Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
He got her out of the courtyard before the crowd finished deciding what it felt about everything that had just happened.
That is the priority.
Not the council, not Moira's riders still assembling at the gate, not Fergus, who was already moving to manage both.
Her.
Out of the courtyard and away from the faces that had been shouting burn her twenty minutes ago. And were now wearing expressions of collective, uncomfortable regret, because collective, uncomfortable regret still had eyes, and she had been standing in iron long enough.
He put his hand at her back, and she moved with it without argument. Which told him more about how she was doing than anything she would have said, because Catriona Campbell did not move with anyone's hand at her back without argument.
They crossed the courtyard through the gap the crowd made for them. It made the gap quickly and quietly, which was the correct response, and came out through the inner gate to where his horse still stood, reins trailing, sides heaving from the hard ride down from the ridge.
He had pushed the animal harder than he should have.
I would do it again.
He turned to her and put his hands at her waist and lifted her up onto the horse before she had time to form a position on whether she wanted to be lifted.
She made a soft, startled sound, and her hands closed around his arm for balance as the horse shifted its weight beneath her. He felt the grip of her fingers through his sleeve, and swung up behind her, and took the reins, and turned them toward the keep.
The ride was short.
Forty yards, perhaps fifty, from the inner gate to the keep entrance, the horse walking at a pace that had nothing urgent left in it now that the urgent part was done.
The rain was still coming down steadily, the particular persistent Highland rain that had no interest in stopping and knew it. It ran off the brim of his hood and down between his shoulders and pooled in the crease of his gloves.
She was pressed against his chest, her back to him, her weight settled into him.
She's too tired to hold herself.
He could feel the tension still in her spine. The rigid control she'd been holding herself to for however long she'd been standing in that courtyard. But underneath it, something that had been braced was coming loose, fraction by fraction, with each step of the horse.
He kept his arms around her and held the reins and looked at the back of her head and did not say anything.
There was nothing to say on horseback in the rain that could carry what he wanted it to carry, and he had learned, imperfectly and late, that some things needed the right conditions or they came out wrong.
He reined in under the archway.
Dismounted. Turned immediately and put his hands back at her waist and lifted her down.
Her hands found his arms again, and she steadied herself against him and then stayed there, not stepping back.
Her palms flat against his forearms, and the rain coming down around both of them in the narrow shelter of the arch.
Her hair was plastered to her face on one side.
Her cloak was soaked through. She was looking at him with an expression he couldn't fully read, which was not something he was accustomed to when it came to her face.
He had learned her face over weeks of watching it when he thought she wasn't watching him watch it, and he could read most of what moved across it. This he couldn't.
It's too many things at once.
She's still so beautiful.
He stepped back and gestured toward the door.
She didn't move.
He looked at her.
She was standing at the threshold with her hands at her sides now, looking at the keep entrance the way she'd looked at it the first day he'd brought her here. Measuring it, calculating it, deciding what it meant. Only the calculation was different now. He could see that much.
"Why do ye wait here?" he asked.
The rain hit the stone around them. She kept her eyes on the door.
"Because I daenae ken," she said, and her voice had the particular quality of someone working very hard at steadiness and mostly getting there, "if I was saved." She stopped. Swallowed. "Or kept."
He stood with the rain running off him and felt the words go in somewhere below the collarbone, finding the specific place they were aimed at, which was deep and accurate of her and exactly what he deserved.
Kept.
He thought about the first day.
The ledge above the falls, her wrist in his hand, the powder she'd thrown that had blinded him, the way she'd run with the absolute certainty of someone who knew the landscape better than he did and was going to use that knowledge right up until the moment she couldn't.
He thought about the rope he'd tied at his own belt and the way she'd sat straight-backed in his saddle for two hours in deliberate refusal to lean against him, and the locked door, and the key he'd kept.
He thought about a hundred other things that came after, and did not improve the picture.
The rain came down.
He stepped toward her.
Not just to be saved, but also kept.
I'm keeping her.
"I was afraid," he said. The words came out rough, dragged up from somewhere he didn't open often, scraping the sides on the way. "When Fergus reached me on the ridge and told me what had happened."
He held her gaze. She was looking at him now, fully, the assessment in her eyes sharp despite everything she'd been through. He made himself stay in it, stay in her direct green gaze, and not manage his face into something more comfortable.
"I rode hard because I was afraid." He paused. Let the next part come at its own pace, because rushing it would make it smaller than it was. "Nae of losing the healer."
Her chin moved slightly. A fractional lift, bracing.
"Of losing ye," he said.
Simple. Undecorated. The plainest thing he'd said to another person in six years and possibly longer.
Her face did something then that he'd never seen it do. Not the dry guard dropping, not the professional mask shifting. Something underneath all of that, something that had been held very tightly and for a very long time, suddenly, without the strength to stay held.
Her jaw moved. Her eyes went bright and immediately furious at themselves for going bright.
She pulled in a breath through her nose and let it out slowly, and in the space of that breath, she came apart, very quietly, in the specific way of people who had been managing something enormous and then ran out of the energy to manage it.
He closed the distance before he decided to.
His hand came up and cupped her face, his thumb at her cheekbone, and she turned into it.
Not dramatically, just a fractional lean, her cold cheek against his palm.
He felt her exhale against his wrist, and something in his chest did something he didn't have a controlled word for and stopped trying to find one.
I want ye.
She moved toward him at the same moment he reached for her.
The kiss that followed was not like the ones before it. The others had been heat and frustration and things compressed past bearing, suddenly finding their pressure point, this was different.
