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She was quiet for a moment. Then: “That’s an answer.”

9

The questioning came naturally.

Freya wanted to know more about her husband. If she was to spend the next three weeks with him, she had to know what kind of man he was beyond the rumors.

When Skye and Dougal got together, she had learned that there was more to the Lion of the Highlands than the rumors suggested. He had never killed his betrothed, but merely let people believe those lies.

Perhaps it wasn’t quite the same with the Wolf, but Freya couldn’t help thinking about it.

Dougal had let the whole of the Highlands call him a monster for years. The truth, it turned out, was that he was a man who had melted the second he held his newborn son. A man who loved his adopted daughter, Lily, more than anything, having cared for her for years.

Could the Wolf be the same?

Freya turned the question over again and again in her mind as they went down the path. He had given her a number, flippantly, but she wasn’t sure she could trust it.

But then she remembered how he had protected her the night they met at the inn. He hadn’t hesitated to go after those men. He had barely broken a sweat, either. He seemed regretful that he hadn’t broken a sweat.

She wasn’t sure what bothered her most, whether the rumors were true or not.

He had said he needed a wife and an heir. No pretending it was anything else. No soft words, or whispering in her ear that she was the bonniest lass he had ever seen, none of the sugar that the boy at the cèilidh had poured over her until she couldn’t taste anything else.

There was something almost restful in that. A man who told you what he wanted couldn’t surprise you later.

Unless he was lying.

He could be lying. That was always a possibility.

That was the trouble, of course. Freya had heard lies coming from an honest face before. The Wolf’s face was many things, but no one would ever accuse it of being honest. It was a face that was filled with pain, even if one ignored the scars and the nose that had clearly been broken at some point.

So she’d ask everything she could think of until something didn’t fit.

But just as she started questioning him, a group of men appeared. Three of them. From the way they popped out of the bracken, they must have been lying in wait.

Freya couldn’t believe what she was seeing at first. She was rarely scared, but trembled all the same. Her mare shied, and she pulled the reins with both hands, her heart pounding in her chest.

By the time she had the beast’s head down, the men were already on the road, one ahead, two behind.

Evander had already jumped off his horse, but he hadn’t drawn his sword. He stood there, staring at the men. Freya wanted to scream at him to do something, anything. He could get hurt if he didn’t do something and fast.

He stood in the middle of the road, with his horse’s reins looped loose in one hand and the other resting idly on the pommel of his sword, and looked at the three men the way a farmer looked at crows.

“Why were ye following us, lads?”

He said it conversationally. That made the hairs on Freya’s arms rise. He might have been asking after their mothers.

Freya watched, clutching her mare’s reins tightly. She wasn’t sure what to think of what he was saying. But he was handling it, much like he had handled it the night those men had harassed her at the inn.

The one in front, older and grey-bearded, shifted his weight. “We were told to find ye.”

The slightest tremor ran through their bodies. Freya noticed it, which meant that her husband had certainly noticed it. There was no chance he didn’t.

“Ah, is that so?” Evander nodded slowly, as if this were a reasonable answer to a reasonable question. “Well done, then. Ye did so well.”

His sword came out of its sheath with a long hiss.

“Who wants to go first?”