The Ruthless Laird

She came north as a treaty clause. She stays as a blade. Elspeth MacRae is seventeen and burning with everything a hostage isn't supposed to have: a memory, a grudge, and the will to learn the language her captors fight in so she can hear what they plan. Laird Bram Munro is forty-two and twice a widower, colder than the loch in February, and he does not want a bride. He wants her brother's oath and her clan's salt road. He gets a wife who eats from her own plate, sleeps with a dirk beneath her pillow, and refuses to be afraid of him. When her brother breaks the oath and raids Munro cattle, Bram rides to war, and Elspeth rides with him — masked, unrecognized, with nothing left to lose but the man she hasn't yet admitted she loves. Her brother falls. She doesn't forgive it. She buries him, and then she takes Bram's hand anyway. *A dark, age-gap Highland romance for readers who like their happily-ever-afters paid for in blood.*