Page 5 of Owned by the Scarred Laird

She lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She thought about Jenny, about the candle on Jenny’s windowsill and how the kitchen smelled on cold mornings, and the sound of Thomas’s voice echoing up through the floorboards when he did not realize anyone could hear him. Small things. The kind you never thought you would hold onto because you believed they would always be there.

She thought about her birth mother’s letter, and wondered if any of it would have been different if she had known sooner what she was.

Lady Chloe O’Donell.

The name sat in her chest like something foreign. Like something she could not yet afford to acknowledge.

3

Her father came before the light had fully settled into the room. He did not knock. The bolt scraped back, and he stepped inside and stood in the doorway with the look of a man who had already decided how this conversation would go.

“Ye’re to be married, Chloe,” he said. “I’ve made an arrangement with Laird O’Brien. He has good lands, good standin’. It’s a strong match.”

Chloe stared at him.

“I am to get married?” She almost choked on the word.

“Aye.”

She stared at him, standing there in the middle of the room, disbelieving what she was hearing.

“To a man I’ve never met?”

“That’s how arrangements work.”

Her father was relaxed, his arms loose at his sides, already moving on in his mind to whatever came next. And she understood it then, all at once and fully. He had not ridden for three days, walked into Jenny’s hall, and threatened her life because he wanted his daughter back. He had come because she was useful to him—someone he could trade.

“Ye didnae come for me,” she said. “Ye came for what ye could get for me.”

He did not answer, and he did not turn away.

What she saw in his eyes made something break open in her chest. How could a man who claimed to be her father, who had come to take her away from the life she knew, be so cruel to her? She had hoped that in some way, he had come after he because he wanted his daughter close to him. She wondered if he would have bothered to come find her if she were not bringing him profit in some way.

Moira had pressed a folded letter into her hands once, ten years ago, three days before she died, and made her promise to carry it to Lady Jenny herself.

Chloe had been fifteen. She'd never asked what was inside it — Moira hadn't wanted her to — and by the time grief loosened its grip enough to wonder, Jenny already had it locked away somewhere, unopened as far as Chloe knew, and the moment for asking had come and gone.

Jenny was the one who'd made the rest of it make sense back then, a place to go, work to do, a roof over her head. She had not known, until this moment, standing in this room with a stranger who called himself her father, how much of herself she had built around that.

“I am goin’ back. I am goin’ back to Jenny and Thomas, and ye can find yerself another bargainin’ piece because I willnae be⁠—”

“Chloe. Shut up before I make ye regret it.”

“Nay! I willnae do it. I daenae ken this man and I daenae ken ye. I want to go home!”

He turned and looked at her.

“If ye go back,” he said quietly. “If ye run, if ye send word, if ye do one single thing to disrupt what I’ve put in place, Thomas MacLaud willnae see another spring. His wife as well.”

He gave her a minute to let that sink in.

“Ye will find that I am a very determined man, so it is nae in yer interest to defy me orders. So ye will prepare, and we will go meet Laird O’Brien,” he said. “He’s expectin’ us.”

Chloe looked up at him, fighting back tears.

Ye must nae cry in front of this man. Daenae let his cruelty break ye.

Her father pulled out a chair from the table and sat down, unhurried. He laced his fingers together. “Look. The contract is already signed. Has been for two months. Laird O’Brien is a practical man, and so am I. This marriage happens with or without yer cooperation, lass. The only thing ye have any say in is how difficult ye make the next few days for yerself.”