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Chapter

I f Maisie thought Kieran protective before, this eve he was more so than usual.

She insisted on returning to work, the inn needing her attention after she’d gone missing unexpectedly. None knew what had transpired behind the stables, and Maisie hoped to keep it as such.

MacBrannigan was dead.

She did not mourn the loss of such a man, precisely, but as Kieran had correctly surmised, seeing him slain was not something she could rid her mind of. One moment, he was alive, coming at Kieran when he turned to look at her.

The next, he lay on the ground, blood seeping into the grass. It was the sounds she remembered most, strangely. Of swords clanging. Of MacBrannigan’s men shouting, promising their revenge against Kieran and Clan Duncraig.

“My lady?”

“Aye, Margaret?” she asked the maidservant.

“Cook sent me to tell you the stores of grain are low.”

That could not be so. “We’ve had grain delivered less than a sennight ago.”

Margaret shrugged as if to say she knew not the reason for it. “I will speak to her.”

Reminding herself to do so, Maisie attempted not to think of what had happened earlier.

Her fear when she realized MacBrannigan had made good on his promise.

She should have waited until she’d come back into the inn, with Kieran at her back, to tell him to leave.

But the way he sneered at her . . . she shook her head as if to clear it of the memory of him.

Kieran watched her.

He sat with his brother and sister-in-law, as well as their men, but had not once looked away from her all eve.

Promising to speak to her at the end of the evening, hinting he had much to tell her, Kieran had been tended to by the healer and, thankfully, his arm no longer bled.

A new shirt hid the bandage she knew was underneath.

For a moment earlier, she thought he might be killed. That Maisie feared more for his life than she had her own—and she’d been quite terrified MacBrannigan would rape or kill her before anyone, namely Kieran, could intervene—was all she needed to know about her feelings toward him.

Lady Avelina was right.

She loved him.

Maisie had gone and fallen in love with a man. Something she swore never, ever to do.