Page 45 of The Highland Ghost’s Virgin

She turned to face him fully now, the bairn still cradled against her shoulder. There was nothing uncertain in her at all, none of the careful distance she'd kept in London drawing rooms, none of the deflection she wielded like a blade in every other conversation they'd had since she'd arrived.

"I know what it is to be handed off to whoever's convenient, Alpin. I willnae do that to her before she's even a day old."

The kitchen had gone very quiet.

"That's nae what I meant," he said, though he found, turning it over, that he wasn't entirely certain what he had meant.

"Then say what you did mean."

He didn't have an answer ready, and the longer he stood there without one, the more the silence in the kitchen took on a weight of its own, Isobel's eyes flicking between the two of them, Greer suddenly very interested in folding a length of clean linen that didn't need folding.

"I meant," he said finally, "that it's a great deal to take on, for a woman who arrived here a fortnight past kenning nae one in this castle."

"Then it's fortunate I've had a fortnight to learn how to manage difficult things." Something in her face eased, just slightly, the fight going out of her shoulders though not out of her eyes. "I know who holds command in this keep, Alpin. But command means protecting those who cannot ask for it themselves. The child stays by the fire, and you and I can settle the rest once she's warm."

He should have argued further. He had a dozen reasons ready, the same reasons Greer had already laid out, practical and sound and entirely beside the point. Every one of them died somewhere behind his teeth when the bairn stirred against Grisselle's shoulder and let out a small, contented sound.

Grisselle's hand came up automatically to settle her, the motion so unthinking, so entirely natural.

He'd watched her tame a mare that had thrown grown men. He'd watched her walk into a village that had nodded politely at him his entire life and have half of it in her hand within the hour. He'd watched her stand in a ballroom full of people who'd humiliated her and answer every insult with her chin up and her voice steady.

None of it had undone him quite the way this did. A woman he would marry for convenience, standing in his kitchen at dawn with a stranger's orphan asleep against her shoulder, daring the entire household to tell her she couldn't keep her.

"Fine," he said. "She stays."

Isobel's head came up. Greer's folding stopped mid-motion. Even Senga, elbow-deep in warming milk at the hearth, went briefly still.

"But she'll need a name that's her own," Alpin said, before any of them could remark on how quickly he'd surrendered the argument, "and nae one borrowed from the MacKays."

"I've already been calling her Nora; it came with the letter," Grisselle said. "It suits her."

He looked at the small, sleeping face tucked against her shoulder. It was in the middle of that thought, watching her hum something low and tuneless to a child that wasn't hers, that Mòr appeared in the kitchen doorway, drawn by the commotion, her eyes going straight past everyone else in the room to settle on the bairn.

Mòr didn't come in. She stood in the doorway a moment, her eyes on the bairn, then turned and went back down the passage without a word. Nobody called after her. Nobody had noticed her at all, or so it seemed; the whole kitchen was still arranged around Grisselle and the child.

Nobody except Alpin.

He watched Dougal cross the kitchen toward Grisselle, the old man moving unhurried. He stopped at her elbow, close enough to speak low, and waited until she looked up.

"I ken the plaid," Dougal said.

Grisselle's hand stilled on Nora's back.

"The Frasers use that weave. Different shade of brown at the edge, see it there." He touched the corner of the blanket with one gnarled finger, not lifting it, just pointing. "The father drowned last winter. Off the north point, in the storm that took the MacInnes boat as well. Tam Fraser, he was called. Good man. Kept nets for the Mackays and never once shorted them."

Grisselle looked down at Nora. The bairn had one fist curled against her own cheek, eyes shut, the furious red of her face gone blotchy and soft in sleep.

"Three days," Grisselle said.

"Aye."

"She's been kept three days, and then brought here."

"Aye." Dougal's chin dipped once. "Whoever brought her, they'd have waited to be sure there was no one else to take her first. That's the decent way of it. Ye check the kin before ye go to the Laird."

Grisselle's thumb moved once across the back of Nora's head, the softest pass, nothing anyone would have called deliberate. "And when there's no kin?"

"They come here," Dougal said. "Always has been. The Laird's house takes what the clan cannae carry on its own. Been that way since before me time."