Page 111 of The Laird’s Sinful Obsession

Lachlann looked up from the parchment spread across his desk.

He took her in. The set of her jaw, the controlled stillness of her shoulders that meant she was angrier than she was letting on, and he set his quill down with the slow care of a man who understood that whatever came next required his full attention.

"Alba."

"Nay." She cut him off cleanly. "Dinnae say me name like that, like ye're about tae talk me round somethin'. I asked ye a question. Torquil's men have been crossin' the boundary. Yer messenger didnae come back fer a week. Men were hurt." Her voice dropped, and the drop was worse than if she'd raised it. "And ye didnae say a word tae me."

He rose slowly, unhurried, the way he did everything.

She hated, sometimes, how steady he was, how he could stand in the middle of a storm she was feeling and simply be still inside it.

"Who told ye?" he asked.

"It daesnae matter who told me." She took a step toward him, and the last of her restraint thinned at the edges. "What matters is that it wasnae ye. That I had tae hear it from someone else, like I'm nae… like this daesnae concern me." She stopped herself, breathed. "He's comin' fer me, Lachlann. Whatever quarrel Torquil has, it has me name on it. And ye decided I didnae need tae ken that?"

He came around the desk. Not fast, not with any urgency, just the same measured way he moved through every difficult thing, like he was giving it the full weight of himself before he reached it. He stopped a few feet from her.

"I didnae want ye tae worry, and I only found out yesterday. I didnae want to ruin our day," he said.

"Ye didnae want me tae worry." She repeated it flatly, not a question. Something in her expression shifted, not softer, but different. More tired. "Lachlann. Dae ye hear yerself?"

"Aye." His jaw tightened slightly. "I dae. It daesnae matter," he said then, and the words came out with a quiet, absolute certainty that would have been almost comforting if she wasn't so furious. "What Torquil daes, what he plans, it daesnae matter. Ye're mine. And I'll protect ye. That's the whole of it."

The whole of it.

Alba stared at him for a long moment.

She could feel the sincerity of it coming off him like heat. He meant every word, she knew that, had always known that about him, that he didn’t say things he didn’t mean.

But sincerity wasn’t the same as being right, and she wasn’t about to let the warmth of it close her eyes to the rest.

Her shoulders dropped. Just a fraction. Just enough.

"I should have kent," she muttered, half to herself, her gaze sliding briefly away before coming back to him."

"Ye are right."

"Aye," she said. "I am."

He was quiet for a moment. Outside the narrow window, the sounds of the castle drifted up, boots on stone, someone calling a name across the courtyard, the distant rhythmic clang of the smithy. Ordinary sounds. Sounds that had nothing to do with the careful, charged stillness of this room.

"I've been managin' things I should have brought tae ye," he said at last.

It wasn’t a deflection. It wasn’t dressed up in justification. It was just the plain shape of it, laid down without ceremony, and she felt it land differently than she'd expected.

"Why?" she asked, and she meant it simply, just the word, stripped of its anger.

Just the question underneath.

He looked at her steadily. She could see him working through it, the way he always worked through things that mattered — slowly, thoroughly, with the same deliberate gravity he brought to decisions that couldn’t be undone.

"Because ye carry a great deal already," he said. "This place. The people in it. And I thought—" He paused. "I thought if I handled Torquil quietly and it came tae naething, ye'd never have tae feel the weight of it." His jaw tightened. "That wasnae wisdom. That was me decidin' what ye could bear. And ye're right that it isnae me choice tae make."

Alba held his gaze.

There was still something wound tight in her chest, a resistance she wasn’t quite ready to put down. But beneath it, she felt the particular loosening of something that came when words said matched something true.

She had spent enough time around men who never said I was wrong to know how rare it was, and how differently it landed.