Chapter 27 #2
The wheel caught, shuddered, then turned.
Inside the mill, the great stone engaged with a low, grinding hum that seemed to move through the ground beneath their feet.
Grain began its old transformation somewhere beyond the wall, hard kernels becoming meal, the day’s hunger becoming tomorrow’s bread.
Amelia’s smile came slow and surprised, as if the world had handed her a small victory and she hadn’t quite trusted it until now.
“There,” she said.
“There,” he agreed as she turned that smile on him.
Thomas had learned her smiles because there were not nearly enough of them.
There was the quick one she used for children.
The narrow one she gave Walter when she’d won a point and wanted to be gracious.
The dry little smile that meant he’d said something foolish and she was deciding whether to point it out.
This one was different. Wide. Unguarded. Lit from inside by the satisfaction of something fixed.
He was in a great deal of trouble.
The thought wasn’t new. Now the mill put it in his hands with mud on its hem, river light in its eyes, and that single red curl lying against her cheek like a banner raised after a siege.
This was not the time. The mill yard was ten yards behind them.
Godwin was inside. Anyone might walk down the river track.
One sighting, one wrong word carried back to the village, and whatever remained of Amelia’s careful, fragile respectability would be ashes before dusk.
The faery whispers had only just been blunted.
Belmaine was watching. A suspect baron couldn’t afford scandal.
Thomas knew all of that. He’d been raised on duty the way other boys were raised on sweet cakes. He had swallowed it until it became bone. He knew the rules of land, household, name, protection, obligation, and consequence.
He should take three steps back and say something sensible about the wheel joint.
Amelia’s smile faded at the edges. She watched him the way she watched the accounts when she suspected the numbers were about to confess something difficult.
“Thomas,” she said.
“The wheel joint should hold through winter.”
“That,” she said, “is not what you were about to say.”
He looked at the river. It ran pewter beneath the lifting fog, quick and cold past the mill stones, carrying willow leaves and thin threads of foam.
He had known this stretch of the Avon since he was six years old and small enough to be lifted to see over the sluice board.
The smell was the same as it had always been. Cold, green, alive.
“No,” he said. “It was not.”
The silence was very loud.
She waited, with more patience than he deserved, for longer than he wanted to count.
“Amelia,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I am not—”
He stopped. Started again.
“I am—”
“A man who talks easily? No, I know.” There was no mockery in it. Only warmth, and something beneath the warmth that was steady and painfully brave. “Whatever it is, just say it. It’s just me.”
Just me.
He could have laughed. Just me was the whole problem.
“You should not still be here,” he said, his voice rougher than he meant it. “You should have found some place where my name does not make you a target.”
“I know.”
“Walter was right. I keep—”
The words failed him, which was just as well, because the truth was ugly and too large for the riverbank.
He looked down at her, this small beautiful woman with her inexplicable knowledge of mill ledgers, her muddy hem, her clever mouth, her green eyes too bright with things neither of them dared name.
He’d thought her too strange at first, too sharp, too full of odd habits and strange speech.
Then she’d gone and made herself necessary.
Not like a tool or a clerk. Like breath and warmth in a hall.
“I keep failing to send you somewhere safer.”
“That’s because I don’t want to go,” she said simply.
He stepped forward. It wasn’t like he meant to.
He had been not-meaning-to for weeks. His hands came up and settled at her shoulders carefully, almost formally, the way a man touches something he knows he should not claim and cannot bear to leave untouched.
She went still beneath his hands, green eyes wide, but she did not step away.
“I have nothing I can offer you that is worth what it costs,” he said.
“Let me decide that.”
“You do not know the cost.”
“I know you,” she said. “That’s enough.”
He had no answer for that. His hand lifted before he gave it permission.
The escaped curl lay against her cheek, damp and bright, and he touched it with the backs of his fingers as if it might burn him.
It was soft. Softer than silk, softer than the down beneath a swan’s wing, though with a stubborn spring to it that suited her so well his heart wrenched inside his chest.
Amelia’s breath caught.
He let the curl wind once around his finger.
Saints. Her hair looked like fire and felt like liquid silk.
He had seen it pinned and covered, tamed beneath linen and wool, but he had imagined it loose far too many times for an honorable man.
Down her back. Across his pillow. Caught in sunlight. Tangled over his hands.
He should not have imagined any of it, should not be touching her now. Yet he could not make himself stop.
“You hide this,” he said, because apparently ruin had made him foolish.
“My hair?”
“Aye.”
“That’s the idea, isn’t it? Covered hair equals respectable woman.”
His thumb brushed the curl, and her eyes fluttered for the smallest moment. It was such a little thing. A breath. A blink. A crack in the careful walls she had built around herself. It undid him more thoroughly than any army ever had.
“It’s a poor law,” he said.
Her mouth softened. “I’ll be sure to mention that to whoever’s in charge.”
He almost smiled, but there was too much ache in him for smiling.
There were freckles across her nose, faint beneath the cold pink of her cheeks.
A tiny smudge of mud near her jaw. A bead of river mist caught on one dark lash.
The sort of details a man had no right to gather unless he meant to keep them.
Thomas gathered them anyway, greedy as a thief in a chapel, and knew he would remember this moment if he lived to be a hundred.
The mill wheel turning. The fog lifting.
Amelia looking up at him as if he was not a disgraced baron and soldier in a muddied field, but a man.
A man she might choose. So he kissed her.
The kiss was not the storm he had feared, not fire, not ruin, not the loss of every law that held him upright. It was quieter than that and far more dangerous.
Her mouth was soft beneath his, surprised for half a heartbeat, and then she leaned into him with a tiny sound he felt more than heard. Her hands came to his arms, fingers curling into the linen of his sleeves, and the whole hard world narrowed to one truth.
She had chosen not to go.
And he had wanted her with more than hunger, more than loneliness, more than anything in this realm.
He meant to kiss her once. Only once. But then her hand slid higher, not bold, not practiced, only seeking, as if she too needed proof that he was real and warm and hers to touch for this one stolen breath beside the river.
He drew her closer, carefully, because even desire in him knew to be gentle with her.
His other hand came to her hair, not to pull the pins free, though every wicked part of him wanted to see it tumble down, but to cradle the back of her head where the veil and pins hid all that glorious red from the world.
She fit beneath his hands as if the shape of him had been waiting for the shape of her.
The kiss deepened by a degree, no more than that, a question asked without words and answered by the trembling way she held on. Honey and smoke and river cold clung to her. Beneath it all was Amelia, clean and warm, and Thomas felt something in him, something old and rusted shut, give way.
Not break, but open wide. That frightened him more. He eased back before he forgot every reason he must.
For a heartbeat, neither of them moved. Her eyes opened slowly, green and dazed and bright enough to make a fool of a better man. Her mouth was parted. Her cheeks had gone rosy, and the escaped curl still clung to his finger as if it, too, had forgotten the rules.
Thomas let it go, watching as the curl sprang back against her cheek.