear sense of where in the building she stood.

"This is the west yard," he said, as they crossed it, unhurried, his hands loose at his sides in a way that had nothing of the wariness he usually carried through his own halls. "Stables through there. If ye ever needed a horse in a hurry, that's the door ye'd want, it's nearer the gate than the main stable, and the boy who tends it sleeps sound."

She glanced at him, something in his tone catching her attention properly for the first time.

"Why are ye telling me that?"

He kept walking. "This passage here leads tae the postern on the north wall. It's nae guarded after the second watch, I've told the men there's nae need, given the cliffs behind it, but a person on foot who kent the path down could manage it, if they were careful and the tide was out."

She stopped walking.

He noticed, and stopped too, turning back to face her in the cold morning light, and she looked at the deliberate, unhurried way he'd walked her through this, gate after gate, route after route and understanding of what he was actually doing arrived all at once.

"Ye're showing me how tae leave."

"Aye."

"Why?"