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Page 33 of Outlaw Ever After (Highland Handfasts #3)

Wrapped up in cheerful red and green, Peigi bent to collect her basket but Alex plucked it up and slipped his hand in hers. Wove his fingers with hers like laces up a well-fitted boot.

He pulled her through the fallow herb rows. Hopped over the late parsley and through the gate, sticking to the shadows. They rounded the corner and he dragged his reluctant songbird out into the Samhain fanfare.

Celebration dinned. Drummers pounded; vendors hawked their wares. Children dodged carts and chased each other. The laypeople’s music filled the air.

Song

.

He glanced back at Peigi, hoping to see her expression change—for he’d overheard her avoid her sister’s pleas for song when Seamus had been showing him castle repairs. She’d once said music was her solace.

Jossy suspected that if singing were her happiness, she must be deeply sad. What had silenced her?

Laird Graham sauntered through the crowd with one of his men.

She balked. “Someone will see me.”

“They nay even ken it’s ye.” He squeezed her hand.

Still, he hoisted the basket onto his shoulder, bracing it there to shield their faces and veered off the footpath. Weaving behind a vendor whose chickens roosted in their crates, toward the abandoned competition field, he pulled her a pace behind him.

He slowed and turned her to a cart loaded with strange orange, yellow, and green melons from the New World— pompions

they were called—as his brow firmed.

“Alex, what are—”

“One of yer brother’s soldiers patrols up yonder.”

Peigi’s hand tightened on his, whispering, “Oh God, Seamus’s soldiers will skewer ye! And he’ll—”

But her eyes darted around. Searching for her path of escape. To hide. To flee the danger.

He blocked her in with the basket over one shoulder and his arm.

“Relax.”

“I can nay—”

“Ye must

. Besides, ’twill nay be yer head on a pike if we’re found. Ye’ve nothing to fear.”

She gawped up at him. “But ’twould be yers

.”

He teased softly, “Like the song?”

She scoffed, but he caressed the fold of Comyn tartan around her neck thoughtfully, the impact of the jest dying. “Hiding in plain sight sometimes makes ye invisible.”

Spoken like someone who’d mastered the art, like an outlaw who’d thrust himself into the torchlight to distract everyone while he watched from the shadows.

My brother wants yer head…

Heads on pikes, like in that flyer from long ago.

There was a dark undercurrent to Alex’s jest. It could

be that he was the outlaw…couldn’t it?

Now that the idea was rooted in her suspicions, she couldn’t rid her mind of it. She knew pieces of Alex’s past. Of being orphaned young and losing everything like the wee Comyn heir had

. Of coincidences between things Joslyn and Alex had separately said.

If he was the laddie, could she blame him for wanting to enter this tourney and take back what was his? Yet did it mean his interest in her, deep down, was false? It would

mean she’d met him thrice, though.

Ye’re being ridiculous

, she scolded herself, quelling her mounting excitement. What are the chances of this braw warrior and scholar being the same lad from years ago?

Coincidences, plain and simple.

The guardsman jingled closer. Her stomach jumped into her throat as Alex blanketed her with his front. Her body fired alive. His head dipped to her neck, blocking her face.

“Alex, what are—”

“Wheesht, sweeting,” he breathed across the skin behind her ears.

Sweeting?

He buried his face there as if rediscovering secrets. Her heart drummed hard against his torso as memories of him leaning on a crumbling wall flashed. Her breath quickened at his liberal touch.

“Ye didna’ flinch,” he muttered. She hadn’t

flinched.

Their eyes connected. So close. She could see the olive and jade striations in his gaze.

Could see the nuances of the bruises and the crusted scab of his split lip.

Traced his fanning lashes with her eyes.

Breathed in the saltiness of his neck against her nose, as her bosom heaved up and down nervously against his torso.

“Does it mean ye trust me again, lass?” he beseeched on a croak. “I’d do anything to ken my songbird’s faith is restored in me.”

She chewed her lip. He thumbed it free, tracing the flesh with his scratchy calluses, pushed it out of shape with such restraint, she could see the strain torquing his neck and jaw.

Did she? If what he’d explained about leaving her was true, then at worst, he’d made an error in judgment, but he hadn’t tried to hurt her. Her hand snaked across her belly. Why was this trust so hard to summon again?

“Wrap yer arms around me,” Alex gruffed, his jaw ticking to be left unvalidated.

He adjusted the basket on his shoulder to keep their faces blocked as the guard approached, and rested his forehead to hers.

He was…pretending they were villagers in an embrace, like so many others around them, as boots and weaponry jingled closer.

