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She straightened instead, and under the fury something hurt, small and sharp and stupid. He had brought her men to choose from. He had no thought of taking her to his own bed at all. He did not want her.

“I’ll choose none of them,” she said, and fury cracked her voice, and she let it crack. “But as ye’re so generous with yer house, let me pay ye back in kind. I’ll choose yer mistress for ye. I’ll find ye a good one, with no tongue in her head. Then ye’ll never hear what she thinks of ye.”

She had meant it to cut. He smiled wider, slow and lazy, and her stomach knotted under the brown wool.

“I thought ye might say that,” Alasdair said. “So I’ve saved ye the trouble.”

He lifted his voice toward the passage. “Come in.”

Then five beautiful women came in out of the passage, one after another, and the room filled with the smell of rosewater and the rustle of good skirts.

Iona went very still.

They were nobody she knew. One had black curls piled high and a mouth like a ripe plum. One was tall and fair and moved like a cat on a wall. One laughed as she came in, low and throaty, as if somebody had already said something wicked. They did not look at the floor. They looked at Alasdair, every one of them, and smiled at him as if Iona were part of the furniture.

“My laird,” the dark one said, and sank into a curtsey so low that the neck of her gown fell open.

Alasdair came around the desk.

He took his time. He walked down the line of them with his bound hand behind his back, like a buyer walking horses at a fair, and he looked at each woman from her hair to her shoes. He let his eyes rest. He let them see him enjoy it. The fair one put her fingers on his bandage and asked, in a voice like warm honey, whether it hurt very much.

“It’s mending,” Alasdair said. “Somebody tied it well.”

The laughing one laughed again. It sounded, Iona thought savagely, like a hen that had just laid.

The dark one looked Iona up and down, from her floury sleeves to her working shoes, and curled her plum mouth.

“So that’s the Dunmore bride,” she said. “I’d heard they were bonnier.”

Alasdair turned his head. The smile went off his face as if a hand had wiped it. He took the woman’s chin hard between his finger and thumb and turned her face toward the door.

“Ye’ll call her Lady MacVey,” he said, “or ye’ll walk home with yer shoes in yer hand.”

The dark one went white. Alasdair let go of her and moved on down the line, and the smile came back as fast as it had gone.

Iona’s heart gave one hard, startled kick against her ribs. He had defended her. In front of all of them, with the same eyes he had just run over their bodies, he had claimed her as his, and she did not know whether she was touched or more furious than ever.

Iona’s throat had closed. Her nails were digging so hard into her palms that she felt the skin give. She told herself she did not care who he looked at. She had told him to his face that she would never share his bed, and a man who could not have his wife would look elsewhere, and she ought to be glad.

Then the fair woman stroked the bandage again, and Iona wanted to drag those fingers off his linen, her linen, and throw them out of the window. The heat of it frightened her. She knew what it was. It was what he had felt last night at supper, with the white gone to his scar, and he had brought it into this room to make her feel every bit of it in front of witnesses.

Knowing why did not make it hurt less.

Alasdair stopped beside the fair one and looked at Iona over the woman’s shoulder. His grey eyes were bright and hard and amused.

“Well, wife?” he said. “Ye offered to choose. Which is it to be?”

Iona drew one long breath through her nose, and her hands stopped shaking.

“Out,” she said.

Nobody moved. The fair woman’s hand stayed on Alasdair’s sleeve. The five men by the wall shifted their feet and looked at their laird.

Iona stepped up to the desk and planted her feet on the black stain.

“I am Lady MacVey,” she said, and her voice rang off the stone. “I married into this house in front of the King’s man, and this is my house as much as it is his. Every one of ye, out of this room. Now.”

The dark woman glanced at Alasdair.