Page 9 of Owned by the Scarred Laird

The debt is fully settled.

She meant nothing to him. A debt. A number on a page that had been bothering her father long enough that he had gone to the trouble of finding her and handing her over to clear it.

She stood in the candlelight with her hand inside a stranger’s, her stomach still churning. But her spine stayed straight, and her jaw clenched. She watched the priest’s moving mouth and felt the humiliation ripple through her and spread outward until it reached her fingertips.

She looked at the man beside her. At his profile, the line of his jaw, the scar running down it. He was looking straight ahead. Still. Utterly unmoved. As though she were not standing beside him at all. As though none of this cost him a single thing.

I am nae even a person to him. Only a debt repaid.

She did not understand how someone could remain so aloof, standing in a kirk like he had been carved out of the highlands themselves.

She did not understand how her entire life could be decided in a room this small, with candles this ordinary, and no one had once thought to ask her a single word about any of it.

The priest was still talking.

The cord was white linen, simple, wound around their joined hands by the priest with the careful deliberateness of a man who had done this many times and still treated it as something that mattered. Chloe watched it loop, cross, and settle against her skin.

This is real now.

Something about the cord made this moment land differently. Made it land in her body in a way the road and the gates and the kirk had not. This was happening.

I cannae escape this. This is me life now.

The priest spoke the old words. The candles burned. Outside, the wind had picked up, and she could hear it moving against the stone walls of the kirk, low and steady, the only sound beside the priest’s voice that felt real.

She focused on it. The wind. The way it moved against the old stone. She needed something outside herself to hold onto, or she was going to fall apart in front of all of them. She did not know what came after this room. She had not let herself think past it all week because thinking beyond that meant imagining a life she had no shape for yet. A castle she had not seen. A man she did not know. A name that was not hers yet, but would be by the time she walked back out that door.

Then the priest finished.

He unwound the cord slowly, stepped back, and folded it over his hands, and it was finished. Ten years with Jenny. A mother she was only now beginning to understand she had never fully known. A father who had traded her to settle a debt. All of it had led to this small room, these ordinary candles, and a man whose name she had only learned an hour earlier.

Her husband shifted his weight and leaned down toward her, close enough that she felt the warmth of him before she heard his voice. She went very still. Every muscle in her body pulled tight at once. It came low and quiet, meant for no one but her.

“Ye’re tremblin’, little wife.” A pause. “Daenae fash. I will nae hurt ye.”

She turned her head to look at him. Her heart was very loud.

He was closer than she expected. Those pale eyes were looking down at her.

“Unless ye want me to.”

The air left her lungs entirely. She felt the heat climb from her chest to her throat, then crawl over her face.

She had no time to hide it, so she lifted her chin.

“I daenae,” she said quietly. “Me Laird.” The title came out exactly as she intended. Respectful enough that he could not fault her for it, and nothing more. “And I daenae want ye to touch me either, though I understand that may nae be entirely up to me, as I now have a duty to ye as yer wife.”

She turned back to the front of the kirk before the heat in her face could betray her entirely.

From the side of her eye, she saw something shift in his expression. The corner of his mouth pulled back just slightly, a ghost of something that in another man and another moment she might have called a smile.

“Daenae be afraid then, lass.” His voice dropped further, quieter, closer. “I will take me time learnin’ how ye like to be touched.”

Her face went hot.

She turned back to face the front of the kirk before he could see the full extent of it, spine straight, chin level, hands folded in front of her with a composure she did not feel deep down.

Behind her, she heard her father speak to the priest. Next to her, she sensed her husband watching her.