Page 46 of Promised to the Cursed Laird

She watched him more than she meant to, all through the first course. She watched the easy way he inclined his head to old Ionmhainn's long-winded tale about something that happened thirty years gone, watched him laugh, genuinely, at something Lachlan muttered low enough that only the two of them caught it.

Then a young maid, carrying a heavy tray of bread toward the far end of the table, caught her foot on the uneven stone and pitched forward with a sharp, frightened cry.

Neilina's breath caught. Some old instinct from her father’s table made her brace for a laird’s displeasure, a sharp word, a moment of public humiliation for the girl.

Instead Marcas was already moving, catching the tray with one hand and the girl's elbow with the other before either could fully go down, steadying both with an ease that suggested he'd done this before.

"There," he said, easy, unbothered, setting the tray right on the table himself. "Nae harm done, Ailie. The bread's survived worse falls than that."

The girl, scarlet-faced, murmured an apology too quiet to hear, and he only smiled at her, brief and warm, and sent her back toward the kitchen with a word that made her laugh despite her embarrassment, and turned back to his own plate as though nothing whatsoever had happened.

He didnae have tae do that, Neilina thought, watching him. A dozen lairds I've known would have made a scene of it. He only steadied her and let it go.

She noticed, too, once she'd started noticing, how often his hand found the pitcher before she reached for it herself, how the best cut of meat found its way to her plate without comment, how he'd angled his chair, very slightly, to block the worst of the draft from the door without a single word said about it.

He's been doing this the whole meal, she realized. Seeing tae me without ever once drawing attention tae it.

"Ye're staring," he said, low, not looking up from his own plate, a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.

"I'm observing."

"Is there a difference?"

"A great deal of difference." She reached for her cup, hiding the smile she couldn't quite suppress. "I was only noting that ye're rather less terrible than I expected ye tae be, when I first heard yer name."

"High praise."

"Dinnae let it go tae yer head."

"Too late." He glanced at her properly now, warmth in his eyes that had nothing to do with the fire or the wine. "Ye're smiling. I havenae seen that particular smile from ye before. Nae the wry one, nae the one ye give Lachlan tae humor him. This is a new one."

"I'm nae smiling."

"Ye are." He leaned back slightly, watching her with an open, unguarded pleasure that made her chest go warm despite every effort to hold onto the last of her earlier anger. "Ye're allowed tae admit it, Neilina. I willnae hold it against ye."

She looked at him a long moment, seeing the man who'd steadied a servant's fall without a flicker of temper, who'd spent an entire meal seeing to her comfort without once making her feel managed by it, who'd stood in a doorway mortified and refused to simply flee rather than say what needed saying. She felt the caution she'd been holding since the gallery this morning ease, finally, into something softer.

"Ye're different than I expected," she admitted, quietly, under the noise of the hall. "When Fearchar spoke of ye. When Cailleach spoke of ye. Neither of them described anything close tae a man who would make certain a servin girl didnae feel foolish for tripping over a stone."

"Is that a compliment," he said, something careful and hopeful threading under the wickedness in his voice, "or merely an observation."

She considered the question honestly, turning it over the way she turned over everything, and found, for once, she didn't have a ready answer, only the plain, unsettling truth that she wasn't certain yet, and didn't want to lie to either of them by pretending otherwise.

"I havenae decided," she said.

"Fair enough." He reached for his cup, and though the wickedness stayed in his eyes, something steadier and warmer sat beneath it now, patient in a way she was coming, slowly, to trust. "I'll take undecided over yer earlier verdict any day. It's considerably better company."

She laughed, despite everything, despite the gallery and the things she heard and the whole tangled uncertainty she still hadn't fully resolved, and found, watching him smile back at her over the noise of his own hall, that undecided was, for tonight at least, exactly where she wanted to stay.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

After dinner, he led her up past the garden and the last of the torches marking the household's usual boundaries, then up a narrow stair cut into the cliff face itself until the noise of the hall fell away and there was only wind and stone. When the stair finally opened out onto a flat shelf of rock jutting over the sea, the whole dark sweep of his land spread beneath them under a sky gone thick with stars.

"Where are we," she said, breathless from the climb, the wind pulling hard at her hair.

"Naewhere anyone thinks tae look for their laird." He came to stand beside her at the rock's edge, the sea a long black drop below and the moon laying a pale road across the water toward the horizon, close enough that the warmth of her reached him despite the cold wind.

He should have been thinking of the view. Instead, his mind supplied an entirely different picture.