Chapter 28 #4
She held his gaze, though her heart had begun performing acrobatics with no regard for safety.
“I wasn’t trying to keep anything from you,” she said softly. “I was trying to bring you something useful before I brought you one more worry.”
His expression shifted.
“You think I cannot bear worry?”
“No. I think you bear too much of it alone.”
Walter suddenly became fascinated by the candle wick.
Thomas’s eyes held hers as the kiss stood between them like a living thing. The memory of wet air by the mill, the rush of water, the warmth of his hand at her nape, his mouth taking hers and then giving her back to herself before gossip or desire or loneliness could ruin her.
“You should sleep,” he said at last.
No title. No Mistress Amelia. Her foolish heart noticed. Walter, curse him, noticed that she noticed.
“So should you,” she said.
Thomas’s mouth almost moved. Almost.
Then he looked to Walter. “Tomorrow. Pershore first. Hob can ask after Gilbert atte Wode. Huck too, if he can be kept from telling the bees before us.”
“Huck tells the bees everything,” Walter said. “He claims it improves their judgment.”
“It may improve ours,” Thomas said dryly.
Amelia smiled before she could stop herself.
Walter wrapped the narrow roll and tucked it into the locked chest where the account copies were kept.
Thomas turned to leave, then stopped with his hand on the latch.
“Mistress Amelia.”
“Yes, my lord?”
He flinched faintly. Good. Let him, two could play that game.
“You did well today.”
The words were quiet. Rough.
Walter looked as if he would rather be outside in freezing rain than witness this.
Amelia’s throat tightened. “So did you.”
Thomas looked at her for a heartbeat longer than he should have, then he opened the door and went out.
Walter waited until his footsteps faded.
“Saints,” he said. “I have sat through tax disputes with more comfort.”
Amelia pressed both hands over her face. “Not one word.”
“I only said one word. Saints. A useful word, broad in application.”
“I’m going to bed.”
“Wise.”
She took the mending basket because Edith would ask for it at dawn and because normal tasks were the ropes by which a person hauled herself through difficult days.
In the hall, the fire had burned low. Pickering’s clerks were asleep on their benches, their cloaks pulled over their shoulders, mouths slack in the undignified manner of all men once they stopped being official.
At the high table, Thomas sat in his chair, half in shadow, as if he had been carved there out of oak, smoke, and stubbornness.
It was perhaps the most Thomas thing he had ever done.
Three days ago, she might have walked past him, left him to brood. But that was before the kiss, and before the way his mouth had softened on hers.
She stopped at the edge of the hearthlight.
“He’ll come back,” she said quietly, so as not to wake the clerks. “Pickering.”
Thomas did not look surprised. “Aye.”
“The accounts are solid, but he wasn’t pleased. He was surprised. A man like that needs another visit to be sure his surprise was right.”
His gaze lifted to hers. “You expected this.”
“I planned for it. That’s not quite the same thing.”
“You are nearly ready,” he said.
“Almost,” she said. “Give us a few more days.”
Us.
The word slipped out before she could stop it.
His hand curled once around the arm of the chair, the only sign that he’d registered it too.
“You should sleep,” he said.
“That seems to be everyone’s favorite instruction.”
“Then mayhap you should obey it.”
“I’ll consider adding it to the list.”
He looked down at the dying fire. The last glow edged his profile in bronze and shadow, making him look both older and younger than he was.
A lord under suspicion. A soldier who had survived so much.
A man who had kissed her once and then locked himself behind duty because he thought restraint was the only gift he could safely give.
Amelia’s fingers tightened around the mending basket. “Good night, Thomas.”
His eyes closed for the briefest moment, then he opened them and looked at her.
“Good night, Amelia.”
No mistress, no wall between them. Just her name, roughened by smoke and all the things he wouldn’t say.
She went to bed before she did something foolish. Behind her, the hall settled into sleep, but Ashcombe didn’t feel quiet. It felt watchful.
Outside, beyond the gate and the fields and the road slick with autumn mud, Belmaine had set something moving. Pickering had come, measured, and found less weakness than he’d been promised. He would return. Men like that always did, with cleaner questions and sharper knives.
Amelia climbed the stairs with Edith’s basket on her arm, the smell of lavender, ash, and ink clinging to her sleeves.
She thought about Belmaine’s secrets, not quite complete, about Master Pickering’s careful eyes, about Walter saying us.
Mostly, though, she thought about Thomas sitting alone in the firelight, his hand curling when she had used that same small word.
Us.
Such a tiny word. A word a person could build a life around before she noticed the foundation had already been laid.