“Touch me as if ye want me still.” His whisper was filled with gravel, as if he wasn’t sure anymore if she did.

She could see the tiny cracks in his lips from the cold weather, could see the silvery vestiges of his life as a warrior.

She slipped her hand around his waist and a shudder rocked his frame.

His forehead dug harder into hers. His grip on her tightened, but as if realizing how hard his fingers were digging, he took to stroking her.

And yet, as her hands caressed up his back, down his back, refamiliarizing herself with his form, her eyes fluttered closed, too.

“That’s my lass,” he whispered, as her heart beat a fury against his massive form. “Ye nay always have to flee into hiding.”

She could hear his teeth working together, waiting for the soldier to pass. His nose subtly traced the crest of her cheek.

The boots were past now. She could feel the presence lumbering away, yet they remained in a lover’s embrace he didn’t deepen with a kiss, even if his breath came out hot, his lips were parted, and she could feel him leaning into her, arm holding her lower back to him, invisible as if he truly was an expert at hiding in plain sight.

To be swallowed in his hold again, to feel like the most beloved object of his attention had felt like heaven once. The feel of his beard brushing against her skin, the tug of the Comyn mantle around her as his heart pounded a matching cadence to the soldier’s receding boots, felt right.

Patchouli filled her senses like freshly baking bread and her eyes blinked open again. His were still closed, brow pleated, lost in some thought as his nose brushed along her cheek and his braided beard tickled her, taunting her to touch and remember the lost dream.

Her breath came in erratic bursts as he traced her heartbeat in her neck with his nose.

Dusted his lips over the wee freckle there.

Worshipped her skin with his breath as if she a spirit he was afraid to drink, leaving emptiness lingering amid the pleasure brewing within her at the pressure of his brawn blanketing her.

Her finger slipped up between them to twine his beard, tempted to grasp this memory and feel if it was actually real—

He sucked in. Jerked subtly, as if her touch hurt. His beard unraveled from her finger as his eyes opened. Could it be that he, too, was truly pained by the months apart?

He flashed that pearlescent smile of a playactor, though it was stilted. “Weel done. Ye fooled them. Ye nearly fooled me.”

Except they weren’t fooling anyone. Because the castle maids now knew that they knew each other, and so did Seamus.

“Mayhap we only try to fool ourselves,” she said sadly.

“I’m nay fooled.” He bit out. “I kenned what I wanted the moment I first met ye.”

Alex hurried her onto a footpath, cutting toward the stables, where Thomas saddled Faunus.

He’d not meant for his remark to hurt her, though he’d seen the sting of it on her cheeks.

But it was becoming hard to hide the pain of these past months.

It was harder to smile when he felt her yearning for him in her agonizingly hesitant touches, knowing she still didn’t believe him.

Damnation, he’d nearly confessed who he was as he’d slid that ring back onto her finger.

He’d almost told her that she should have already been the lady of Freuchie. The truth had burned on his lips, that she wore the lady of Freuchie’s ring. That he knew her thrice, as the oat stalks predicted. That his name started with C

, like the crab apples predicted. That this was all some cosmic spell, destining them to meet again but not promising them a future they weren’t committed to fighting for. That his arriving here, blindsiding him at first, was fate.

And those fickle fae were clearly toying with fates. Always be honest with me…

Because he wouldn’t be able to sit on his secret if he won, and when she finally realized he’d duped her, would her trust be too fragile for such a test?

Lying didn’t feel right. Telling the truth was akin to taking his life into his hands.

He hoisted her up into the saddle and spirited her out of the stable, loping across the hills to the wood.

His fingertips skimmed the passing trunks: once-sapling friends having grown tall, old ones he’d once climbed having fallen.

So familiar. So much time, lost. He closed his eyes and swallowed the thickness threatening to clog his throat, pushing aside his competing thoughts so he could relish the way her arms were wrapped around him like they’d done that day so long ago when he’d whisked her through wildflowers. When he’d made her his

in body, but failed to do so in name.

Choosing a battle over her. Showing up here, choosing a castle while blind to her pain…

That was it.

That

was what he had to do to remind her of how good it had once been, to reignite that spark within her he’d once fought hard to win. He’d been meant to find the wee lass who’d set him free, whose heart he’d wounded and trust he’d dashed.

Which meant, in this entire mess between birthright and employer and unrequited love, she must believe he’d pick her

more than anything else. Which was now impossible. For in order to do so, he also had to pick the castle, and

the battles. Now that he was here, embroiled in this, he had to pick his people, too.

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