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“Ye do enough for both of us.”

“That’s what me braither says.” She’d propped her chin on her fist. “He says I’ll talk meself into a grave one day. Or a marriage. He’s never sure which is worse.”

“And which is it?”

“Marriage,” she’d said, with great certainty. “Obviously.”

She still couldn’t remember what he’d said. Only that he’d laughed, one short, surprised bark of it. The men at the next table had turned to look, and it turned out they were his men, half a dozen of them.

After that, the tables had somehow been pushed together, and someone had produced a fiddle.

Faces. A red-bearded giant who kept refilling her cup with water and winking. A young one with a scar through his eyebrow who’d asked her to dance and had been sat down hard by the stranger’s hand on his shoulder. A grinning man with green eyes and an easy laugh who’d raised his cup and called out, “To the Laird’s bride, God help her!”

“I’m nae his bride,” she’d said to general delight. “I’m his rescue, like a lamb. Or a…” She’d held up her hand, and the wolf’s head had flashed in the firelight. “I’m just minding his ring for him.”

“Ye’d better keep it, then,” the green-eyed man had said. “He’ll only lose it again.”

“Aye, well.” She’d studied the ring. It had suited her hand. It had suited it very well. “If I’m minding it anyway, we may as well make it proper. There’s a priest sitting right there; I saw him bless the stew. Come on, then, husband.” She’d stood, not unsteadily, and held out her hand across the table. “Let’s have a handfasting. Ye can annul it in the morning.”

Silence.

Then the stranger had looked at her for a moment with those unreadable black eyes and pushed back his stool.

“Faither,” he’d said, without turning his head. “Ye heard the lady.”

She remembered the priest’s cord, rough against her wrist. She remembered the words and her own voice saying them, clear and steady and laughing. She remembered the stranger’s palm against hers, warm and dry and enormous, and the way his thumb had moved once across her knuckles when the knot was tied, as if to check that it would hold.

And she remembered thinking, with the whole taproom cheering and the fiddle striking up again, this is the most fun I’ve had in years.

At the end, the last thing she remembered clearly was his hand on the small of her back, guiding her up the stairs while his men whooped and hollered behind them, someone shouting something about wedding nights that made her laugh so hard she nearly missed a step.

She remembered the door closing, the sudden quiet after all that noise, and him looking down at her with an expression she couldn’t quite place, something between amusement and a question.

She remembered saying something, though the words themselves had gone soft and blurred at the edges. After that, nothing. Just darkness, warm and total, and the last clear thought she carried into it was that his arms, when he’d caught her stumbling, had felt like the safest place she’d been in six weeks, even though this was the furthest thing from the truth.

Even now, part of her ached to feel that way again.

“So ye finally remember?”

The way he was staring at her from across the room, with that damned smirk on his face, was enough to make her want to slap it off.

She clamped a hand over her mouth and looked over at the maid, who looked even more mortified than she was.

“Take the babe and leave,” she ordered.

“Are ye sure, me Lady?”

“Aye.”

Freya didn’t want anyone else to witness this humiliation. All she wanted was for the Wolf to leave. For him to turn around and pretend she didn’t exist.

“Should I—” The maid’s eyes darted to the doorway and back. “Should I fetch Laird MacKinnon, me Lady?”

“Nay.”

“The guard, then? Only he’s…” she trailed off. “He’s very large.”

“I can see that, Aileen. Take the babe to his maither.”