Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The word had barely finished echoing when his chest cracked open. He felt the air leave his lungs in a sharp, staggering rush, as if the stone walls themselves had finally closed in.
He hadn't planned it. His hands, flat on the table, began to tremble, and he curled his fingers into the wood until the splinters bit into his skin.
He had not stood in this room at any point in the last six years and thought, Today I will say it. The very idea had been a ghost he'd spent half a decade outrunning.
He had stood in this room at various points over those years and thought the opposite.
Never, to nay one, nae like this.
The vow had been a cold, hard knot in his stomach that he never expected to unravel.
That had held until thirty seconds ago when she'd looked at him with her chin up and her hands flat on the table and said, Ye cannae fix what ye willnae look at. The words hit him with the force of a physical blow, shattering the last of his carefully built defenses.
Something in him had simply run out of wall. He felt the structural integrity of his silence give way, a slow, grinding collapse.
"Me parents are gone," he said, "because I killed them." The admission was a jagged, ugly thing, leaving the copper taste of blood in the back of his throat.
She went still. He saw her shoulders lock, her breath hitching as the silence in the room became absolute.
"Me brother. His wife." He looked at the window.
The grey square of sky. The frost on the sill.
The pale light caught the sudden wetness in his eyes, though he blinked it back with a ferocity that made his head ache.
"James's lungs. All of it. One decision.
Mine." He felt the weight of the statement settle into his marrow, cold and immutable.
His voice came out low and hollow, the voice he heard sometimes at three in the morning in a different form.
The one that went through that corridor again, that felt the smoke hit his lungs, that heard his mother say the wind's shifting and felt his own hand pull free of hers.
He could almost smell it now—the acrid, choking scent of burning timber and wet wool.
"I was to be his man-at-arms. Me brother was Laird in waitin'.
I was to be the best soldier this clan had ever produced.
" He turned. Looked at her directly. His jaw was tight, his pulse thrumming visibly in the hollow of his throat.
"And I believed it. I was twenty-four, and I believed it completely.
" The memory of that arrogance was a bitter, stinging heat behind his eyes.
She was watching him. Both hands still on the table edge. She hadn't moved. Her green eyes were wide, absorbing the wreck of him with a terrifying, quiet focus.
"The fire came at night. The lower wing. We had a chance to stop it. I've thought about that chance every day for six years, and I ken we had it, a real one, if we'd pulled the men back when there was still time. But I was arrogant." He let out a short, harsh breath that was almost a sob.
He looked at his hands. The faint shine of old burn scars across the knuckles, the leather gloves that hadn't been enough.
The scars looked white and angry in the dim light of the brazier.
"Me mother stood in that courtyard and told me the wind was turnin'.
She was raised by a healer. She knew how to read what others ignored.
She said it plainly." He pressed his thumb across the scars.
The skin there was tight and numb, a permanent map of his failure. "I pulled me arm free and walked away."
The fire in the brazier gave a small sound. Neither of them moved. The soft hiss of the peat was the only thing filling the void between them.
"The wind turned. The fire took the lower wing.
I went back in anyway. I got them out, most of them, Margaret, me father, me brother with the boy in his arms. But the smoke had already done what it did.
Me father went first. Ewan and Margaret held on three weeks.
Me mother," He stopped. His throat closed up, the air scratching like thorns as he tried to speak.
"She followed me inside. She knew there was nothin' she could do. She came in after me."
He looked at the window again. His eyes traced the patterns of the frost, desperate for something solid to hold onto.
"She held on until spring. I had the best care brought that I could find and I sat with her and watched it finish her anyway.
" His jaw moved. He felt the rhythmic grind of his teeth, a dull ache in his skull.
"She had followed me inside. Despite knowin'.
She came in after me." The repetition was a penance, a mantra of his own making.
The room was very quiet. He could hear the flutter of her pulse from across the stone floor.
"After." He said the word the way you said something that still had weight after six years of carrying it.
