Chapter 15 #2
He could still feel the shape of her against him.
The give of her mouth beneath his, the way her fingers had fisted in his shirt rather than pushed him away, the small startled sound she’d made before she’d kissed him back with a force that had very nearly undone every last piece of his self-control.
He had lost control. Again. Twice now, in the space of a fortnight, after thirteen years of never once losing it at all.
For thirteen years, he’d have sworn to any man living that he did not do things without deciding to do them first. He decided when to ride out, when to sign a contract, when to climb a roof at dawn rather than wait on a man with a ladder.
He did not, as a rule, find his hands movin’ before his head had given leave.
His hands had moved anyway. Twice now. And both times, the leave his head gave came well after the fact.
He turned the blade in his hands, checking the edge in the lamplight, and set the whetstone against it once more.
“Ye’ve survived worse than that, Jinny,” he muttered.
The door creaked, and he looked up. Elspeth stood in the doorway, one hand on the latch, her expression somewhere between startled and deeply skeptical.
“Were ye speaking to a sword?”
He set the whetstone down. “Aye.”
“Why?”
“It’s listened to me longer than most people.”
She blinked at that, several times in quick succession, and he watched her decide that the matter did not warrant further pursuit, whatever her opinion of it might be. She stepped fully into the room instead, arms folded, chin lifted.
“I came to ask,” she said, “whether I might finally participate in the preparations for the handfasting and the cèilidh.”
It was, as far as excuses went, a fairly thin one, and he’d wager she knew it every bit as well as he did. The preparations had been made for four days without her permission being sought. They could have waited one more, if reaching him hadn’t been the actual errand.
He said none of it.
“Nay.”
“Magnus.”
“Mrs. McAulay has enough hands.”
“Then what precisely am I to do?” Her voice rose a fraction, frustration threading through it. “Sit in me chamber and admire the wallpaper until the day arrives?”
“Prepare for the handfasting,” he said, as though the distinction were obvious.
“I am tryin’ to. How am I meant to do that if I’m nae permitted anywhere near the preparations?”
Magnus picked the whetstone back up, more for something to do with his hands than any real need to continue the work, and drew it along the blade with deliberate slowness. “Choose yer flowers. Prepare yer rituals. Mrs. McAulay has assured me that ladies enjoy these activities.”
“And will ye be preparin’ yer own rituals?”
“Aye.” He set the stone down again. “By ridin’ the borders. Securin’ the approach.”
Something in her expression shifted, the frustration giving way to an assessing look, her head tilting to the side.
“I could help,” she said.
He very nearly choked on his breath. “Help?”
“Aye.”
“Nay.”
“Why?” The word came out sharp, exasperated, both hands rising briefly before dropping back to her sides.
“Because.”
“Because?”
He set his cup down on the small table beside him, harder than the gesture warranted, and looked at her the way he might look at a man who’d asked why fences needed mending or grain needed drying.
“Because ye are to become Lady Wallace.”
“That sounds suspiciously like ye’ve placed me on a decorative shelf and intend to admire me from a safe distance while the actual work proceeds without me.”
“I have done no such thing.”
“Ye have.”
He watched her breathe in sharply, her chest lifting beneath the plain wool of her gown, and found himself watching it a moment longer than the argument warranted.
“I merely think,” he said, dragging his attention back to her face, “that ye deserve comfort.”
Something in her shoulders eased, just slightly, the sharp edge of her frustration softening into something quieter, more thoughtful.
“I deserve to have a choice,” she said.
He had no answer ready for that.
He sat with it a moment, the whetstone gone still in his hand, and found the silence stretching longer than he’d meant it to, longer than was comfortable for either of them, in the low lamplight with the memory of the corridor sitting unresolved between them.
She held his gaze, waiting.
He looked at the flush rising high in her cheeks, at her lips, parted slightly around whatever retort she’d decided not to finish, and found his attention narrowing to…
Those lips.
He reached for his cup instead and drank, because it seemed considerably safer than continuing to look at her mouth and think about it.
Elspeth’s eyes narrowed, tracking the movement.
“That cup is yer father’s. I ken that much already.” She tipped her head. “What I daenae ken is why a bit of blackened wood gets carried from room to room like it might walk off if ye set it down.”
He looked down at it. Worn smooth at the rim from years of handling, the only thing that had survived the fire O’Brien had started. The only piece of his father he had left that wasn’t carved from memory and hung on a corridor wall.
He had no wish to explain any of that.
“Ye wouldnae understand,” he said. “Ye daenae even drink.”
Something dangerous crossed her face, quick and sharp.
“Oh?” she murmured. “I daenae drink?”
She crossed to the small shelf where the whisky sat before he’d fully registered her moving, poured herself a measure considerably more generous than propriety allowed, and swallowed it in one clean motion.
Magnus stared. “That was one cup.”
“Was it?”
She poured a second. Drank that too without so much as a cough, without the faintest sway that ought to have followed two measures of whisky taken in quick succession by a gently bred woman who claimed no experience with spirits.
“I was raised an only child,” she said, setting the cup down with deliberate care, “by a father who forgot I existed most days, in a household full of servants who found me entertainin’ enough to teach me whatever I asked.
I ken how to drink, Magnus. I ken how to tend livestock.
I ken how to run a household from top to bottom without a single soul’s guidance. ”
She paused. “I can do a great many things ye havenae troubled yerself to learn about me.”
He said nothing. He found he had, once again, nothing ready to say.
The fight went out of her shoulders all at once, the proud line of them dropping into something smaller, closer to admission than defiance.
“I simply want to see the stars,” she added, quieter now, her eyes dropping to his collar rather than his face. “I want to walk beside ye and see the man behind the Laird.”
He watched her. Her cheeks had turned a deep crimson, whether from the whisky or the argument, he couldn’t say.
Her eyes had brightened, sharp and clear despite the drink, and her hair had come loose at her temple during the course of the evening, one curl falling free against her jaw in a way that made his hand itch with the unhelpful urge to tuck it back.
She stood there, angry and flushed and utterly certain of herself, and he found his carefully maintained distance sliding sideways without his permission.
“Ye want to see the stars,” he said.
“Aye.”
He set his cup down. He was not certain afterward what had prompted him to take the step that followed.
Maybe it was the whisky in her, or the fight still bright in her eyes, or simply thirteen years of careful restraint finally running thin against a woman who refused to be managed by any of his usual methods.
He stepped closer. “Then stop askin’ books and poets for them.”
“And where should I ask?”
He was close enough now that he could smell the whisky on her breath, warm and sharp.
Beneath it was the unmistakable scent of lavender—the same scent that had haunted him since the auction, since the ride home with her rigid and small against his chest, since every hour he’d spent trying and failing to think of her as merely a practical arrangement.
“Me,” he said. “I will show ye the stars.”
He reached up, his fingers finding the loose curl at her jaw. He tucked it back slowly, deliberately, the barest brush of his knuckles against her skin. Her breath caught, audible in the quiet room.
He drew her in.
He had exhausted every ounce of control he had left.