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Oh, he would never let her hear the end of this.

He’d bring it up at supper, very innocently, and watch her go pink to the ears. Then again tonight, when she couldn’t escape.

He wondered what else she’d told them. The feathers, perhaps. Or the innkeeper’s cat.

He grinned up at the ceiling, already planning it. Perhaps he’d remind her how she’d held out her hand across the table and demanded a priest. How she’d laughed through every vow.

Archer jabbed his wooden sword closer. “Da! Ye’re nae listening!”

“Aye, laddie,” Evander said. “I’m listening now.”

“He’s nae yielding,” Amelia said from his legs. She sat with her small fists planted on her hips and her dark curls in a tangle, glaring down at him with the expression she’d worn since the day Freya lifted her from the wet grass. Five years old, and she was already the most fearsome person in the castle. “Ye have to make him.”

“I’m making him!”

“Ye’re nae making him hard enough.”

Evander grinned up at the pair of them. “Ye’ll never take me alive, ye wee reivers.”

Amelia narrowed her eyes at him. Then she leaned forward, very deliberately, and began to tickle his ribs.

The Wolf of the Highlands howled.

Archer shrieked with triumph and joined in. Evander thrashed and roared and pretended to fight them off, which he was very bad at, mostly because he was laughing too hard to manage it.

He’d never laughed this much in his life. Not before them. Not before her.

“What,” said a voice from the doorway, “is going on in here?”

All three of them went still.

Evander turned his head. Freya stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame and the other resting on her hip. The late afternoon light poured through the window behind her and caught gold in her hair. She was wearing the blue gown and his tartan at her shoulder.

Four years, and the sight of her still knocked the breath clean out of him, the same way it had on the stairs the night of the feast.

He briefly forgot that he was being held hostage.

“Da’s yielding,” Archer announced.

“I am nae.”

“Ye are,” Amelia said.

Freya’s mouth twitched. “Well, whoever’s winning, it’s time for yer bath. Brigid’s waiting, and the water’s going cold.”

Two small faces turned toward her in perfect outrage. Then, as one, the twins abandoned their prisoner and ran to her, flinging their arms around her skirts.

“Aye, Ma,” they chorused.

She bent and kissed the tops of their heads, before smoothing Amelia’s curls back from her brow.

Brigid appeared behind her in the corridor, holding out her hands, and the twins went off with her in a clatter of wooden swords and bare feet, already arguing about who’d won.

Evander sat up slowly on the floor, rubbing his ribs. “Thank ye, wife. For a moment there, I thought they’d win.”

Freya laughed and crossed the room toward him. “Well, they do outnumber ye. One day soon, I fear they will take ye down.”

“Two against one. Hardly fair,” he retorted with a grin.