He did not look away. “I am saying this was set deliberately.”
Her throat worked. “By whom?”
“I do not know,” he said. “Yet.”
Her gaze went instinctively toward the house. To the broken-winged silhouette of Strathmore, to the figures moving in and out of the ruined hall.
“Alistair,” she whispered.
He heard the torn note in her voice and cursed himself inwardly for saying nothing and thus letting her mind leap first to blood.
“I have not said that,” he said at once. “Listen to me.”
She turned back to him, eyes bright in the shadow of the ruined stable.
“I watched you,” he said quietly, “when we came over that hill. I have watched you all afternoon. No one grieves like that for something they meant to see burn.”
She swallowed.
“I know this,” he went on. “I am sure of you.”
She blinked, as if the words were unexpected.
“But I cannot say the same for your brother,” he added, because honesty between them meant all of it, not just the parts that comforted.
Her face tightened. “You think Alistair would set his own house on fire to … what? … get money from you? Force your hand? Extort funds for rebuilding?”
He held her gaze. “I think your brother is desperate. I have seen his accounts. I have watched him drink. I have heard rumors in London that made even other gamblers uneasy. Desperate men do things they would once have called unthinkable.”
She looked back at the charred stalls, teeth pressing into her lower lip.
“Would Alistair risk the staff?” she demanded. “Macrae? The stable boys? Children? He would not.”
“He may have believed he had time,” Edward said. “That he could cry alarm, get people out. Fires are treacherous. They spread faster than a man’s calculations.”
“It is what Glenmore would say,” she said bitterly. “Or your mother.”
“My mother would say far worse,” he said.
She shook her head, taking a step away as if the thought itself smelled foul.
“I do not want to believe it,” she said. “I cannot bear it if it is true. He is foolish. Vain. Short-sighted. But …” She hesitated, then asked, low, “Do you still believe I am in league with him?”
The question was a blade. He deserved the cut.
“No,” he said, with more force than he had used for anything all day. “No, Isla.”
He closed the distance between them, heedless of ash on his boots, and took her face between his hands, soot and all.
“I believed it once,” he said. “When all I had were Deverell’s words and my own fear. I do not now. You could set this whole damned county alight and I would still know the grief on your face was real.”
Her eyes searched his. Whatever she found there seemed to steady her.
“Good,” she whispered. “Because if you had said yes, I might have pushed you into the trough.”
He huffed a breath that might almost have been a laugh. Ash dusted her cheekbones, a streak of soot ran along the line of her jaw where some beam had brushed against her. She looked like some warrior stepped out of a ballad, armor smoked but unbroken. He kissed her anyway. There, in the gutted stable, with the charred bones of stalls around them, he bent and pressed his mouth to hers.
She tasted of smoke and salt and stubbornness. Her hands, roughened by the day’s work, slid up to his shoulders and clenched, pulling him closer. For a heartbeat the ruins fell away, there was only the warmth of her, the answering heat in him, the knowledge that they stood together in the wreckage and were not yet broken.
