Chapter 9
Ragnall had come down the corridor that night for the same reason he came every night—to stand a moment in the doorway of his sister’s room and look upon the wreck that her bright life had become, and feel the full crushing weight of his own failure settle onto him, before he let himself go and seek what little sleep would have him.
It was the one penance he never missed. He had failed her, had been too busy with his duties to see the danger creeping up on his own blood under his own roof, and so he paid her now in the only coin he had left, which was to refuse himself the mercy of looking away from what had been done to her.
The door was not quite shut. Voices came through the narrow gap of it, and that stopped him where he stood, because no one spoke in Kate’s room.
One of the voices was Olivia’s—low and unguarded, stripped of its usual armor. He stood frozen in the dark corridor, listening to her ask his wounded sister with such raw, unpracticed kindness whether Kate hated her for the wedding. And she meant the question.
She is askin’ me sister for forgiveness for a crime that was never hers. And she doesnae even ken that’s what she is doin’.
And then a voice he had not heard in long months, a voice he had begun in his blackest hours to believe was gone forever, a voice he had nearly forgotten the music of, said, “It looks good on ye, Olivia.”
Ragnall’s heart stopped.
He pushed the door wide before he had decided in any part of his mind to do it, and there they were, his enemy’s sister standing in her blue wedding gown and his own sister sitting up in her chair.
Kate was looking at the world again, actually looking at it, her eyes alert and alive, and his legs all but went straight out from under him where he stood.
“Kate.” His voice cracked clean across the middle of her name. “Did ye… Did ye need somethin’? Did ye just… Did ye talk?”
“She is the only one who asked me a normal question, Ragnall.”
He was unable to speak, standing in the doorway like a man who had been felled. Throughout these silent months, he had bombarded his sister with a hundred questions, a thousand, kneeling by that chair until his knees hurt. All of them, without exception, were the wrong ones.
“Ye all come in here,” Kate went on, slow and thin, terribly and perfectly clear, each word set down with care like a foot on uncertain ice, “and ye ask me how I feel. As if there’s an answer to be had.
As if I could hand it to ye and ye’d be comforted.
The man I loved tricked me. And then, when I’d given him everythin’, he tried to kill me. ”
Behind him, Ragnall heard Olivia draw one sharp, stricken breath, and he understood with a fresh stab of helplessness that she was learning this last black piece of the truth only now, in this room, from his sister’s mouth, and there was nothing on God’s earth he could do to soften the blow for either of them.
“And then ye killed him for it, Braither. With yer own hand. So now tell me, how do ye think I feel?” Kate turned her face slowly back toward the dark window.
“I daenae have an answer to give ye. I’ve looked for one and there isnae any.
But the lass didnae come to ask me about me feelings.
She came to ken whether her gown sat well on her.
It does. She looks lovely in it.” The faint thread of voice dropped lower still.
“Now, leave me. I am tired. I am so tired, Ragnall.”
“Kate, Rosie’s grown so big. She has started to crawl. She gets clear across the floor now. If ye’d only see her, just the once, just for a—”
“I cannae see her yet.” A long pause, and the candle guttered. “Nae like this.”
He turned, leading Olivia out. There was nothing else in the world to do but leave, and so he left and softly pulled the door shut behind him.
Then he stood in the dark of the passage with his hand still on the latch, and he did not move for a long moment, because he did not entirely trust his legs.
Six months. For six months, he had knelt at that chair until his knees ached on the cold boards.
He had brought her broth she would not eat and news she did not want, and her own daughter twice, and had been sent away.
He had begged. He had once, God forgive him, shouted, and she had not so much as blinked, and he had gone out and put his fist through a stable door and told Alastair it was a horse that did it.
A hundred questions. A thousand. And every one of them the wrong one.
And then a red-haired Blythe hellion who had every reason under heaven to wish his whole house in the ground had barged into the wrong room in her wedding gown and asked his sister whether the gown sat well, and his sister had answered her.
Ye asked her a question that wasnae about her sufferin’. That’s the whole of it. That’s all she ever wanted. I couldnae see it, but ye did, and ye werenae even tryin’.
He should have been glad. He was glad. It sat in his chest alongside a thing that was not gladness at all, a low and shameful thing that he turned over once, and recognized, and set down again quickly, appalled at himself.
He was jealous. Of Olivia. For getting there first.
Down the passage, the candle in its sconce guttered and steadied. Ragnall let go of the latch at last, made himself breathe, and set off toward the stairs, finding that he had no earthly notion what he was going to say to the woman waiting for him there.
Olivia thought, as he steered her out of the room with a hand on the small of her back, that he would be glad.
His sister had spoken. After all these silent shuttered months, Kate had come back from wherever the dark had taken her, even if for a little while, even if only far enough to say a kind word about a gown to a near stranger.
Olivia had expected to see joy break over that hard, scarred face like the dawn coming up over the hills.
Instead, his hand stayed firm on her back as he led her down the corridor, into his study, and shut the door behind them.
When he turned to face her in the dim firelight, he was not glad at all. He was something else.
He was undone.
“Ye’re nae supposed to see me in me weddin’ gown,” Olivia said, for lack of anything braver to put in the silence. “It’s ill luck, ye ken. The worst kind.”
“As if this match was made in heaven before.” He dragged a hand down his face and let out a shaky breath. “How do ye do it?”
“Do what?”
“This.” He gestured to the whole of her, helpless, furious, as if she were a riddle set before him for the express purpose of tormenting him.
