She clasped her hands behind her back and strolled to a support, where she leaned her shoulder. “How did you find the old house?” she asked in a mild tone.
Lachlan nodded. “Mm. Good. You were right.”
Finley felt her head draw back in surprise.
“It was wet, miserable, and freezing,” he supplied. “Just what I needed to remind me where I should be.”
“In a warm, dry house with a roof over your head?” Finley ventured.
“Aye, but not Rory Carson’s roof,” Lachlan said, brushing the crumbs from his lap and standing. He reached down and swiped his cup from the straw and drained it, stacked it on the metal plate and then walked toward Finley. “I’m meant to be chief. I was born to it. It’s been stolen from me, by whatever happened between our clans these thirty years ago.” He held the empty dishes toward her.
Finley glanced down at them but did not take them, looking back up into his face with a frown. “Are you blaming the Carsons for your clan rejecting you?”
“I don’t know yet who to blame,” Lachlan admitted. “I do doubt that the Blairs would have agreed to whatever it was that brought this town to such loss. But I have an idea that it wasn’t just the Carsons who’ve suffered. And the proof of it might lie in what I found in the ruin.”
“There’s nothing in the old house,” Finley objected. “I’ve not been inside since I was a girl, but even then—it was rubble.”
He was looking at her curiously, and his intense stare coupled with the warm scent rolling off his bare skin had quite addled Finley’s brains.
“What if we could make this all go away?” he asked her in a low voice.
“Make…make what go away?”
“This marriage.”
“But the treaty…”
“The treaty will stand,” he interjected. “I promise. You could keep your da’s farm for yourself and I could go back to Town Blair and claim my rightful place.”
Finley narrowed her eyes at him. “And Carson Town would still be owed its allowances.”
Lachlan nodded. “I’d need your help, though.”
“What would I have to do?”
“Take a walk with me later,” he said, pushing the dishes into her hands just as the jingle of approaching riders filled the barn aisle. “Up to the…what did you call it?”
“The old house.”
“Let me show you what I found,” he said, pulling his shirt from a peg on the wall and thrusting his head through it. “You tell me what you know about it.”
Finley nodded. “All right.” She seemed better able to think once his chest was covered, and the ridiculousness of it made her cross. “Don’t think I’ll be bringing your meals to you all the time.”
Lachlan walked back to the anvil and once more took up the task of straightening the hinge. He raised the hammer and glanced at her with a wink. “I prefer butter and honey with my bannocks.”
* * * *
Finley followed Lachlan out the door of the longhouse after the awkward noon meal, during which Ina Carson had beamed knowingly between her daughter and new son-in-law and Rory Carson had kept his eyes fixed wordlessly on his plate.
“Do you need me, Mam?” Finley asked, fidgeting with the stack of plates on the sideboard. “Lachlan’s asked me to show him about the town.”
Rory Carson snatched up his faded blue bonnet and smashed it onto his head before exiting the house without comment.
Ina glanced at the door with a confounded look and then smiled at Finley. “That’s a grand idea! You two go along. There will be plenty to do before supper.”
They started down the dirt path away from the Carson longhouse, the tiny, early wildflowers bobbing and bowing onto the path and caressing Finley’s skirts in the stiff breeze. She waited until they were over the crest of the hill and heading into the town proper to address Lachlan Blair.
“What did you do to offend my father?”
