Page 55 of Owned by the Scarred Laird

Their master chamber was precisely as she had abandoned it. The attentive maids had kept the hearth fire burning hot in their absence, the vast linen sheets of the four-poster bed were smoothed flat, and fresh, steaming water occupied the stoneware basin.

The late afternoon sun bled through the narrow stone casement, casting long, golden bars of amber light across the dark floorboards. Chloe stood in the center of the warmth.

Edward marched into the space, set down the small linen bundle containing their salvaged trail gear, and uncoiled his spine. He surveyed the perimeter of the room, his eyes darting from the bed to her bandaged ankle, and finally to the open doorway.

A sudden, desperate impulse surged in her throat before she could logically dismantle it.

Stay.

A single syllable. It sat perched at the very edge of her teeth, hot and demanding. But then she looked at his hard profile, the guarded angle of his jaw, and the familiar, suffocating armor he was already meticulously reassembling after the vulnerability of the last twenty-four hours. She swallowed the word down, the bitter taste of it burning her throat.

She was not truly prepared for what his staying would require of her. And neither, she suspected, was the man standing before her.

“I desire to see Will,” she spoke up instead.

Edward paused, his hand already reaching for the door latch. He turned back slowly. “William,” he corrected flatly.

The reprimand was an automatic reflex, a hard instinct, but Chloe watched him register his own hypocrisy a fraction of a second after the name passed his lips. A tiny, telling muscle twitched at the outer corner of his eye.

“Aye, William,” Chloe repeated, her tone dripping with an agreeable, deliberate softness.

He held her brown gaze for a charged interval. Then, without a word of negotiation, he pulled the heavy door wide.

“Come, then,” he muttered.

She had fully expected him to bark a command down the gallery, summoning Melodie or Mrs. Donnan to escort her. Instead, he simply broke into a slow, unhurried stride, and she fell into his wake.

They navigated the drafty upper corridors together in the dying gold of the afternoon, her boots clicking in an uneven limping rhythm, his massive steps adjusted to a pace she could match without straining.

“Ye daenae have to come,” she said, after a while.

“I ken.”

She glanced sideways at him. His eyes were forward, his jaw set in its familiar line. “Then why are ye?”

“Because ye cannae manage the stairs alone.”

“I managed them perfectly well earlier.”

“Ye managed them because I had hold of yer elbow.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it. He was not wrong.

They turned the corner into the upper passage, the nursery door visible at the far end, a thin thread of warm light beneath it.

“He will be asleep,” Edward said. “At this hour, he usually is.”

She looked at him. He was still watching the corridor ahead, but something in his voice had shifted, quieter, less armored.

“Aye,” she said softly. “Probably.”

Chloe halted at the threshold, her breath catching.

The young nursemaid was nowhere to be found. The room was filled with deliberate silence. Edward crossed the boundary without hesitation.

He crossed the floorboards to the cradle with an agonizing, reverent care that looked completely incongruous given the sheer, terrifying mass of his shoulders. Each heavy boot was placed with a silent precision he never yielded in the great hall or the training yard. He came to a halt beside the wooden frame and looked down into the blankets.

He did not touch the child.