Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
"Right." Margaret lifted Lilly from the crook of her arm and held her out toward the door, where Maisie had appeared as though she had been waiting just beyond it, which, Fergus suspected, she had. "She is fed. Maisie will take her."
Maisie stepped forward, took the baby and left without a word. The door swung gently shut behind her.
Margaret turned to him.
"Ye gave me yer time," she said. "Yer presence. In all things, ye said." Her expression was entirely calm. "The castle runs on what this kitchen produces every mornin', and the people who run it have nae met their Laird properly. That changes today."
She tilted her head slightly. "Follow me."
She did not wait to see if he would.
Fergus stood in the nursery for one deliberate second before he moved.
He told himself this was because he was a man who decided his own actions and not because the alternative was admitting that he had been following her with his eyes since the moment she walked in and had shown no signs of stopping.
He followed her down the corridor, then the stairs, through the largely empty great hall at this hour. Two of his men at the far end loaded feed sacks, deliberately not watching their Laird follow his wife through the castle at seven in the morning. He went down the passage to the left.
The kitchen?
Fergus stopped in the doorway.
Mrs. O'Halloran looked up from the far hearth, took in the situation, and then deliberately turned back to her pot.
The room smelled of yeast, warm stone, and the faint sweetness of something already baked.
Margaret was already at the long table, pulling a bowl toward her and opening the flour sack with the brisk efficiency of a woman familiar with the terrain.
She reached in, turned, and held out a fistful of flour.
"Yer hands," she said.
He looked at the flour. He looked at her. "Margaret."
"Yer hands, Fergus."
This cannae be happenin'.
The look on her face told him it was happening.
With a glance that he made sure conveyed what he thought of the idea, he crossed the kitchen and held out his hands.
She poured the flour into them with the same calm, purposeful expression she might show when handing him a dispatch from the council—composed, deliberate, and completely unaffected by the fact that he was the Laird of this castle and she was filling his palms with baking flour at dawn.
"Ye'll work it in," she said, turning back to the bowl. "Like this." She briefly demonstrated her hands pressing into the dough with a steady, rhythmic motion. Then she stepped aside and looked at him.
Fergus glared at the dough, resisting the urge to be intimidated.
It is bread. It is flour and water. Ye have faced armed men. Ye can manage bread.
He pressed his hands in, and the dough immediately collapsed sideways. It stuck to his left palm with a stubbornness that felt personal. He pressed harder. It tore. He tried to fold it the way she had done and ended up with something that looked more like a defeated animal than anything else.
"Less force," Margaret said, from where she stood watching him with her arms loosely folded and her expression carefully neutral. "Ye are nae punishin' it."
"I am nae..." He exhaled through his nose. "I ken what I'm doin'."
She said nothing. She leaned back against the heavy wooden table, her arms locking tight over her chest.
That damned cool expression.
It was, Fergus reflected, one of the more irritating things she did, and she did a remarkable number of irritating things.
He tried again. The dough stuck to his right hand this time.
I have built this castle. I have negotiated land rights with men twice my age. I have stood in a river in February to repair a mill wheel. I cannae be beaten by bread.
The dough disagreed.
"Ye're grippin'," she said. "Ease yer hands. Let it move."
"I am lettin' it move." It was moving everywhere except where it was supposed to. A piece had attached itself to his wrist. He was not going to acknowledge the piece on his wrist.
"Fergus."
"I said I have it."
She pressed her lips together, hiding a smile that he caught anyway. She turned to the flour sack and measured out another handful, adding it to the bowl. "Again," she said simply.
I can grab those lips in mine this second, and that'll be the end of this orderin' around.
He threw a quick glance her way, almost tempted, but then let out a slow breath.
He started again, this time more slowly, with the uncomfortable and deeply unwelcome realization that this required a kind of attention he usually did not give to anything that might fight back.
His hands were too big for it. Too used to resistance.
The dough asked for something different—a steadiness without force, a pressure that guided rather than commanded.
He didn't have the instinct for it. He had to think about it, which was the most humbling part.
He had thought about leaving twice in the last four minutes. Both times, he looked toward the door, and both times something stopped him, though he wasn't examining that too closely.
What was the point of leavin'? She would simply appear wherever I go next. She has a talent for it.
Margaret moved beside him to check the dough's consistency, reaching past him to press two fingers into it. Her sleeve brushed his arm. He stilled, said nothing, and kept his eyes on his work.
"Better," she said. "Slower still."
She stepped back. She reached for the flour sack again to dust the board, and he did not know exactly how it happened—whether the sack shifted or her grip slipped—but a cloud of flour billowed up faster than they expected.
She turned her face away, which meant the flour caught her from the side. Her cheek. Her jaw. The curve of her bare neck above her collar and the upper slope of her chest where her neckline sat open in the morning warmth.
She blinked. Looked down at herself.
And then she laughed.
It was not a polite laugh. It was a genuine one, her head tilting back slightly with it.
Her hand rose to touch her dusted cheek as if confirming what had just happened, then she laughed again.
The sound echoed through the kitchen. It was full, warm, and completely unguarded—the laugh of a woman who had momentarily forgotten to be careful about anything.
Fergus forgot to breathe.
