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With a final rub just beneath her head, Reid put the kitten down and said a silent prayer she would heed his words . . . and live.

When he looked up, Reid called louder to Allie this time. But it seemed there had been no need. She’d already been looking down at him.

“I can’t—”

“You are upset.”

He always knew what to say, how to say it, and was never at a loss for words.

A guard moved from his position, heading toward them, but he stopped when Allie shook her head.

“Will you walk with me?” He sounded like one of his damn brothers. Maybe even like Catrina’s proper English husband. But Reid refused to leave her.

“That depends.”

“On?”

“Which Reid is asking?”

He frowned. “There is only one.”

“Nay.” She shook her head. “There is not. And I do not have patience this eve to spar with the one my sister met at The Wild Boar. The one I met on his first night at Highgate End.”

So it was as he suspected. Allie’s fight with Gillian had been about him.

“I can be whomever the lady wishes.” He said it jokingly, but Allie did not laugh. But she did pick up the hem of her gown and walk back down the stairs.

“Walk with me,” he repeated. Offering his elbow in a courtly gesture he’d seen but never had use for before, Reid led Allie back toward the inner gate. When he turned into the grassy area along the walls, Allie did not protest. With only two entrances leading from the outer bailey back toward the keep, they would not separate for at least half of the distance of Highgate Castle.

The sky, lit only by the light of the moon and the torches punctuating the tops of both walls, was at least clear this eve. Reid remained silent, waiting.

“She forbade me to speak to you.”

Reid was not surprised. “Yet here we are.”

Her arm fit perfectly in the crook of his elbow. Despite her ominous words, Reid was very much enjoying their simple walk.

“She means well,” Allie said. “Gillian is accustomed to playing the role of my mother.”

“You say that as if your own mother does not play her role well.”

She looked at him as if asking a silent question.

Though he rarely talked about his own mother, Reid did not hesitate. “As I’m sure you know, the story of my own is complicated. For many years we thought she abandoned my siblings and I, but we learned just recently she tried only to protect us.”

“I had heard she was found and returned to Scotland.”

The pang in his chest every time he thought of the mother he hated for leaving, the one they’d been reunited with now living with his brother . . .

“Aye,” he said, wanting to tell her more, to explain how her leaving just after his father died had affected him. But instead, he brought them back to her own observation of Gillian’s role. “And your own mother? Is she not the nurturing kind?”

Allie’s laugh usually lit up everything around her, but this time it sounded bitter. “Nurturing, indeed. She bows to her husband in all things, even when they are wrong.”

“Covington?”

It was nearly as quiet here as in the woods where they trained. Reid would have to remember this spot . . . finding privacy in any castle was a difficult feat to accomplish, but he’d had occasion to practice.

“Covington, our tutoring, his insistence Gillian and I should be sheltered at all times. Do you know I have never been to a tournament?”