This was slow. This was her cold hands coming up to his jaw and his arm going around her, and the rain falling on both of them. Neither of them was moving away from it, just standing in the archway in the wet and choosing this, deliberately and without the excuse of a crisis carrying them into it.
Her mouth was cold from the rain and warm from the inside, and she kissed him the way she did everything, with her whole attention.
He kissed her back with six weeks of accumulated restraint.
He pulled back first.
Rested his forehead against hers and stood there breathing, her hands still at his jaw, his arm still around her, the rain still coming down. He could feel her pulse in the place where his hand had shifted to her neck. Quick, uneven, matching his own.
"Inside," he said. His voice came out considerably rougher than he intended.
"Aye," she said. Not moving.
"Catriona."
"I heard ye."
A beat.
She stepped back and turned toward the door, and he saw the corner of her mouth, and let himself look at it for exactly one moment before he followed her inside.
Fox was in her chamber.
Anthony heard him before they reached the door. The quick, bright sound of a fox that was alive, followed by the scratch of claws on stone as he launched himself at Catriona the moment she came through the doorway.
She caught him mid-leap, both arms going around him, her face dropping into his fur, and Anthony stood in the doorway and watched her hold the animal and felt the tightness in his own chest ease several degrees.
He had not known, on the ridge, when Fergus reached him with his face arranged in the way it was arranged when the news was bad. He had not known, in the hard, fast ride back across the wet ground, whether Fox was alive or not.
Had not asked because asking would have required speech, and speech would have required more breath than he had to spare.
Fox was alive.
He was, in fact, conducting a thorough inspection of Catriona's face with his nose, his tail moving with the rapid, indiscriminate enthusiasm of an animal that had been worried and was now expressing the relief of it in the only language available to him.
"Aye," she told him, her voice muffled in his fur. "I ken. Me too. I'm happy I'm here."
She set him down.
Fox turned.
He crossed the chamber to Anthony with the purposeful directness he usually reserved for unguarded plates of meat, and walked straight into Anthony's shin, pressing the full weight of his narrow head against it for a moment.
Then turned and trotted out of the open door and disappeared down the corridor without looking back.
Anthony looked at the empty doorway. Then at Catriona.
"Did yer fox just thank me?"
"He has his own way of doing things," she said.
She was at the worktable, her hands moving over her herb jars in the automatic, settling way she had when she needed something familiar under her fingers. Her cloak was still on, still dripping.
He came into the room and closed the door.
She turned at the sound of the latch and looked at it, and then at him, and there it was again. That expression he couldn't fully read, the one with too many things in it.
He watched her clock the closed door and make her calculation and arrive at the other side of it.
"Ye could have left that open," she said.
"Aye," he agreed.
A beat.
"Anthony."
"I'm stayin'," he said. Plain and simple, the same way he'd learned to say the things that mattered. "If ye'll have me."
She looked at him for a long moment. Outside, the rain kept coming, and the fire in the chamber had burned low, and the room held the particular stillness of a place that was waiting to see what happened next.
"Ye're drippin' on me floor," she said.
"I am."
"And ye rode yer horse into the ground gettin' here."
"His legs are fine. I checked."
Her mouth moved. Not quite a smile yet. Something that was thinking about becoming one. She turned back to the worktable, reached up to the hook behind it, brought down a dry cloth, and turned back and held it out across the space between them.
He crossed the room and took it, and her hand didn't move back when his closed over it.
They stood like that for a moment, him holding the cloth and her still holding the other end of it, and he looked at her face, and she looked at his.
"So tell me, little fox," he said. His voice came out low and rough-edged, the way it came out when he'd stopped managing it. He watched something in her face go very still. "Will ye marry a dragon?"
The question sat in the chamber between them, exposed, stripped of the armor that the teasing words had tried to give it and somehow no less naked for them.
She looked at him.
He held her gaze and did not look away and did not backfill the silence with anything, just let the question stand there in the firelight with all its vulnerability showing, because she deserved that.
She deserved a man who could say the thing plainly and then stand in front of it without flinching.
Her breath caught.
Her eyes went bright again, and this time the brightness came with the corner of her mouth pulling despite itself.
She laughed, a short, soft, undone sound, and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth as though that might help, and it didn't help at all. Tears cut tracks down her rain-damp cheeks and she laughed through them.
He stepped forward and took her face in both hands and tilted it up, and she was still laughing when he kissed her.
Still half-laughing against his mouth before the laughing became something else.
Her hands finding his chest, her fingers curling in the wet fabric of his tunic, the cloth dropping somewhere between them, forgotten.
She kissed him back the way she did everything.
Completely. Without reservation.
Without the careful management of a woman protecting herself, without the half-held quality of their earlier kisses, where part of her had always been deciding.
This was decided. This was her choosing, actively, with both hands, and he felt the difference in it like the difference between standing outside a fire and being inside one.
He pulled back just enough to breathe.
Her hands were still in his tunic. His were still at her face, thumbs tracing the line of her cheekbones, and he looked at her in the low firelight.
The red hair dark with rain, the green eyes bright, the freckles across her nose that he had spent a considerable amount of time not thinking about over the preceding weeks.
He felt something settle in his chest that he recognized, distantly and without panic, as the absence of the weight he'd been carrying since he was twenty-four years old.
Not gone. He was not naive enough to think it was gone.
But set down. For now. Here.
But soon, soon it'll be gone.
"That's nae an answer," he said.
She looked at him with the specific expression she wore when he'd said something she was going to make him wait for.
That expression, which he'd first seen on a cliff ledge in the western glens when she'd had powder in her hand and fury in her face, had become over the preceding weeks one of his favorite sights in the world.
She reached up and closed her hand in his collar and pulled him back down.
He took that as an answer.
She's definitely saying yes.