Chapter Seven #3
The realization settled quickly, and a faint smile touched her mouth, neither large nor wide, but something she was simply and vaguely aware of.
Just as quickly, however, noticing the sour expression he wore, her smile faded, and she resented him and his presence.
She had already restored the solitude of her days in her mind, had in fact just convinced herself it was simpler, safer, better, and now here he was.
He didn’t move easily, Avery noticed. Even at a distance she could see the stiffness in his stride, the careful way he favored one side. His shoulders were set hard, jaw rigid, and though he was not yet near enough for her to read his eyes clearly, the force of his approach carried its own message.
“I’ve been searching for ye for half an hour,” he said gruffly as he cleared the trees.
She blinked at him. “What?” Why?
“I returned to find ye gone,” he said, his breath nearly ragged. “I searched all over for any sign of ye.”
“I came... here,” she said, confusion evident in her tone. She lifted her hand and pointed with her thumb over her shoulder, the motion slow, akin to her bewilderment, indicating where she’d laid out her laundry to dry.
He halted a few paces in front of her, his chest rising.
Up close, the pallor beneath his stubble betrayed him.
Sweat darkened the linen at his throat despite the cool air.
The gray of his eyes was stormy now with his crustiness, and when he spoke his lips formed hard and thin lines around his words.
“I dinna ken where ye were,” he pressed, agitated still.
Never in this life had she been required to account for her movements—not to the man, not to anyone.
She stared at him, bewildered. Yet beneath the confusion something else moved unexpectedly through her chest, warm and unfamiliar enough that she almost mistrusted it.
No one had searched for her in years. No one had noticed her absence quickly enough to worry over it.
If she vanished for hours—or days—the forest itself remained the only thing likely to mark the difference.
“I thought you left,” she said at last, offering the only truth she knew.
This twisted his expression further. “Left? Where would I go?” he snapped. “I struggled to retrace our steps from yesterday. Jesu,” he cursed, blowing out a slow breath, “and again could scarcely manage that.”
And Avery understood then that he was not angry with her so much as he was annoyed with himself and his limitations, shaped by a slower than hoped-for recovery.
She recalled that about the man, on the few occasions when he’d been injured—he, too, had allowed himself no grace at all, no time for his body to heal, had pushed himself unnecessarily.
Morggán shifted his weight, and this time the effort showed, in a faint tightening at the corner of his mouth. His hand pressed briefly—almost absently—against his side where his ribs had been struck.
“But why did you walk where we had gone yesterday?” she asked.
His answer was preceded by a sigh. “I wanted to see from the ridge again, to know if those same fires were lit,” he said. “Or if they’d moved.”
“Did they?”
“Nae, they remain.”
“What does that mean?”
He glanced around then, seeming to take in his surroundings now for the first time, the loch itself, her dirty waiting laundry at the shore, and the clean drying items just behind Avery.
“Could mean several things,” he informed her, settling his hands on his hips. “Waiting on units or an entire army—might be a staging area. Holding while the wounded are tended and mended. Might be waiting on communication.”
“But...they won’t come here? Into the forest,” she clarified. Her own frown evolved. “Are they looking for you?”
He shook his head before he answered. “Nae. I canna imagine it’s the same force we clashed with days ago.”
He stepped closer and lifted his hand toward her, the motion almost casual.
Avery stiffened at once, her shoulders drawing back though her feet remained planted.
He paused, meeting her gaze. Then, without a word, he reached a little farther and plucked a leaf from her hair, holding it up briefly so she might see that he meant no threat, but only had removed the small evidence of her passage through the trees.
He tossed the leaf aside. Avery watched it flutter and dance toward the ground, seemingly in no hurry to get there, before she swallowed and left him, returning to her laundry.
She stepped back into the loch and sank to her knees with her back to him, another pair of pants in hand, aware of him still standing there, possibly watching her again with that piercing, studious regard of his.
“Ye kent I left,” he said from behind her. “And did that please ye or nae?”
Avery considered her response for a long moment, her cheeks pinkening, fighting with actual truth versus what she’d told herself in the last hour, until finally she turned her head over her shoulder.
“I guess it...” she began, only to stop when she realized he’d gone, was limping through the trees away from her, little more than a shadow now.
She acknowledged the relief, for his departure now, knowing it saved her having to pretend that it made no difference that he’d stayed.