He became aware of this approximately three seconds after it happened, standing at the kitchen table with his flour-covered hands and his chest doing something that had nothing to do with the bread.
The flour on her skin caught the morning light coming through the window.
The freckles on her neck were visible beneath it.
She was still laughing, softer now, her eyes bright.
This bonnie, annoyin' lass is me wife.
It landed differently than it had before.
It had always been a fact, a legal arrangement, a complication.
Standing here right now, watching her dust flour from her collarbone with the back of her hand and smile at nothing in particular, it felt less like a fact and more like something he had not yet fully understood.
He looked back at the dough before she could catch him looking.
* * *
The rest of the morning passed the way mornings did when a man was trying to outwork his own thoughts.
He drove fence posts in the south yard until his shoulders ached.
He went over the grain tallies with Angus, corrected two errors, and sent word to the MacAlister steward.
He inspected the repaired sheep shed in the daylight, checked every beam, every rope, every joint that had taken the weight of the storm.
It was useful work. Necessary work.
Damnit. I cannae take me mind off that lass.
By afternoon, he had run out of things that genuinely required his attention and had moved on to things that could wait, which was how he found himself walking the east wall at a pace that had no destination, hands behind his back, jaw set, thinking about flour on a woman's collarbone with the focused intensity he usually reserved for military strategy.
Realizing working himself into the ground was not enough of a distraction, he turned back to go inside the castle.
The noise reached him even from afar. The laughter, loud and overlapping, was the kind that came in waves when children had decided something was funny.
Beneath that, the softer murmur of women's voices, unhurried, shifting between topics with the ease of people not trying to accomplish anything in particular, and they were better for it.
Fergus came around the east wall and stopped.
The courtyard was filled with afternoon sunlight.
Margaret sat in the middle, cross-legged on the grass with Lilly tucked against her chest, and three of the clan children gathered around her in various stages of attention.
Two older women sat nearby on a low bench, carding wool and talking without looking up.
Maisie was laughing at something one of the children had said.
A girl about six was trying to braid Margaret's hair from behind, showing more enthusiasm than skill, and Margaret watched calmly.
She looks like she has always been here.
He stood at the edge of the courtyard, arms crossed, weight shifted back—an attitude of a man contemplating a situation before deciding what to do next.
Once, he would have watched for a moment and then moved on. Filed it away. There was always something that needed doing, always a reason to keep going, and a laird standing idle at the edge of a women's gathering served no purpose he could name.
He did not move on.
He was not entirely sure when he made this decision.
One moment, he was watching from the wall, and the next, he had stepped forward.
The grass was soft under his feet. One of the older women looked up, noticed him, and went back to her wool without comment.
The children did not notice him at all. They were too busy listening to whatever Margaret was telling them, her voice low and lively, her free hand tracing shapes in the air.
He found a place near the edge of the group and sat.
Not beside her. Not close enough to be pointed. Just near enough to be present.
This is deeply uncomfortable.
The noise pressed in from all sides, layered and directionless, nothing like the order of a training yard or a council chamber where voices had purpose and sequence.
A child was crying somewhere to his left about something that seemed to involve a flower crown.
Two of the women had started disagreeing, cheerfully, about the right way to salt mutton.
Maisie was now telling a story that involved a lot of hand gestures.
He did not follow most of it. He listened anyway, or at least tried to.
His attention kept drifting toward the boundary wall, the list of things waiting for him, the eastern fence posts, the grain count, the letter from the MacAlister steward that he had not yet replied to.
He pulled his focus back. Let the noise be noise. He stopped trying to organize it.
A small body pressed against his left arm.
He looked down. One of the younger children, a boy of perhaps four, had simply leaned into him the way small children lean into whatever is solid and available, without asking, without looking up.
He was watching Margaret with round, interested eyes, his weight settled comfortably against Fergus's side as though this was a completely ordinary thing to do to a person.
Fergus did not move away.
He sat with the child's weight resting against his arm and looked over at Margaret, who was now listening to the six-year-old explain something at length, her expression patient and genuinely interested. Lilly was dozing against her chest, one small fist loosely curled under her chin.
She is good at this.
Margaret looked up and saw him already watching.
Her eyes drifted over him, noting the child against his arm, and the fact that he had been there for a while.
She expected him to say something, to mark the moment in that way she did—a raised brow, a careful word that conveyed three meanings at once.
She looked at him for a moment, something shifting in her expression that he could not name, and then she turned back to the child who was still talking. As though his being here was unremarkable. As though it was simply what he did.
He sat with that for a while.
When Lilly began to stir, he was already standing. He crossed the few feet between them and held out his arms before he had consciously decided to. Margaret looked up at him.
"I'll hold her," he said.
A beat of silence. Margaret blinked, just once, and he watched her recover from something she had not expected.
"Will ye now?" she said.
He took the bairn. Lilly regarded him with the bright, assessing eyes she always turned on him. He adjusted her against his chest, more certain than the first time, less careful about where his hands went.
"Aye," he said, not quite looking at Margaret. He felt her eyes on him for a moment longer than necessary.
He did not explain himself. He had nothing to explain. He sat back down on the grass with the bairn against his chest and the child still leaning against his arm, and he looked out across the courtyard at nothing in particular, and he told himself this was simply practical.
The warmth of Lilly's small body settled against his ribs.