Chapter Twenty-One #3
For a moment, the men only stared, but Harsain was the first to understand the jest. “Och, and we thank ye kindly, lass,” he said, his lips curving inside his facial hair. “Surpasses even what we saw on the training field this morn.”
More laughter followed, which Anastasia accepted with a rueful smile, but when she turned and met Bram’s gaze, the smile disappeared and her expression settled once more into the composed courtesy he had come increasingly to despise.
Bram handed his own reins to Calum and went to the mare. “I’ll teach ye, lass.”
“She dinna need ye to,” Etta said.
“No, thank you,” Anastasia said at exactly the same moment.
Bram looked from his sister to Anastasia, though it was the latter’s refusal that held his attention. There it was again, that infuriating politeness—perfectly gracious and perfectly distant, giving him nothing against which he might reasonably take offense.
His tried to ignore this, dropping his gaze to the stirrup.
“’Tis too long.”
Etta frowned. “What?”
“The stirrup. For Anastasia.” Bram reached for the leather and shortened it. “And ye’re having her put her foot too far through it.”
“I was—”
“Only the ball of your foot,” he told Anastasia, ignoring his sister. “Else if ye fall and cannae free it, the mare may drag ye.”
Anastasia stared but briefly before acknowledging this. “All right.”
Bram took that as sufficient permission to continue. “And dinna haul yourself up by the saddle. Ye’ll pull it toward ye and make the mare shift beneath your weight.” He put one hand against the pommel. “Left hand here with the reins. Nae so tight. Ye need only keep her from walking away.”
He stepped aside so that she could approach and watched as she adjusted her grip according to his instruction.
“Now take hold at the back.” When she did, he added, “Put your foot in.” Bram watched her slide it into the stirrup and immediately caught her ankle before she could push it through as deeply as she had before.
“Nae. Just here.” He drew her foot back until only the proper portion rested upon the iron, then released her.
“Turn toward the mare a wee bit more. Ye were twisting away from her before ye even left the ground.”
Anastasia shifted obediently.
“Now spring from this leg,” he said, bolding tapping his hand against the skirt at her thigh, “and straighten the other as ye rise. Dinna try to climb the horse. Let the stirrup give ye the height and carry ye upward.”
She nodded and Bram took one step backward, giving her space.
Anastasia drew a breath, adjusted her hands upon the saddle and reins, and sprang.
This time she rose cleanly, carrying herself upward with enough momentum to swing her right leg over the mare’s back and settle squarely into the saddle without any assistance from him.
There was a moment when her skirts caught and gave her pause but she persisted and completed the action of mounting.
“I did it!”
She looked down at Bram with a wide, triumphant smile, all the pleasure of that small accomplishment shining in her eyes, and for one fleeting moment she was the Anastasia he remembered from the road—before he’d rejected her so brutally—turning instinctively to him because something had pleased or surprised her.
Bram grinned up at her. “Aye, ye did.”
Something in her expression faltered. He saw the light in her eyes dim and he wondered if memory surfaced in her as well—of that eerie storm, and of his cruel words meant to drive her into it. The smile vanished. She looked away, her hands suddenly busy with the reins.
“Well,” she said, her voice now carefully subdued, “Etta gave me a good foundation.”
Bram’s own smile disappeared and he gave his regard to her seat, immediately stepping forward to close his hand around her ankle, drawing her foot slightly backward in the stirrup before sliding his palm higher along the curve of her calf to reposition her leg.
The correction required nothing more than that, yet beneath the wool of her skirt he felt the muscle tense abruptly beneath his hand.
His jaw clenched and his hand stilled.
It had been a simple thing to touch her on the road.
He had lifted her onto the gelding, taken her hand to guide her across rough ground, slept beside her and ridden endless miles with her body fitted against his.
Now, after days in which she had maintained so careful a distance between them, the innocent contact felt startlingly intimate.
Bram raised his eyes. “?Twas too far forward,” he explained, the words coming out clipped and low. “Keep your leg here, like this.”
Anastasia stared down at him, her eyes wide and unblinking, both her earlier excitement and the polite detachment of moments ago gone.
