Page 53

She didn't wait for a count. She dug her heels in and was moving before the last word had left her mouth, and heard his startled laugh behind her, heard him give chase a half-second later.

She gave herself over entirely to the wind and the speed and the wild, uncomplicated joy of simply riding, hard and fast, with nothing at stake but a child's dare and a debt of sweets.

He caught her a length from the fence and edged narrowly ahead on the turn. She pushed harder, low over the horse's neck, close enough on the return that she could hear his breathing and feel the competitive heat coming off him same as it came off her. They crossed back to the children's cheering line nearly even, his horse's nose perhaps a hand's width ahead of hers.

"Ye won by nothing," she said, breathless, laughing, reining in hard.

"I won."

"Barely."

"Barely still counts." He was already dismounting, grinning in a way she'd rarely seen from him, and he crossed to her horse before she'd finished catching her breath, reaching up to help her down with both hands closing sure around her waist.

She came off the saddle easily, and he didn't step back once her boots found the ground.

His hands stayed at her waist, warm even through the wool of her riding dress, and she looked up at him, breathless still from the race, close enough now that she could see the flush of exertion high on his cheekbones, the brightness still lingering in his eyes from the win.

"I've had considerable practice dismounting on my own this week," she said, though she made no move to step away from him.

"I ken ye have."

"Then why⁠—"

"Maybe I just wanted tae hold ye," he said, plain, no wickedness dressing it up this time, only the same raw honesty he'd given her on the overlook, and she felt her breath catch, the whole noisy field of cheering children narrowing down to nothing but the warmth of his hands and the steady, open want sitting undisguised in his eyes.

Neither of them moved.

The distance between them had become a thing she was aware of in every part of her body at once, his thumb shifting absently against the curve of her waist, her hands having found the front of his shirt without her quite deciding to put them there. She watched his gaze drop to her mouth, and felt her own breath go shallow in answer, the whole world narrowing to the inch of space still standing between them.

"MacKinnon!"

The shout came from across the yard, one of his men jogging toward them with the urgency of a message that couldn't wait, and Marcas closed his eyes briefly, a low, frustrated swear escaping him that made her want to laugh despite the heat still sitting thick and unresolved in her chest.

"I have tae go," he said, low, his hands still not quite releasing her.

"I ken."

"I dinnae want tae."

"I ken that too." She found, despite everything, that her voice had gone soft in a way she hadn't given it permission to. "Go, MacKinnon. Whatever it is willnae wait forever, and neither, apparently, will yer patience for standing in a field in front of a dozen children."

That won a short laugh out of him, and he stepped back at last, though his eyes held hers a moment longer.

"Keep at this," he said, nodding toward the children already clamoring for a second race. "Every day, if ye're willing. I'd have ye keep doing this every day."

"Is that a request, or a command?"

"Whichever gets me the answer I want."

He was gone before she could volley that back at him, jogging toward his man with his stride still carrying some of the race's loose-limbed lightness, and she stood there in the trampled grass with her pulse refusing to settle and the children already tugging at her sleeve for another turn. She pressed the back of one hand briefly to her own too-warm cheek, and did not examine, for now, what exactly she was smiling about.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The old records room smelled of dust and tallow and the must of parchment that had sat undisturbed longer than most men in the household had been alive. After he left Neilina, Marcas had spent the better part of an hour in it with old Tòmas, the one clansman left who remembered the boundary disputes from before Marcas's father had held the lairdship.

"Here." Tòmas set a brittle roll of vellum flat across the table, weighting its curling edges with two stones worn smooth from exactly this purpose. "MacRath land, this was. Before the Chisholms took it."

Marcas leaned over the map, tracing the old boundary line with one finger. It was a wide stretch of good grazing ground running along the river, marked in faded ink with the MacRath sigil, the same land that had belonged, for as long as living memory reached, to the clan Cailleach now led.