“Everyone in this castle has lost their wits over ye. The bairn willnae be parted from ye, screams the roof down when ye leave the room. Me grandmaither schemes for ye behind me back, and badly. She is nay good at hidin’ it.
Me sister, who’s nae spoken a single word to a livin’ soul since the leaves turned, talks. To ye. About a gown.”
His voice rose. “Even me own dog sleeps across yer door of a night and willnae so much as turn his shaggy head when I call him. Me own dog, Olivia.”
She stared at him. And then, because the day had been far too long and the fear far too large and the sudden relief that his fury was aimed at a matter so perfectly, gloriously absurd was so enormous, she felt her mouth begin to twitch at one corner.
“Did ye nae want them to like me, then?”
“Nay, I… That’s nae… I—”
“Ye’re jealous.” She felt it bloom up bright in her chest, light and delighted. “Ye great glowerin’ Laird of Clan Cairn. Ye’re jealous because I am more likable than ye are. In yer own keep.”
For one taut breath, she truly thought he would roar at her.
Instead, the scarred edge of his mouth, the one that always pulled, tugged upward against his every visible effort to stop it, and a charge passed between them across the firelit room that was not war at all, that had nothing of the feud in it, and they were both nearly smiling.
It changed the air in the small room. It changed nearly everything, Olivia felt with a lurch.
“I think,” Olivia said, more quietly now, the laughter gone soft, “that I may have been too hard on ye. From the very start. I only ever kent one side of the tale, ye see. Me own side. And I held it that tight in me fist all these long months that there was nay room left in me hand for any other to fit.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “That’s what war does to folk. It hands every soul one side of the truth and tells them, soft and certain, that it’s the whole truth.”
“But that cannae change the past, can it?”
“Nay,” he said. “Nothin’ can. I’ve tried.”
“So it cannae change the future.” She did not know why she said it. She only knew that she wanted, suddenly and badly, against all her good sense, to hear what he would answer.
“Can it nae?” he said, very softly.
The three small words went through her like a draught of warm water on a cold night.
“Nay,” she breathed, and did not believe it even as it left her lips. “So ye’re still aware of me rule, then?”
“Aye.” His dark eyes had gone steady and certain on hers, and would not be moved. “Nay touchin’.”
“Good.”
“But ye’ll share me bed for the first month.”
She blinked at him. “I beg yer pardon?”
“I willnae have two clans whisperin’ that we never consummated the marriage and so defied the Council’s edict.
” He said it as reasonably as a man discussing the price of grain, which made it all infinitely worse.
“Ye will sleep in me chambers. We’ll touch nay more than ye yerself wish, which is to say nae at all.
But ye’ll be there when the maids come in at dawn, and ye’ll be there when they go at dusk, and if ye can manage to survive a full month of me, lassie, I give ye me word that we’ll never speak of it again so long as we live. ”
She had crossed the room without once deciding to. Or perhaps he had. There was no longer any safe and sensible distance left between them, only the small, warm, dangerous space where two people stand when they have forgotten to be afraid of one another.
“Ye’re…” She had to stop and begin again, because her voice had gone unsteady. “Ye are awfully arrogant for a man who murdered me—”
“Yer family. Aye. I ken it.” He did not flinch from the word now, did not look away from her.
He looked down into her upturned face, and the firelight moved gold over the scar, the dark steady eyes, and the mouth she was, to her horror, looking at.
“But that man isnae the one standin’ before ye, Olivia. ”
“Then who is?” It came out scarcely more than a whisper.
“The one ye’ll wed in the mornin’,” he said.
“The one who’ll keep ye, and guard ye with his life, and never once raise his hand to ye so long as he draws breath in his body.
The one who’d very much like, just at this moment, to stop bein’ so cursed honorable about all of it.
” His gaze dropped to her lips and lifted slowly back to her eyes. “If ye’d only let him.”
She should have stepped back. She had a great many excellent reasons to step back, a whole muddy yard full of them, and she could not for the life of her call a single one to mind, because he was so close to her now that she could feel his warm breath brush her cheek, and her own breath had gone shallow and quick, and the whole wide world had narrowed down to the space of a kiss not yet taken.
He did not take it. He waited. That was what undid her in the end—that he waited. So she rose on her tiptoes and closed the last of the distance herself.
The kiss was nothing like she had imagined, and she was startled to realize she had imagined it. It started gentle, a question pressed softly against her mouth, and when she did not pull away, it stopped asking.
His hand rose to cradle the back of her head, gentle and reverent, at odds with the raw need she could feel restrained behind it, and she made a small sound against his mouth that she would never admit to afterward, along with his low groan that she felt all the way down to her toes.
She had never been kissed before, not once. She had spent her whole life keeping men well away from her, suitors and hopeful fools alike, at arm’s length and farther.
And now here was the one man she had most cause to hate, kissing her as if he had been starving for years and yet determined to be a gentleman about the meal, and the contradiction of it was the most ruinous feeling she had ever known.
It was that very thought, that ruinous thought, that brought her back to herself.
She broke away from him, both of them breathing hard, her fingers pressed to her swollen lips as if to hold the kiss in or push it off. She truly could not have said which.
“I-I…” she stuttered. “I have to—the gown—me maither—they will be lookin’ for me—”
She fled. She clutched the loch-blue skirts in both fists and hurried out of his study like the coward she had never been, rushing down the dark corridor with her heart pounding like a war drum beneath the borrowed silk, her lips still burning from the kiss, and her carefully built world tipping completely off its axis and tumbling into the dark.
Behind her, low and rough, edged with something that might have been laughter and might just as easily have been despair, Ragnall called, “See ye at the weddin’, Olivia.”