Slowly, Bram slid his hand away and stepped back.
“We would have gotten there eventually,” Etta said tightly from somewhere behind him.
“Aye, but I’m pleased to arrive there before she was harmed.”
“And, um, that might be enough for one day,” Anastaisa announced.
Bram looked up at her again. She was already gathering the reins, her attention fixed rather too carefully upon her hands, and he understood at once that she imagined he meant to continue the lesson now that she’d managed to mount, to teach her how to guide the mare and properly keep her seat.
Yet whatever enthusiasm she’d shown only moments before had vanished with remarkable speed.
Apparently, learning to ride had lost some of its appeal the instant it threatened to require more of his hands upon her.
He’d accepted her polite distance at Craig na Coille, assuming it was the natural aftermath of his rejection. She was courteous because it was her nature, and she avoided his gaze because he’d given her every reason to. He disliked it, but he understood it.
This, however—this sudden tension at his touch—he understood rather less.
Indifference should not have made her go so still beneath his hand.
It shouldn’t have widened her eyes when he looked up at her or sent that faint wash of color across her cheeks, and it certainly shouldn’t have made her abandon a lesson only seconds after successfully mounting the mare.
Neither could he forget the bright, unguarded smile she’d given him with her delighted I did it, before recollection had shuttered it away.
Mayhap he’d been mistaken about what Anastasia had accomplished these past several days. Mayhap she hadn’t ceased feeling anything at all, but only had become better at hiding it.
I’m keeping my distance—isn’t that what you wanted? she’d said not four hours ago.
After an initial self-criticizing thought of I’ve created a monster, Bram began to suspect that her indifference might be every bit as manufactured as his own.
What had seemed so certain beneath that violent storm no longer felt simple at all.
He had meant to push her away, believing it was the only honorable choice.
He couldn’t protect her on the road, not truly, and when the heavens themselves had offered her a way home, his own selfishness could not be the thing that kept her in his dangerous world.
But the danger here was different. There were no English soldiers hunting them, no need to sleep with one hand on his sword. At Craig na Coille, hundreds of people stood ready at the sound of a horn. His fighting men guarded the walls, and his own kin had taken her under their collective wing.
She was safer here than she had been at any moment since appearing before him in that rain-soaked English wood, which left Bram with considerably less reason to maintain the distance he had so deliberately put between them.
If he no longer needed to push Anastasia away for her own safety, he could not rightfully explain why he should continue pretending he wanted nothing from her, denying himself even the companionship he had come to value so greatly upon the road.
Unless it was no longer Anastasia he sought to protect.
Another storm might come, another strange disturbance in the air that opened whatever impossible path had brought her here in the first place, and the next time it might not simply fade away and leave her standing still at his side.
He’d already tried to make her hate him—a cruel mercy meant to make her leaving easier. He’d told himself it was for her safety. But as he watched her, the sharp edge of that lie returned. It wasn’t her safety he feared for, but his own sanity when she was gone.
He scowled at nothing in particular and looked up at Anastasia, who shifted uncertainly in the saddle, glancing down at the considerable distance between herself and the ground, possibly hoping some obvious method of getting herself safely down might present itself.
Without a word, he caught her firmly about the waist and lifted her from the saddle, setting her squarely upon her feet.
Anastasia made a small sound of surprise and caught briefly at his shoulders for balance, and for a moment his hands were still at her waist and her breath was warm against his jaw.
He released her almost at once.
“Aye. Ye’ve learned enough for today.”
Anastasia stared at him, plainly bewildered by the sudden change in his mood. “Okay. Thank you.”
That maddening politeness again.
Bram thrust the mare’s reins toward Etta, turned on his heel and strode back toward his horse.
Behind him, Harsain made some low remark that earned a burst of laughter from the others, but Bram neither heard nor cared to know what had been said.
He swung into his saddle, wheeled the horse toward the keep and left them to follow at their leisure, irritated with himself, and most especially irritated by the dawning suspicion that the distance between them, which had seemed so necessary only days ago, might now be the very last thing he wanted.