"The alliances broke. The arrangements." A short pause.
He swallowed hard, his hands clenching into fists.
"There was a betrothal. A woman. Her father had arranged it when I was the second son with a future and an unmarked face and a family intact behind me.
" The phantom weight of a ring he never gave felt heavy on his finger.
He touched the scar at his jaw without appearing to register that he was doing it. One finger, brief, the automatic gesture of a man who had been doing it for six years without deciding to. The skin there was raised and ridged, a constant reminder of the price of his pride.
"He sent word of difficulties. Complications." The corner of his mouth pulled in a way that had nothing to do with a smile. It was a grimace of pure, concentrated pain. "She was wed to MacLeod before autumn."
Catriona said nothing. She just watched him, her eyes dark with a depth of understanding that made him want to flinch.
"A scarred orphan," he said. "Runnin' a clan I was never supposed to run, with a child in the east wing who breathed wrong because I had nae listened to me mother in a courtyard at twenty-four years old." He looked at her. "That is the tale."
She was looking at him with an expression he had not seen on her face before. The dry, professional guard was gone.
He didn't know what to do with what had replaced it.
Not pity, he would have closed the door on pity. Not the clinical assessment she gave everything that needed treating. Something else.
Both hands still on the table, her eyes on his face, looking at him the way you looked at something you were not going to look away from.
She had heard all of it, and she had not moved back.
Then she crossed the room.
He didn't step back. The instruction was there. The same one he'd used at a well in the courtyard, at a door in the dark corridor, every charged moment in the weeks between. His feet didn't take it.
She reached up. He watched her hand rise.
Her fingers touched the scar along his cheek.
He stopped breathing.
'Daenae
Not the clinical touch. Not the two-finger press on a wrist, not the palm on a sternum.
Flat fingertips, moving along the ridge of it the way you traced something you were reading. Unhurried. As if she had decided to learn it and was not going to be rushed.
He didn't know what his face was doing.
He couldn't feel it.
He couldn't feel anything above the point of contact.
She looked at it. Then at him. Close enough that he could see the freckle at the corner of her left eye. The slight asymmetry of her mouth. The tremor in her lower lip she hadn't hidden.
Her breathing was steadier than his. She was managing herself more carefully than he was managing himself.
He had no idea what she saw when she looked at him.
That was the thing. That was the part he couldn't withstand.
Not the touch, not the closeness, but that he could not read her and had no ground to stand on and nothing left to hold.
The last of it gave way.
He caught her wrist. His grip was firm, desperate, his pulse jumping against her palm.
She looked at his hand on her wrist. Then at his face. She didn't pull away; she leaned into the contact, her gaze challenging him to find the strength he thought he'd lost.
His other hand found her waist. He felt the solid, warm reality of her through the wool of her dress, and the air in the room seemed to disappear.
He pulled her forward. One step, she came with it, her free hand came up between them and her fingers found the front of his tunic.
She did not push away, she pulled. A single deliberate fistful of wool, and that was the last of whatever had been holding.
The friction of her body against his was a shock to his system.
He kissed her.
Hard. The impact was desperate, a collision of two people who had spent too long in the cold.
His hand came up to her jaw, tilting her head. She made a sound against his mouth that went straight through his chest and lodged there. It was a small, broken whimper that fueled the fire in his blood.
Her fingers were in his hair and pulling, and he had both arms around her.
She was pressed against him from shoulder to hip and the herb room.
The morning, the study, the map with its northern ridge notation and the name written in small, careful script below it, all of it gone.
The world ceased to exist outside the circle of his arms.
Nothing in the room except this. Her mouth and her hands and the small fierce sounds she made when he deepened the kiss and the way she kissed him back like she was answering a question she'd been sitting with for weeks. Her lips were soft and demanding, a promise and a confession all at once.
She pulled back enough to breathe. Her chest was heaving, her face flushed a deep, beautiful red.