“I daenae ken how to be a laird’s wife.”
“Ye’ll learn. Ye learn everythin’ fast, it’s genuinely irritatin’.”
Something moved at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile. Close enough that he felt it.
“I’m serious,” she said.
“So am I.” He held her gaze. “Set aside what ye’re supposed to want and what makes sense on paper. Tell me if ye want it. Just that.”
She looked at him. He could see her doing so. The honest assessment she applied to everything, not just for show, but truly considering it. The castle behind him. The title. The weight of a life she hadn’t been raised to. Esther was inside, waiting, not knowing what had just happened.
“I’ve been afraid of wanting this too much. In case it wasnae real. In case ye changed yer mind.”
“It’s real.”
“Ye say that now.”
“Ava,” he said her name the way she had once told him Esther needed things said. Plain, direct, no softening. “I am nae going to change me mind. Hear that as a fact, nae a reassurance. A fact.”
She held his gaze for a long moment, long enough for him to feel the full weight of her attention when she was making a truly important decision.
Not performing hesitation. Actually reckoning.
“Do ye love me?” he said.
“Aye,” she said quietly. “I do. I have for...” She stopped. Looked at him directly. “A while. Longer than I admitted to meself.”
“Then marry me.”
One more moment, long enough for him to feel it—the full weight of what she was being asked to face. Then something in her face shifted. The argument left her expression. Not defeated, but resolved—like a woman who has carefully weighed something and arrived at her answer, done carrying the burden of her decision.
“Aye,” she said. “All right. Aye.”
His mouth came down on hers.
Something slower and more deliberate, with both her hands finding his coat and the cold courtyard air around them, weighted by the full weight of the morning, yet none of it seeming to matter at this moment.
She kissed him back. Her hands gripped the front of his coat, and she gave it back to him without the small internal argument she usually felt herself conducting. Just her, present and committed, nothing held back.
When they pulled apart, her eyes were bright, and she looked at him with a genuine smile.
The one that reached her eyes before she’d decided to allow it. The one he had been working for, he realised, to earn since the moment she’d walked into his life with his niece on her hip and had looked at him like he was something to be assessed before she made up her mind.
She had made up her mind.
“Ye’re still an impossible man,” she said.
“Aye.” His thumb moved carefully across her cheekbone, just below the bruise. “Ye’re going to marry me anyway.”
“Apparently.” She looked at the cut along his jaw, and her expression settled into the warm, exasperated practicality that was, he had come to understand, simply how she looked at him when she had decided he was hers to deal with. “Come inside. Let me see to that.”
“I’m fine.”
“Noah.” The way she said his name, that particular combination of warmth and patience and absolute intolerance for nonsense, settled in his chest the way it always had. The way it always would. “Come on.”
She kept one hand in his and led him toward the door.
He went without argument.
