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Freya bit back a laugh, grateful for the distraction.

If Archer hadn’t started crying, she didn’t know how far they would have gone. She pressed a kiss to his damp curls, bouncing him gently until his cries settled into hiccupping sniffles, and glanced down at Amelia again, who had gone back to studying her with that same unimpressed little frown.

“Ye’re a clever one, are ye nae?” she murmured. “Kenning exactly when to interrupt.”

Amelia only blinked at her, entirely unrepentant, and reached up with both fists as if demanding equal attention.

Freya laughed properly this time, shifting Archer to one hip so she could scoop the girl up with her free arm, both babies now settled against her, warm and solid and blessedly uncomplicated compared to the man she’d left standing in their room.

The frightening part was how willing she had been to go along with it. Evander would have pulled away if she’d truly told him to stop. Her protests had been weak and half-hearted. She had protested more for herself than out of an urgent need to stop what they had been doing.

Finally, Archer settled. She set Amelia down first, then settled Archer in his crib. Amelia drifted off to sleep right away, only to be woken by her stubborn brother, who started wailing again.

“Laddie, why do ye insist on waking up yer sister?”

Freya scooped him back up, rubbing slow circles on his back, and glanced apologetically at Amelia, who had cracked one eye open to glare at her brother.

“I ken, I ken,” she murmured. “He cannae help himself. Some folk are just born contrary.”

Amelia huffed, or let out something close enough to a huff for a baby her age, and squeezed her eyes shut again, apparently deciding to power through the injustice of it all.

Archer, meanwhile, showed no signs of relenting. He arched against Freya’s shoulder, his fists working at the air, his wails climbing in pitch until she was fairly certain the whole corridor could hear him.

“What is it, then?” she asked, checking him over for anything obvious—a pin come loose, a chill in the room, anything at all. “Ye’re fed, ye’re dry, and yer sister will murder ye in yer sleep if ye daenae hush.”

He only cried louder, and she sighed, resigning herself to another long stretch of pacing the floor with him cradled against her chest, humming whatever half-remembered tune came to mind, waiting for the moment his small body finally gave up the fight and went heavy and still against her.

19

What a fool he was.

Evander should have pulled her close and kissed her again until he stole her breath away.

She had been right there in his arms, wanting and ready for his touch. The desire had been burning in her eyes, her body trembling from every press of his lips against her heated skin.

But the baby had cried, setting her on high alert as much as any warhorn could have a Highland warrior.

She more or less fled the room to check on the child. From the sound of it, the cries were his nephew’s. He had quite the lungs on him. No surprise, given his father had been quite the crier himself when he was a wee bairn.

The bath was cold, and it did nothing to cool the fire his wife had ignited within him, though he sat in it long enough that his skin had grown numb by the time he gave up and dressed again, water dripping off him onto the flagstones as he pulled his shirt over his head.

It was a poor remedy, and he knew it even as he tried it, the way a man knew a wound needed stitching and still put off the needle. He’d fought battles that troubled him less than the memory of her breath catching under his hand, and no bath in the Highlands was cold enough to wash that particular memory out of him.

He was still half hard, the bath doing little to ease his craving for his beautiful wife. The memory of her standing there, trembling, her pupils blown wide with desire, was hard to forget.

He had hoped to see how she would look under such circumstances, and he hadn’t been disappointed one bit to finally see his fantasy play out in front of him.

He told himself he was only going to check on the twins. That was all. It had nothing to do with the fact that he could still faintly hear her voice through the wall, low and soothing, and that some part of him wanted to be near it a while longer without having to explain himself.

He pushed the nursery door open to find her holding the boy against her shoulder, swaying gently in the dim light of a single candle. Her nightgown slipped off one shoulder as she swayed, and his mouth went dry.

She had dropped her voice into something soft and foolish that he was quite certain she’d never used in front of anyone else in her life. It was a voice reserved, he suspected, entirely for the very small and the very helpless, nonsensical words strung together in a tune half-remembered.

He stood in the doorway longer than he should have, simply listening to it, unwilling to break whatever spell it was weaving.

Evander felt as if he were witnessing something he shouldn’t be. A part of him wanted to slowly back away and let the moment play out in private, but something kept him rooted to the spot.

He hadn’t realized, until that moment, watching her soothe a child who wasn’t hers into sleep as though it were the easiest thing in the world, as though she’d been doing it her whole life rather than a handful of days, quite how well he’d chosen, drunk and reckless as that choosing had been.