“Aye, that’s exactly what happened! The Laird’s gone soft over Miss Harris, and I’m the one payin’ for it!”
Noah shook his head, but he was fighting a smile.
Insufferable bastard.
Elliot was also his oldest friend, his most trusted warrior, and one of the few people who dared to speak to him with such familiarity. And maybe, maybe, he had a point.
Noah’s gaze drifted back to where Ava and Esther had been, but they had moved out of sight now. Probably gone back toward the castle to continue whatever lessons Ava had planned for the afternoon.
Was he that obvious? Did the whole castle really see it, the way Elliot claimed? Did Ava see it?
He didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, feel pressured, or feel obligated because he was the Laird and she was his employee.
She’d come here for Esther, not for him. And after everything she’d been through, the abuse she’d hinted at, the poverty she’d escaped, the last thing she needed was her employer making unwanted advances.
But that kiss...
That kiss hadn’t felt unwanted. She’d kissed him back with a desperation that matched his own and had clung to him as if he were the only solid thing in a storm. And afterward, she looked at him with such confusion, longing...
“One hundred and ninety!” Elliot called out, breaking into Noah’s thoughts. “Keep goin’, lads. Only ten more and we can all collapse in misery together!”
Noah forced himself to focus on the training yard, back to his responsibilities. He had work to do. Duties to attend to. A clan to run.
He couldn’t afford to be distracted by green eyes and a sharp tongue and the memory of soft lips moving against his.
No matter how much he wanted to be.
An hour later, after the guards had finally finished their two hundred slashes and Elliot was still stubbornly working through his six hundred with increasingly inventive cursing, Noah retreated to his study.
He had council reports to review, correspondence to respond to, and decisions to make on trade agreements and border patrols.
But his mind kept dragging itself back to her.
Not to her competence with Esther, that he could file away cleanly, credit where it was due, and move on. Not to the way she’d stood in the courtyard and dismantled Margaret piece by piece; he respected that, but he could set it aside.
It was the other things he couldn’t let go of. The way she’d gone still when his thumb brushed her knuckles. The sound she’d made, barely a sound, and the way his eyes had immediately gone to her mouth before he had the sense to look away.
The memory of her in that cottage, her hands in his shirt, kissing him back like she had no intention of stopping.
Fine.
He set the correspondence down.
Fine. I want her.
It wasn’t complicated. It was desire—blunt, physical, inconvenient. The same desire that had him lying awake at night, painfully aware that only a wall separated his bed from hers.
He could imagine it effortlessly: crossing that corridor, opening her door, and seeing if she’d look at him the same way she did in the cottage. Whether she’d make that sound again.
He paused with the thought for a moment before picking up the correspondence again.
She was his employee. She was here for Esther. She’d come from nothing, survived god-knows-what to get here, and the last thing she needed was her Laird showing up at her door because he couldn’t control himself.
Whatever she felt in that cottage, whatever he felt, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t the type of man who took what he wanted at the expense of someone who had no real power to refuse him.
He would not act on it.
He read the same sentence from the trade report four times and retained nothing.
