Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“This is nae helpin’!”
The morning had become gray and drizzling when Ava stopped pretending to read.
She placed the book face-down on the window seat and watched the rain trace slow lines down the glass, her chin resting on her knees, her mind doing what it had been doing for three days now with a persistence she was beginning to find exhausting.
Going back to the tower.
Not the stars, not the cold air, not even the things he had said, though those replayed often enough. Just the moment after. The careful way his hands had tied her laces. The way she had reached back for him without deciding to.
She pressed her forehead against the cool glass and willed herself to think about something else.
“Ye’ve got that face again.”
Ava turned.
Caitlin stood in the doorway with a bundle of fresh linens balanced on one hip, her head tilted at the angle she wore when she was about to say something she had already decided she was going to say, no matter how it turned out.
“What face?”
“The one where ye’re starin’ at nothin’, and yer ears go pink.”
Caitlin deposited the linens on the chest at the foot of the bed and settled herself uninvited into the chair by the fire with the ease of someone who had decided they were friends weeks ago and hadn’t seen any evidence to the contrary.
“Want to tell me what’s got ye twisted up, or shall I guess?”
“There’s nothin’ to tell.”
“I see.” Caitlin tucked her feet beneath her. “Is it a male-shaped nothin’?”
Ava opened her mouth, then closed it.
“Aye,” Caitlin said, satisfied. “That’s what I thought.”
“I daenae ken what to do with…” Ava stopped. Tried again. “I daenae understand how anyone manages it. Males. They’re just...” She waved a hand. “Confusin’.”
“Oh, deeply,” Caitlin agreed with feeling. “Deeply and completely and with nay apparent awareness of the confusion they’re causin’. It’s a talent, really.” She paused. “Though some are worse than others.”
Ava said nothing, which apparently said everything.
“Ye ken,” Caitlin began, in the tone of someone settling in for a proper story. “Fiona in the laundry had the same problem nae three months past.”
“I’m nae sure me situation is the same.”
“Her fellow, Dougal, he’s one of the outer gate guards—very broad shoulders, ye’ve probably seen him around. When they first started circlin’ each other, it was an absolute disaster. He’d say somethin’ clumsy, she’d take it the wrong way, she’d say somethin’ sharp, and he’d go quiet for a week.”
Caitlin shook her head with the mournful pleasure of someone recounting a very satisfying catastrophe.
“There were tears. There was a period of approximately a fortnight during which they refused to look each other in the eye. Old Morag from the kitchen said she’d never seen two people work so hard to be in the same room without acknowledgin’ it. ”
Despite herself, Ava felt her mouth twitch. “What happened?”
“He brought her a bunch of heather he had picked on his rounds. Didnae say anythin’. Just left it outside the laundry door.” Caitlin spread her hands. “And that was that. Smooth sailin’ ever since. They’re to be married come spring.”
Ava looked back at the rain-blurred window. “That’s lovely. For them.”
“It is. Things have a way of workin’ out, is what I’m sayin’.”
“Nae for everyone.”
“Why nae for ye?”
The question was gentle enough that Ava almost answered it directly. She caught herself in time, but not before the actual thought surfaced, flat and certain in a way she couldn’t argue with.
Because Fiona and Dougal are the same kind of thing. Two people from the same world, the same station, the same life. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
“Because some things daenae make sense,” Ava said instead. “Nay matter how ye look at them.”
Caitlin studied her for a moment with eyes that were considerably sharper than her cheerful chatter suggested. Then she unfolded herself from the chair, picked up a pillowcase to fold, and let the subject rest.
But the thought wouldn’t fade. It sat in Ava’s chest with the steady certainty of something that had been true long before she had words for it.
She was a village lass who had run from her father’s house at sixteen with nothing but the clothes on her back and enough stubbornness to keep breathing.
She had swept tavern floors and mended children’s stockings at the orphanage and been grateful, genuinely grateful, for a dry place to sleep and enough to eat.
She was not fit for… she didn’t even have a word for what the alternative would be. The idea of it was so shapeless and implausible that her mind kept sliding off it like water off a stone.
A laird.
Ye are nae qualified for a laird, Ava Harris. Ye are nae the right shape for that life, and ye never will be, and the sooner ye get that clearly in yer head, the better off ye’ll be.
There was actually a sense of relief in it. A clear line drawn.
Something she could hold onto when her mind started drifting back toward towers, starlight, and hands that tied laces with a gentleness that shouldn’t exist in the same body as all that controlled, coiled intensity.
She was an employee.
A good one, she thought, without false modesty. She was good with Esther, was earning her wages honestly, and had no intention of doing anything that would jeopardize either of those facts.
He’s the Laird, and ye are the help. And whatever happened on that tower was—
She didn’t finish the thought. She had not been finishing it for three days and had gotten rather good at the technique.
What she was less skilled at was the part where she would wake in the small hours, lie in the dark, and feel the imprint of his hands at her waist as clearly as if they were still there.
That part she hadn’t managed to reason away yet.
Give it some time, it’ll fade away.
She picked her book back up and tried to read, this time with more success.
Three floors below, in a study that had seen considerably less work completed in the past seventy-two hours than its occupant would admit, Noah stared at the same paragraph of the same trade report he had been fixated on since before breakfast.
The words made sense on their own. However, they refused to come together into anything meaningful because an irrational part of his mind kept interrupting with unrelated information.
The way she’d tasted.
