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Her nephew’s cooing brought her back to the present. She smiled, gazing down at the newborn. She might not be interested in marriage, but something about the warm weight and innocent gaze of a baby still made her heart quicken.

It wasn’t the first time she had held a newborn. Emily had given birth to Kaden’s children, and Freya had been one of the first people to hold their babies after them.

Now, she could do the same with Skye’s newborn son.

He was adorable, as all babies were once they were cleaned up. She would burn down the Highlands for this infant. For this precious infant who was the apple of everyone’s eyes.

Her nephew weighed less than a sack of oats and, inexplicably, smelled of warm bread. He stared up at her with his father’s eyes, but his hair and the rest of his features were Skye’s.

Freya had claimed him the moment Skye’s eyes drifted shut, scooping him up from the cradle before the nursemaid could object and carrying him to the window seat, where the afternoon light came in soft and gold through the old glass.

He’d made no protest, really. Two days old, and already he was the most agreeable MacKinnon ever born. Which, considering his father’s character, was not a high bar to clear.

She tucked the blanket under his chin. He tucked his chin into the blanket. They regarded each other in their own way. He had no idea who she was, but one day he would. He would come to know her as his loving aunt Freya, who would do whatever it took to guide and protect him.

“Ye’re very wise,” she murmured to him, “for someone who cannae see past his own nose, but give it time and ye will grow into it. I promise ye all of us grow into our noses. Except Kaden. It’s unfortunate, but his nose is still the same as it’s always been.”

The ring caught the light as she said it. It always did. She had turned it inward on her finger, wolf’s head against her palm, and still it managed to wink at her every time she moved, like a guest who wouldn’t take the hint and leave.

She’d told Dougal she had no idea. Dougal had turned it over, frowned at the crest, and said he’d never seen it, and that no clan he knew of took a wolf alone as its crest, not since the old days. And Skye had looked at her the way she did when she knew perfectly well she was lying and was too tired to make a fuss.

Which left Freya with a ring, a stolen plaid folded at the bottom of her bag where no one would find it, and a hole in her memory the size of an inn. And worse, the memory of a stranger’s laugh she couldn’t stop wanting to hear again.

She could go back. That was the sensible thing. Ride the half day to the crossroads, walk in, and ask the innkeeper’s wife, calmly and with dignity, whether she had by any chance done anything last night that a person might regret, instead of what she had actually done, which was to throw a lantern at a man’s head and flee like a bedlamite in his plaid.

But it seemed mortifying to go back and find out who the man she had apparently married was. She wanted to put it behind her. She needed to, and that was exactly what she was going to do.

The baby cooed again, drawing Freya out of her thoughts. She smiled down at him again, allowing him to grab her finger and latch onto it. He was quite strong for an infant, but it was no surprise, since he was Skye and Dougal’s child.

“What do ye think?” she asked him. “Should I go back?”

Her nephew considered the question with great seriousness. His lips puckered. One eye cracked open, milky and unfocused, then the other, and he gazed up at her. Then he yawned so wide that his whole face disappeared into it.

Freya’s heart clenched and melted all at once.

“Aye,” she said, in the voice she never used where anyone could hear it, the one that came out high and silly and belonged to no one but the very small. “Aye, that’s a grand idea. That’s just what I’ll do. Clever lad. I’ll never go back. In fact, I’ll stay right here and forget everything that happened. We’ll go on as if I didnae make a single mistake a few nights ago.”

It was decided.

Freya wasn’t going to admit to anyone that she’d made this decision after talking to an infant. She would tell Skye she’d thought it through. Carefully. Soberly.

Over the course of a long afternoon, weighing all sides like a sensible woman of seven-and-twenty, she concluded that the ring was a trinket, the man was a dream, and the whole affair was best left in whatever midden it belonged in.

She would not mention that her chief adviser had been asleep for most of the discussion and had, at the critical moment, hiccupped.

“Ye’re a wise counsel,” she told him anyway, touching the tip of his nose. “Ye have yer maither’s sense. Daenae ever tell yer faither I said so.”

The babe sighed and drooled on her wrist, and she took it as agreement.

“Me Lady?”

She straightened so fast the baby jerked in her arms.

A maid stood in the doorway—one of the younger ones, Ailsa or Aileen—with her hands knotted in her apron and her face the color of whey.

“There’s…” She swallowed. “There’s a visitor. For ye.”

Freya frowned. “Why are ye so nervous?”