Isla MacRae and the First Dance

Isla's story continues. 

The harvest celebration at Ardmuir was, by every measure Isla knew how to take, a triumph. Lists checked. Budgets held. Every free hand on the estate put to good use, right down to the youngest kitchen boy pressed into carrying chairs. It was exactly the kind of work Isla was built for — methodical, useful, entirely within her control.

What she hadn't planned for was how often the duke found reasons to help her.

A Rhythm Neither of Them Named

It started small. He arrived early one morning to help move benches she hadn't asked him to move. He fell into step beside her while she counted casks of ale against her tally, offering an opinion she hadn't requested and, more surprisingly, hadn't minded. By the third day, she had simply stopped being surprised to find him there — checking the weather with her, correcting a miscount in the tenant list, standing patiently while she re-checked his correction and found he was right.

He never once tried to charm her out of the ledgers. He simply worked beside her inside them, and Isla — who had spent a lifetime preferring solitude to company — found she did not mind this particular company at all.

She told herself it meant nothing. She has never been very good at lying to herself, but she gave it a determined effort anyway.

The Night Itself

By the night of the celebration, the great hall at Ardmuir was full in a way it hadn't been in years — tenant farmers and nobility shoulder to shoulder, firelight catching heather-purple ribbons strung along the rafters, whisky-amber light spilling from every candle Isla had personally counted into place. She stood near the edge of it all, satisfied in the particular way that only comes from watching a well-run plan unfold exactly as intended.

She did not expect to be pulled into the middle of it.

The duke found her there, at the edge, and did not ask so much as simply hold out his hand — the way he'd been doing all week, assuming her help before she offered it, and somehow never once presuming too much. When the fiddles struck up for the first dance, it was Isla's hand he was holding, and Isla's feet, entirely unpracticed at anything but standing still behind a desk, that he guided through steps she'd never properly learned.

She did not step on his feet. She counted this, privately, as one of the greater accomplishments of her life.

What She Let Herself Wonder

Her face was sore from smiling by the time she finally sat down by the fire that night, a tartan blanket pulled around her shoulders, the last of the celebration's noise still ringing faintly somewhere beyond her chamber door. She had never been one for dancing, or frivolity, or any of the things that made up an ordinary young woman's ordinary hopes. And yet she had to admit — if only to the fire, and to no one else — that it had been the best night of her life.

Was it possible, she wondered, that there could be love out there for a woman like her?

She did not have an answer. For once, she found she didn't mind not having one yet.

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