Page 92 of Outlaw Ever After

A tapestry hung over the window but didn’t drape all the way to the floor. Alex’s boots would show if he hid behind it.

“Likely harmless,” Seamus said dismissively.

Alex nearly snorted. Seamus wouldn’t guard his bedchamber, knife him, and launch an attack on him in the village if he thought he was harmless.

“Nevertheless,” came Kendrew MacGregor’s calculating voice, “we should keep an eye upon him.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

A new cabinet sat in the window niche. Large and deep, it was big enough for a man to hide within…so long as it was empty.

He moved to it like a wraith, avoiding the plank nearest the hearth out of habit, where a telltale squeak had always resided, and opened the cupboard door.

Christ ! Too narrow for his broad frame and stacked with ledger books. Alex pried open the other cupboard door.

Victory! Empty, and wider.

He climbed in, knotting himself into the niche as it groaned beneath his weight. Hunched over his folded legs, he pulled closed the door as softly as he could, unable to close it completely, just as light splayed into the chamber as the door was thrust open.

Through the crack, he spied Seamus turn to Lady Elizabeth and drop a kiss to her cheek. “Go to bed. I’ll come to ye soon. I need speak to Kendrew about an important matter.”

He cupped his bairn cradled in her arms, a smile softening the hard angles of Seamus’s shaven face. For a moment, he looked nearly human. A father and husband who loved his woman and babe. Not a monster who lashed bairns within an inch of their lives.

“Nay be late.” She smiled, then swished from the chamber.

Seamus strode in as MacGregor closed the door.

“Ye mean to say that he was alone with Peigi all eve in the village?” MacGregor launched into a conversation that sounded as if it had already been in progress before Donegal had interrupted them.

“Aye, and furious with me, saying I was terrorizing those folk. I’ve only reaved them once and it was back then , but he seemed willing to risk taking my sword for them.”

Such bullshite! Only once? Alpin and the villagers had jumped into action as if having done so a hundred times.

“But what did he say that made ye suspicious?” MacGregor pressed.

“He said that the Grants were good at taking heads.”

Silence. Alex’s skin prickled with gooseflesh.

“There’s only one head that a Grant has ever taken,” Seamus continued.

Alex’s blood rushed, primed for the damning answer that he feared was about to seal his fate.

“Yer sire punished the Comyn laird by beheading,” MacGregor said.

Alex’s breath froze in his lungs, to hear MacGregor speak so easily about the moment his life had been upended forever. “Which is when that wee whoreson knifed yer sire and mine so badly, mine died on the spot and yers bled out…” Lies! Alex’s jaw clenched as MacGregor perpetuated the biggest lie of all in this entire mess. A dark-haired man had blamed him as he’d run to his sire’s lifeless form despite his mother begging him not to.

“Ye think it’s him? The outlaw we’ve spent a lifetime searching for?”

“Indeed,” Seamus replied. “Tell me, why would he hearken to something so specific unless he’d been there to see it? The folk in the village tonight were depending on him, too. Everyone here seems to bloody like him. He kenned the Burning Sticks today when Peigi specifically picked these folk’s traditions.”

“My brother mentioned that the Archbishop of St. Andrew hired a new deputy comptroller this summer,” MacGregor said. “A brash warrior from the Hebrides whom Arran hopes will help unify more Highland clans, and a young lawyer of no title, who distinguished himself at King’s College.”

“ And now he works for the treasurer. And he’s here.”

“Auditing yer castle loans.”

“The charter granted to me was legal, as restitution for my sire’s murder.” Alex’s teeth gritted. He bet Seamus’s sire received an honorable burial, too. “I have no reason to be worried. It’s only recently my clan has come back from the brink of starvation,” Seamus said, “after I recouped my grievances from the MacDonalds. They’re mostly repaid now.”