Chapter 5 #2
"Before we arrived," she said, her voice soft but accurate. "Ye kent where ye would put me. Or that I would agree to come."
He said nothing. He couldn't deny it. He had spent an hour last week standing in that very spot, imagining her here.
She watched him for a moment with that calm, steady look that he was beginning to find more difficult to hold than a confrontation on a battlefield.
He preferred the clash of steel; he knew how to parry a blade.
"We are married, Fergus," she said at last. Her voice was quiet, factual. "The servants talk. They already are, I'd imagine, they've been watchin' ye manage a screamin' infant, and they'll have opinions about what me arrival means for this house."
She shifted Lilly gently to her other shoulder, the bairn making a soft, snuffling sound in her sleep. "I willnae be a guest in me own home."
"I never said ye were a guest. I have a castle to run, Margaret."
"And I'm yer wife. Ye daenae have to say it, Fergus.
They'll see it in the way we move." Her hazel eyes did not leave his.
"I am nae askin' to share yer bed. I am askin' ye nae to make me look like a woman who's been sent to a guest room in her own home.
There is a difference between modesty and exile. "
"Ye have yer own room," he said, his voice a low growl of frustration. "A good room. Yer own fire, yer own view."
"So it's a fine arrangement." Her voice was even, mercilessly logical.
She stepped toward the small wooden crib that had been placed near the window—he had not asked about that either—and lowered Lilly into it with a slowness and precision that suggested she had been a mother for years rather than a caretaker for hours.
She straightened, her silhouette dark against the light of the window.
Outside, the wind swept across the battlements with that low, whistling sound he had spent years learning to sleep through.
He looked at Margaret. At the set of her chin and the steadiness of her hands, and he felt, not for the first time, that the ground had shifted beneath his boots without his permission.
He crossed the floor to the adjoining door. He turned the heavy iron handle and pushed it open, revealing his own chamber beyond. Austere, functional, the room of a man who had not thought to make it otherwise. It smelled of leather, steel, and old smoke.
"Ye'll have these chambers," he said, his voice rough. He nodded at the key in the lock on her side. "Both of them, to move between as ye need."
She blinked. Just once, a small crack in her composure. Then her chin raised, and she stepped past him to look into the connecting room, passing so close that he caught her scent. The river, still beneath something warmer, something that should not be noticed by a man of his discipline.
"Adjoinin'," she said again, but her tone had changed. There was a lightness to it now, an edge of playfulness that he was learning to brace for.
"Aye."
She turned to face him from inside his doorway, the flickering firelight from his room casting her shadow long across the floor. Her lips curved, not into a full smile, but something smaller and far more dangerous.
"Lock the door," he said abruptly.
She looked at him, her eyebrows rising. "I beg yer pardon?"
"At night." He nodded at the heavy iron key. "Keep it locked." He heard the roughness in his own voice and could not smooth it without making it obvious he was trying. "It will spare us both distractions."
The pause that followed was long enough to be deliberate. She let the word hang in the air between them, shimmering like heat over a summer road.
"Distractions?" she repeated, as though she were holding the word up to the light to see its flaws.
"Aye."
"And here I thought ye the most disciplined man in the Highlands, Fergus MacKenzie."
Her voice was warm with something that was not quite amusement and was considerably more unsettling. She stepped back through to her room, her movement slow enough that he was aware of every inch of her form. "It must be very difficult for ye. To be so easily distracted."
"Daenae test me," he said, already retreating toward the hallway door.
"I havenae even started," she said pleasantly.
He closed the door and turned the key on his side, firmly and deliberately.
It was a sound that ought to have felt like a resolution, like a battle won, but it did not.
He stood with his hand on the cold iron and the fire at his back, listening to the quiet sounds of her settling into the room beyond.
The rustle of fabric. The soft clink of a basin.
The low, melodic humming as she spoke to the sleeping bairn.
She was making herself at home.
He had prepared this room for her. He told himself it was practical, necessary, the only obvious choice. Now, standing in the dark of his own room with his jaw clenched and his hands trembling with repressed energy, he realized that 'obvious' carried a lot of weight in that sentence.
He released the key. He needed to find something to do.