A cabbage struck the ground beside her boot, followed by a muttered curse. She took a cautious step back. “Does ‘Highland Hospitality’ include exceptions for mobs?” she whispered hopefully to no one.
The circle closed. Faces loomed—weathered, angry, suspicious.
“I assure you,” she said, trying for dignity, “I have never once intentionally destroyed a grain storage facility.”
The caber thrower she had felled pushed himself up from the ground, mud dripping from his knees and pride. He brushed his kilt, and his eyes found her.
For the first time in her life, Wanton discovered a situation in which she had no desire to investigate what lay beneath a kilt.
“Maybe we ought to toss her next,” he growled. “See if she lands better than the caber.”
From somewhere behind the crowd came a deep voice.
“Enough.”
The clansmen froze.
The thrower stiffened. Then, begrudgingly, turned.
Tavish was striding through the wreckage, every inch the laird—broad-shouldered, rain-streaked, and radiating authority.
“Leave it, Malcolm,” Tavish said, his tone flat as iron.
Malcolm.
So this was the cousin Morag had mentioned—the one with ambition sharper than honor.
“She’s made a mockery of the Games,” Malcolm protested. “You’d defend her?”
Tavish’s gaze snapped to him, cold and unblinking. “I said enough.”
“If this is the sort o’ Games ye can manage, cousin, maybe the English are right. Sell the land and be done with it.” Malcolm said and stalked away.
Wanton exhaled shakily, clutching her notebook as if it could explain her intentions for her. “Thank you,” she murmured to Tavish. “That was statistically effective crowd control.”
He stopped before her.
For one impossible moment, she thought he might say something kind—something that would acknowledge she had, in her own catastrophic way, been trying to help.
But Tavish didn’t speak. His gaze swept the wreckage: the splintered caber, the shattered whisky casks, the glen littered with grain like golden guilt. When his eyes returned to hers, they were thunder.
Her stomach sank, as though the entire Highland atmosphere had abandoned her lungs at once.
“The trajectory was—”
His gaze swept the wreckage. “Ye call this science? Ye come to the Highlands to fix what ye dinna understand.”
“Correction,” she whispered. “To improve it.”
“That’s what every Sassenach says before the fences go up.”
“I was trying to help,” she said, her voice trembling like an unstable experiment.
“You’ve done enough,” he said, voice low but heavy enough to still the air between them.
Then he turned to calm his people, his voice steady and authoritative, while Wanton stood in the ruin of her own good intentions. He didn’t even look back…
The crowd began to disperse, muttering darkly, skirts and kilts whispering through the settling corn. Morag was led away by a neighbor, shaking her head. The piper limped off, bagpipe deflated, wheezing like a wounded goose. Even the rams—her once-loyal research assistants—trotted after the departing clansmen with an air of professional shame.
