She was almost certain that was a lie.
CHAPTER 5
Ragnall rode out hard,as he always did when the keep grew too small to hold his temper.
He took the trail along the burn and let the cold air hit him, stripping some of the heat away. He tried—and failed—to stop hearing her voice. The one she had watched cut down her father. The one who had killed her brother and ridden off whistling. She had it so wrong and so terribly right, both at once, and there was no untangling one from the other.
He had not whistled. He had been sick to his stomach for the better part of a week after, sick at the waste of it, at the old man who had thrown himself onto a blow that was never meant for him. But the dead were dead all the same, however a man felt about it, and no man could argue a corpse back up onto its feet with the truth, however clean and however whole.
He should have told her. Standing there in that small borrowed room, close enough to count the freckles scattered across hernose, he should have laid the whole black truth out plain before her. He had opened his mouth to do exactly that.
And then she had called him a madman, her chin held high and her eyes bright and brimming, refusing on principle to spill over, and the words simply died in his throat. Because what kind of man told a grieving lass that her own brother was the villain of the story?
Coward. Ye let her keep hatin’ ye because it is kinder than the truth. Or because it is easier. Ye will never be sure which.
A soft voice cut across the chatter of the burn. “Ye ride like the devil himself is after ye, me Laird. As ye always do when ye’ve gone and lost an argument.”
Brigid MacKee knelt at the water’s edge with a flat basket of cut greens beside her, her fair hair coming loose from its pins in the damp, her face turned up to him with the easy familiarity of a woman who had known him too long and in too many rooms to bother with deference.
She had been the old healer’s daughter when the two of them were bairns underfoot together, and the healer herself these five years past, since her father caught the coughing sickness one hard winter. And once, for a while, she had been a good deal more to Ragnall than either, until he had ended it as gently as he knew how, because she had begun to want from him what he did not have in himself to give to anyone.
“I daenae recall losin’,” he said.
“Nay.” She smiled up at him, and there was an edge under the sweetness of it, fine and bright as a filleting knife. “Ye never do recall it. That’s half of yer trouble, that ye misremember every fight ye’ve ever walked away from as a fight ye won.” She rose, brushing the wet earth from her skirts with two brisk strokes.
“What are ye on about?”
“Nothin’, me Laird. Only… ye wouldnae be tearin’ up the whole glen like this if ye’d had the plain good sense to take a bride from among yer own people. A Cairn lass. One who’d ken her place and yers, and warm yer bed of a night without makin’ ye chase her around it first.”
“I didnae ask for yer opinion on me marriage, Brigid.”
“Ye never ask. I give it to ye for free, out of long habit.” She tilted her fair head and studied him with those clever green eyes that had always missed very little. “She is the very sister of the man who broke Kate. The same blood, the same eyes, I have nay doubt. Have ye told her that yet? Or are ye still goin’ about pretendin’ the keep hasnae a single ghost in it?”
The word Kate did what it always did to him. He gathered the reins up short in his fist.
“Tend to yer plants,” he said, the warmth all gone out of his voice. “And tend to me sister, which is the work I keep ye for. And leave me bride to me.”
He wheeled his black horse around and rode for home faster than he had come out, and he did not once look back.
Olivia lasted until midday, sequestered in her room, and then the walls won the argument they had been making against her since dawn.
She could not stop thinking about how close he had been. She kept feeling it on her skin like a sunburn—the heat of him; the spot where the scar bit and pulled at his mouth; his low, rough voice saying there were things about that day she did not know.
She had come to Cairn certain of only one thing in the whole wide world: that she hated the Laird with her whole heart, and the maddening man stubbornly and deliberately refused to be hateable. It was the most disorienting feeling she had ever known.
I came here with one certainty to stand on. He keeps pullin’ it out from under me, plank by plank, all while smilin’. Nay, nae smilin’. He never quite smiles. That’s worse.
So she went seeking a distraction from her own mind, and what she found was Maisie in the corridor, humming tunelessly to herself over a basket of mending.
The old woman’s weathered face lit up at the sight of her like a hearth catching.
“Are ye allowed,” Olivia asked carefully, “to show me around the place? I daenae even ken where the kitchens are, or whether I am permitted into them, seein’ where I come from.”
“Permitted!” Maisie hooted so loudly that the sound bounced off the stones. “Ye’re to be Lady of this great drafty heap of rocks, lass. Ye’re permitted anywhere in it that hasnae a man bathin’ in it, and even then it’s only manners that keep ye out the door and nae any law I ever heard of. Come away with me. I will show ye the bonnie bits and the damp bits, and there’s a deal more of the second than the first. I will warn ye now.”
The tour was unexpectedly delightful, and Olivia resented every minute of it.
Maisie had a story for every door. Half of them were scandalous, and the other half she was plainly inventing where she stood, and she told them all with the same wicked relish.
