Chapter 21 #2
"I am pushin' forward," Margaret insisted, her hair slipping from its pins.
"Ye're pushin' down, me Lady."
"It's the same direction."
"It is nae the same," Catriona pressed her lips together, her chest heaving with a suppressed breath. "Me Lady."
Mrs. O'Halloran had slowly drifted down the length of the table, her boots silent on the flags, nearing the center of the situation. She was currently wiping down a copper mixing bowl that did not require her presence at that end of the room.
Margaret worked the dough with renewed vigor. Her forearms ached. The mass improved slightly, losing some of its wet stickiness. She was making progress. She was absolutely making progress.
She reached blindly for the small clay jar to dust the rolling board one last time, and her elbow clipped the raised edge of the container.
The flour went askew. Most of it landed on the oak board, which was fine.
A good amount coated her forearms and fingers, as expected.
But a large, white patch flew upward and landed squarely on her left cheek.
She didn't realize this right away until Mrs. O'Halloran's composed, blank expression softened into something warmer at the corners of her eyes.
"What?" Margaret asked, freezing mid-knead. "What is it?"
"Nothin', me Lady," Mrs. O'Halloran said, her voice suspiciously tight.
"What?" Margaret reached up with a clean wrist, touching her cheek, and encountered the thick, velvety layer of flour clinging to her skin. She closed her eyes for one brief, private moment, letting her forehead drop toward the rim of the bowl.
Then she heard the heavy oak kitchen door creak on its hinges.
She opened her eyes instantly.
Fergus was there, standing in the doorway.
He had come, she assumed, for the same mundane reasons men ever entered the kitchens.
Something practical, something involving a blacksmith's order or a message that required Mrs. O'Halloran's immediate attention.
It had nothing to do with her. He had taken two massive steps into the warmth of the hearth and stopped dead.
His dark gaze found her immediately, as it always did, bypassing the servants entirely.
His eyes moved slowly. From her flour-dusted hands, up the line of her bare forearms, to the glaring white evidence clinging to her left cheek, down to the bowl of resistant dough, and finally back to her flushed face.
He took it in, in that precise, methodical order, and Margaret watched him receive the full tactical accounting of her defeat.
Neither of them moved.
The entire kitchen held its breath. Even the great log fire in the hearth seemed to quiet its snapping.
Then Mrs. O'Halloran laughed. She put the back of her gnarled hand to her mouth and laughed like a woman who had been holding a heavy weight back for the better part of an hour and could not bear it one moment more.
Behind her, Bridie went off at the exact same time, a sharp snort escaping her nose, and Catriona turned away from the wall, her lips pressed flat against a brilliant smile she could no longer contain.
Margaret exhaled a long, slow breath through her nose, her shoulders dropping. She looked straight across the table at her husband.
"Say nothin'," she said, her tone a direct command.
Fergus raised one thick, dark eyebrow. "I've said nothin'."
"Ye were about to."
"I was thinkin' it."
"That's worse."
Something small and dangerous moved at the very corner of his mouth.
It wasn't a full smile; it never truly arrived or committed itself to his face, but it was the unmistakable sign of one.
His dark eyes held hers for exactly one breath longer than was necessary or safe, warm and very briefly, entirely unguarded.
Then he tore his gaze away, looking toward the head cook.
"I came for the winter store inventory list," he said. His voice was perfectly level, restored to its usual military cadence.
"On the iron hook by the cold store, me Laird," The cook managed to gasp while wiping her hands from her apron.
He crossed the wide kitchen, his boots thudding against the tiles.
He did not look back at Margaret again as he grabbed the parchment, which she felt a sharp prickle in her chest at.
But he almost succeeded in leaving the room without that nearly-smile deepening slightly as his shoulder brushed past her table, a small shift in his jaw that she also noticed with perfect clarity.
The heavy timber door swung shut behind him, the draft rattling the latch.
The entire room exhaled.
Bridie was now laughing openly, leaning against the pantry shelves.
Mrs. O'Halloran had returned to her mixing bowl with the grand air of a woman fully restored by a good comedy.
Catriona quietly walked over, retrieved the stray flour jar, and set it much further from the dangerous edge of the board without a single word.
"The heel of the hand, me Lady," Catriona said gently, her fingers sinking into the dough to demonstrate. "Here. Like so. Slide it forward."
Margaret moved aside, watching the woman's hands work the gray mass, and she told herself she was thinking entirely about the festival bread.
She was not thinking about the bread.
She was thinking exclusively about the corner of his mouth.
She was thinking about how his dark eyes had locked onto hers in that split second before he looked away.
So unguarded, so warm, and so completely involuntary that she was sure he had not meant for her to see it.
She kept thinking about how it had happened right in front of the entire kitchen staff, and he could never take the look back.
"Thank ye," she said to Catriona, taking the heavy dough back into her own hands.
This time, the mass moved beneath her palms the way it was supposed to. She pressed forward firmly with the heel of her hand and felt the fibers give, the stubborn resistance finally yielding to something more like compliance.
She worked steadily through the afternoon, her face composed, her lips unmoving.