But beneath the promise of rebuilding simmered something far darker inside Halvard. Something old and vicious. Something earned in the years before he became laird—years spent fighting men who believed fear was a tool and cruelty a language.
The Savage in him stirred—hot, violent, demanding release.
If Bowen Harcourt had any hand in this devastation, then the earl had just declared himself Halvard’s enemy.
And Halvard had never been a forgiving man.
It took every shred of his strength to push the Savage back down, to bury the fury beneath duty and strategy, because if he let it surface here—amid ruin and ashes—war would rise with it.
Still… the fire had been a message.
And Halvard intended to answer it.
With interest.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The wind had begun shifting for the past hour.
Elsie felt it before anyone spoke of it—a sudden cold sweep across the back of her neck, an unsettling brush of air that didn’t match the heat radiating from the ruins. A moment later, the smoldering heaps responded as if sensing opportunity. Embers brightened within the collapsed walls, tiny points of red that glimmered like watchful eyes. Smoke curled upward in sharp, twisting ribbons that looked far too eager.
“Mind the east side!” a man shouted. “Wind’s turnin’. Mind th’ embers!”
Elsie clutched the basket of bandages Muirin had pressed into her arms and scanned for Halvard. He stood farther down the lane with several men, his posture rigid as he lifted his face to the shifting wind. Even from a distance, she recognized the tightness in his jaw—the look of a leader calculating new threats as they formed.
She had no time to dwell on it. She had been in near-constant motion since they’d arrived in the village—checking burns, washing soot from frightened children’s faces, binding cuts with whatever salve or cloth she had left. Sweat clung to her hairline, her hands were streaked gray from ash, but the work kept her grounded. Doing something, anything, kept fear at bay.
It struck her only now, how strange it was that she felt more herself in this moment than she had ever felt in England. There, she had been taught to sit quietly, to smile politely, to fold her hands neatly in her lap and speak only when invited. It had been a sort of performance, a shape she had been molded into.
Here—in the heat and chaos, with people calling her name because they needed her—she felt something else. Something startlingly close to belonging.
“Hold still, darling,” she murmured to a weeping girl whose small ankle had blistered when she stepped unknowingly onto a glowing ember pile. “This salve will cool it. I promise.”
The girl sniffled hard but nodded, and by the time Elsie tied off the bandage, two small soot-smudged hands clung to her skirt with a trust that pierced straight through her chest.
“Thank ye,” the child’s mother whispered. Her voice was tentative, but her eyes were grateful. “We… dinnae see many Sassenachs… doing so much fer us.”
Elsie managed a tired smile. “Pain doesn’t know borders.”
The woman’s expression softened, and the shift spread quietly through those nearby. Where villagers had earlier watched her with unease or suspicion, they now called for her with urgency.
“Me lady—over here! This lad fainted!”
“Lass, bring yer quick hands. The old man cannae breathe right!”
Elsie hurried from one crisis to another, her basket growing lighter with every step. Halvard worked close by, sleeves rolled and commands sharp, yet every so often their paths crossed—passing each other with buckets, stamping out embers side by side—and in those brief seconds, their eyes met. It was nothing more than a glance, but each one felt weighted, threaded through with something unsaid. Unexpected intimacy in the smoke and fading afternoon light.
She was folding a final set of bandages when she overheard two older women dragging a broken table frame away from another ruined cottage.
“Bonnie’d ne’er have done all this,” one muttered, nodding in Elsie’s direction. “Mayhap the laird chose the better bride after all.”
Elsie’s hands stilled.
Heat rose in her cheeks at the unexpected praise, yet the name struck her with a cold note—Bonnie. There it was again, driftingaround her like a shadow she couldn’t place. Not whispered with pity this time, but with comparison. Comparison to someone she didn’t know, someone woven into Halvard’s past.
For a moment, she could hardly breathe.
She forced her hands to keep moving, tying the linen too tightly before catching herself and loosening it again. When she finished, she sought Halvard. He was only a short distance away, stamping out embers near the main path, shoveling dirt with measured force.
