Chapter 9 #3
By midmorning, her arms ached from carrying baskets and jugs, her back made her feel like she was sixty, and the inside of one shoe had developed a personal grudge against her left heel.
Still, the system was working.
Not perfectly. Nothing worked perfectly except in the deranged imagination of people who wrote project timelines. But better.
Walter, who had begun the morning looking like a man forced to share a bed with a hedgehog, now moved between the rise and the field with his tablet in hand and a grudging light in his eyes.
At one point, she saw him pause beside Osbern and say something while pointing to Amelia’s list.
Osbern nodded. Walter looked deeply annoyed by the usefulness of it all. That alone might sustain her until supper.
“Mistress Amelia!”
Alyson came toward her with a cup, braid half undone, face flushed and glowing.
“No running,” Amelia called.
Alyson slowed into a very exaggerated walk, lifting each foot with solemn care.
“Better?”
“Beautifully done. You are the picture of restraint.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Neither do most adults.”
Alyson beamed and held out the cup. “For my lord.”
Amelia looked toward the line of cutters. Thomas was still working, steady and tireless, though she had seen him rub at his shoulder twice when he thought no one was looking.
“Why are you giving it to me?”
Alyson leaned closer, whispering loudly enough to be heard in France. “Because he won’t stop if I tell him.”
That sounded entirely likely.
“And you think he’ll stop if I tell him?”
Alyson gave her a look of such innocent confidence that Amelia had no idea what to do with it.
Wat appeared behind his sister, carrying a half-full jug with fierce dignity.
“Hob says if Lord Thomas falls over, he’s too heavy and no one will be able to drag him back to the castle.”
“That is also a compelling argument,” Amelia said.
She took the cup and crossed the stubble toward Thomas, trying not to notice the way several heads turned as she went. The whispers were still there. She felt them skim over her veil, her red hair escaping it, her strange speech, and the way she looked at their lord.
But there was less sharpness in them today. Work had a way of sanding gossip into something more practical. A woman might be odd, but if she remembered the bread, kept the children from bleeding, and prevented three arguments over water, perhaps odd could be tolerated until after the harvest.
Thomas lowered the scythe when she approached, his chest rising and falling beneath the sweat-darkened tunic. Up close, he smelled of sun, cut grain, iron, and the clean salt of hard work. A smear of dirt lay across one cheekbone. His pale eyes narrowed against the light.
“You should not be this near the blades.”
“And yet here I am, risking life and limb in the name of hydration.”
He frowned at the cup. “What?”
“Drink.”
“I am not thirsty.”
“Of course not. Men never are. They simply turn gray and fall down out of pride.”
The corner of his mouth shifted. “I have not turned gray.”
“No, but Alyson said you wouldn’t stop if she told you to, and Hob says no one wants to drag you if you fall over.”
“Hob said that?”
“With affection, I’m sure.”
Thomas looked over her shoulder.
Hob, several yards away, became intensely interested in sharpening his blade.
Thomas took the cup. Amelia felt an absurd pulse of triumph, as if she had negotiated peace between nations instead of convincing a sweaty man to drink. He drained it in three swallows and handed it back.
“More,” she said.
His brows rose.
“That wasn’t a suggestion.”
A slow, dangerous amusement moved through his eyes. “Are you ordering me, Mistress Quinn?”
Her brain provided several unhelpful responses at once, most of them involving the word please in tones she didn’t need to be imagining in a field full of armed peasants.
She lifted her chin. “Yes.”
Hob made a strangled sound.
Thomas held out the cup.
She poured more from Wat’s jug, trying very hard not to smile. Thomas drank that too, his throat moving, and really there was no reason for that to be interesting. None whatsoever. Men had throats. It was a known anatomical feature.
The girl with the cheese basket giggled behind her hand.
Amelia turned. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
The girl fled, still giggling.
Thomas handed the cup back. “You have Edith’s manner.”
“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.”
“It was.”
He seemed as surprised as she was.
Amelia looked away first, because if she didn’t, she might stand there in the middle of the rye field with a cup in her hand and every thought she had ever owned scattered like chaff on the wind.
Besotted.
The old-fashioned word slipped into her head as she walked away, ridiculous and entirely too dramatic for a woman with straw in her hem and sweat trickling down her spine.
She glanced back once, watching as Thomas bent to his work, the scythe flashing through the rye, his shoulders dark against the gold.
Wonderful.
She’d fallen seven centuries through time, and apparently her heart had taken one look at a strong, silent medieval lord with scars, a scowl, and terrible conversational skills and decided, Him.