He set the report down. He stood up and moved to the window. He stood there with his hands pressed against the stone, looking at the rain, and told himself firmly that he was a laird with a clan to lead and work that needed doing.
He sat back down and picked up the report.
The way she’d tasted...
The thought arrived again with the unstoppable quality of something that had stopped asking permission.
Her mouth opening under his on the tower, the small broken sound she made, the way her hands gripped his shirt as if she was deciding something, and then made up her mind.
The taste of her, the memory of her body still stuck in his head.
Stop.
The trouble was the silence.
He hadn’t been alone with her since the tower, a fact he was growing more sure she’d planned on purpose.
She came to meals. She smiled when Esther spoke.
She answered him directly and pleasantly when he addressed her, with the careful courtesy of someone who maintained a distance they had measured out to the inch.
And he’d let her, because the alternative was cornering her, and the alternative was something he wasn’t ready to name yet.
Ye pushed too far, too fast, and now she’s pullin’ back, and the right thing, the only thing to do, is to give her room.
He knew that.
The fire crackled. Rain hit the window in uneven bursts.
Somewhere inside the castle, he could hear the distant sound of Esther’s voice echoing down the corridor, saying something he couldn’t understand, followed by Ava’s laugh in response.
It was low, warm, and way too audible from this distance, which meant he was listening for it, a fact he chose not to examine.
The trouble was that no clean line was available to him.
He’d tried.
He’d cataloged the reasons with the same careful thoroughness he used for military problems: she was his employee, the power dynamic between them was uneven, she had been hurt before, and she was there for Esther, not for him.
All of it true. All of it entirely reasonable. None of it doing anything useful when she was in the same room.
Three days of distance hadn’t helped.
If anything, it had made it worse, because now, instead of his desire for her, there was also the awareness of the absence, the space beside Esther at the dinner table that was technically occupied but felt withheld, and that was a more complicated problem than simple desire.
She’ll settle, give her room, and she’ll settle, and then ye can...
Can what, exactly? Have her?
He picked the report back up with the determination of a man who had made a decision.
He had nearly reached the end of the paragraph when the door swung open. He looked up, expecting Elliot with some new creative complaint about his sword training schedule.
It was Aldric, one of the senior council members, a cautious man in his sixties who had served Noah’s father before him and who wore the look of someone who had rehearsed what he was about to say.
Noah set the report down with a different quality of attention. “Aldric.”
“Me Laird.” The man crossed the room and placed a folder of documents on the desk with the purposefulness of someone laying out an argument in physical form. “I’ve brought the quarterly financial reports ye requested.”
Noah opened the folder and ran his eye over the figures.
Something in his chest eased, just fractionally.
The numbers were moving in the right direction.
Finally, slowly, after three years of quietly dismantling the debts his father had accumulated with the casual disregard of a man who had never expected to be held accountable for them.
The eastern trade routes were recovering.
The grain stores were fuller than they had been in years.
“Much improved,” Noah said.
“Aye, me Laird. Considerably.” Aldric paused in the way of a man who had arrived at the part of the conversation he’d actually come for. “The council is pleased with the progress. And it has led us to a related discussion.”
Noah turned a page. “Oh?”
“The matter of succession.” Aldric’s voice was measured, professional, giving nothing away.
“The clan’s financial recovery is significant, me Laird.
The people are more stable, more confident.
The council feels, and I convey this with the greatest respect, that now would be an opportune time to consider the question of marriage. An heir. To secure what’s been built.”
The room temperature dropped several degrees.
Noah looked up from the report with the slow, deliberate quality of a man choosing not to react quickly. “Is that what the council feels?”
Aldric held his ground, to his credit. “Ye’re thirty-two, me Laird. The clan is in recovery. A match with one of the neighbourin’ families would strengthen alliances.”
“I have an heir.” The words came out quiet and absolute.
“Esther is...” Aldric stopped to recalibrate. “The council has the greatest affection for Lady Esther. But she is a child, and a girl, and her parentage is nae good enough.”
“Enough.” The word wasn’t raised. It didn’t need to be.
“I’ll say this once, Aldric, and I’d ask ye to carry it back to the council with accuracy.
Me personal life is nae the council’s domain.
Me marriage, or the absence of one, is nae a matter for committee discussion or collective opinion.
I am the Laird of this clan. I make these decisions.
” He closed the folder with a quiet, final sound.
“If this subject is raised again, by ye or by anyone else on that council, there will be consequences that I promise nay one will find pleasant. Are we clear?”
Aldric’s colour had shifted, but his back remained straight. “Aye, me Laird. Perfectly clear.”
“Good. Thank ye for the financial report. It’s encouragin’.”
The man left with considerably more haste than he had arrived, pulling the door shut behind him.
Noah sat back.
He was vaguely aware of his jaw being clenched at an angle that would give him a headache, and of a particular kind of irritation that had lodged itself somewhere in his sternum and showed no signs of moving.
Marriage.
The council’s words, turning over in his mind with the grating feel of something fundamentally beside the point. As if the answer to anything that currently concerned him could be found in a strategic alliance with a neighboring family’s daughter.
He stood again and went back to the window.
The rain was coming down harder now. Somewhere above him, he could hear movement, as Esther’s lesson continued with its gentle rhythm of questions and answers. Of Ava’s voice, patient and warm, saying something he still couldn’t make out.
He pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose.
Give her room.
He went back to the report. This time, with considerable effort, he managed to read it.