You couldn’t possibly become better than me in only a few weeks,’ she said. ‘You’d have a better chance using a handful of your own tangled hair.’
Aindreas cocked a brow. ‘The lasses have nae trouble with my hair.’
She saw the curve to his lips that displayed the familiar dimple. The one that made all the Fergusson lasses sigh with want.
‘That’s because they didn’t have to listen to your mother lament about you never combing it.’
Those years in childhood at the hunter’s cottage had been the most precious to her. It had been a chance to be around a family, since she didn’t have one of her own.
Except...she did have a family now. Maybe not her father or mother, but her half-brothers and half-sister. They were here.
‘The whelps have already risen,’ Aindreas said, seeming to know her thoughts. If her brothers and sister had risen, she had more pressing concerns.
‘Have they been fed?’ she asked, looking around her.
‘Do you truly care?’
‘Aye, if someone else looks after them, I doona have to.’ She gave him a pointed glare. ‘Your continual calling them puppies won’t make me tend and care for them.’
He shook his head. ‘They think matters are different now.’
She didn’t want to think of her father’s death or what that meant to her younger half-sister, Fyfa, and two half-brothers, Eoin and Gillean. She was still adjusting to being trapped inside the keep with them when, for her entire life, they’d been kept separated. ‘Even if matters are different, what would I do with them? They’re...idle.’
‘They’re not idle. They play.’
‘What would I know of play? Other than it accomplishes nothing.’
‘Just because you weren’t given the chance—’ Aindreas’s eyes softened. ‘You wouldn’t have to do anything with them. Simply be their sister.’
She didn’t know how to play or be a sister because she’d never had a childhood. So how could she understand theirs?
‘You can’t avoid them forever, Lioslath.’
‘I’m not avoiding them.’ It was impossible to. They were always underfoot, playing, laughing. Her clan’s tentative smiles and wary looks continued to startle her. Her siblings’ open smiles and constant chatter terrified her. ‘Will you take them today?’
‘You know I will.’
‘Just keep them away from the platform.’ She didn’t care how he took her words.
‘Caring if they get hurt? You are becoming soft.’
‘Nae,’ she said, wondering if that was why she said it. ‘I doona need the annoyance of tending injuries on top of everything else I have to do today.’
‘What is it you’re doing today?’
Turning away, she said over her shoulder, ‘Saying goodbye to the Colquhouns.’
She heard the camp outside before she reached the steps. Grabbing a bucket, she listened as icy frustration and hot anger coursed in opposing rivulets inside her body. Bram wasn’t breaking camp. Already knowing which unstable steps to avoid, she bounded up the stairs. Before she reached the top, she heard his laughter and gave a feral grin. Bram made such an easy target.
Bram found Lioslath in the kitchens. It was night and darkness blanketed every crevice of the long spaces surrounding them. Soot covering her hands and face, Lioslath slept curled up near a dying fire with that wolf next to her. Like this, she looked soft, inviting—
The dog suddenly growled and Lioslath woke with a start. Her hand reached out, but there was nothing there. If she were a man, he’d have thought she was reaching for a weapon.
The dog’s ears twitched as if to flatten them and Bram pulled himself back. The dog was only a reminder of their differences, of why he was here.
‘You didn’t open the gates,’ he said, more gently than he meant. Her softness was now gone, but his body hadn’t caught up with his thoughts. How she barred him, denied him again, when she should be grateful he showed up at all.
He had not expected Lioslath to open the gates without a pretence of a fight. After all, it would make no sense if she were to open the gates after denying them access for so long. When she threw the bucket of debris and the others did the same, he thought it all for show.
Which was why he controlled his anger when some of it hit his foot. But the entire day came and went, and he didn’t see her again.
‘Yet, you came anyway,’ she retorted.
Wobbling, she stood. Like this, the fire’s light illuminated what he hadn’t seen before: a black mole, small and just above her upper lip. It was placed as if a mischievous faery kissed such perfection. He knew if he were such a faery, there would be others...
‘What can I do to make you unwelcome?’ she said.
Obstinate. Their encounter last night had been brief, but he thought he’d controlled the situation. After all, Lioslath was a beautiful woman and his flattering words had always been enough in the past, but it didn’t seem enough for her. Maybe flirting wouldn’t work with her. Difficult, when her beauty affected him.
No. More than that. It was her fierceness at the platform, her throwing the debris, her contemplative observing of them. All of it affected him. But if his flattery wouldn’t work, there were other methods of persuasion.
She took his gifts by the tunnel and he saw the state of the clan and their lands. She needed his supplies and manpower, even if she pretended she didn’t.
The current level of desperation should be enough for him to be accepted over the winter.
‘Those gates are barred, but I can get inside,’ he said. ‘This is nae a real siege and it is time to end it.’
‘I never told you to come. I held a dagger to you and told you to leave.’
Her amusing threat of last night. At the time he thought it a jest. Now he was beginning to think she meant it. It was still laughable, but for other reasons.
‘I may be unwelcome,’ he said, ‘but my supplies are not.’
‘You stay because of the gifts?’ she retorted. ‘You could have left them and gone. I doona even know why you’re here.’
‘I sent you a missive. When your father died, I would come with help.’
‘Only because you feel guilty for the crimes you committed here!’
‘I committed nae crimes here. I forged an alliance.’
She pulled herself up, then wavered before she widened her stance to gain her balance. He
