Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
It takes me a beat to place myself. The pillow beneath my head is thin but heavy, the linen smoother than anything I own.
The light coming through the leaded glass is soft and grey.
The bed under me is a four-poster with heavy red curtains gathered back at the corners, and the room is warmer than usual.
Because I’m not in my bedroom.
I’m at the castle.
In his bed.
I turn my head on the pillow to look at him.
There is only empty space.
The quilt is folded back carefully and there is the small dent of his head on the pillow next to mine, but that’s the only sign he was there.
I sit up slowly, my body protesting, and look down at myself, puzzled.
I’m wearing his shirt. I don’t remember putting it on. I remember him pulling the heavy quilt up over both of us, I remember the smell of him, and I remember falling asleep against his chest, but I don’t remember anything after that.
Oh, well, I do remember telling myself I might be sleeping with a murderer and I’d be lucky to be alive this morning. Anyway, I’m alive!
I do a light stretch as I look around the room, my muscles slow to wake and little testy. The fire in the small fireplace has burned to embers. The candles on the mantel are gone, the wax pooled at the base. The room smells like beeswax and woodsmoke and him.
I get up, slowly easing myself out of the high bed.
The floor is cold under my feet, making my soles scrunch.
There are slippers, old, soft, woman’s slippers, set neatly at the side of the bed as if put there for me.
I have no idea whose slippers these were and I don’t want to know and I definitely don’t want to put my bare feet in them.
I find my socks scattered about and put them on, then put on the slippers.
I also find a robe over the back of a chair. It is heavy wool, the dark blue of the deep loch, and the hem trails on the floor when I put it on. I belt it tightly and head off to find him.
The castle in the morning is a different place than the castle by firelight.
The corridors are longer. The stone is colder. The light through the slit windows lays in pale bars across the flagstones. The tapestries on the walls are duller than they were last night and the candles in the sconces have not been lit.
I don’t know where I’m going but I walk anyway. The castle is large and quiet and somewhere in it he is awake.
I try every door on this upper corridor but all are locked, so I head down the narrow stone staircase to the lower level. I find him right away.
He’s in the study he showed me yesterday, at the desk stacked with books and has a fountain pen in his hand and a thick, textured piece of paper. He is writing something, his penmanship small and careful.
He looks up when I come in and while he doesn’t outwardly smile this time, his eyes do. “Foxglove.”
“Good morning,” I say through a yawn.
“You’re awake.”
“No, not until I’ve had coffee.”
He sets the pen down and folds the paper, sliding it into the desk drawer as he stands.
He crosses to me. He puts his hands at my hips through the wool of the robe and he kisses me on the forehead. It’s so sweet I feel my toes curl.
“Sleep well?” he murmurs against my skin.
“I think I’m still asleep.”
“Come, I’ll feed you.”
I laugh and he takes my hand and leads me to the kitchen, which is now warmer than it was last night. The fire in the long hearth is up. There’s fresh bread on the wooden table, the smell of it the first thing I take in. There’s butter in a small dish and a tea pot under a cloth.
There is also a small white dish with three kippers laid neatly in it, glossy in the morning light, skin still on.
He’s been awake long enough to bake. My nose wrinkles. And sort out some fish for breakfast?
He pulls out the bench for me. I sit and he pours my tea. “I’m sorry I don’t have any coffee in the house at the moment, but I’ll make sure to remedy that.”
“It will do,” I reply, even though it most definitely will not do. Tea is my après-coffee caffeinated drink; the bridge between coffee and wine. I won’t function without it, and my ADHD will run amok.
“So you aren’t a coffee drinker?” I wonder, reaching for the sugar jar and pouring an obscene amount in my teacup, because I need something.
“Is that a dealbreaker?” he inquires wryly, watching the sugar keep coming.
“Could be,” I quip, though I give him a small smile that says I’m only kinda kidding. Serial killers I can work with, but someone who doesn’t drink coffee? Yeesh.
He pours the tea and watches me take my first sip, then cuts me a slice of the bread and butters it slowly, the knife flat across the warm crust, and slides the plate in front of me.
Then he sits across from me on the bench with two kippers on his own plate and eats the fish the way he does everything, slowly and with all the patience in the world.
Then again, I wouldn’t be in a rush to eat that dried fish either.
There are too many Scottish specialties I have yet to take a liking to.
But at least he bakes a damn good bread.
He clears his throat when he’s done and his plate is pushed away.
“I would keep you here today,” he begins quietly.
“Oh?” I finish the rest of my tea and the thick dregs of sugar at the bottom. I can’t help but feel disappointed because it sounds like he’s asking me to leave. “Why don’t you? I have no plans.”
“Because if I keep you today, perhaps you won’t come back tomorrow.”
I frown, not sure what he means by that. Then again, what else is new with Mr. Cryptic?
He takes my hand across the table, he turns it palm up in his, and kisses the inside of my wrist.
“Foxglove?”
“Yes.”
“Walk down to the gateway with me.”
And I guess that’s my cue that I need to get going.
I head back upstairs and get dressed while he does the dishes.
I get changed into the outfit I wore yesterday, then run my fingers through my hair in the small mirror in the ornate stone bathroom—complete with normal plumbing, thank god.
I look older somehow, still as fresh and alive as the other day, but there’s something about my reflection that reflects a maturity I don’t think I’ll ever feel.
When I’m done, he’s waiting at the bottom of the narrow staircase and offers me his arm in the old-fashioned way and I take it, pretending for a moment that I’m in an episode of Bridgerton. In this place, with this distinguished, old-fashioned man holding on to me, it’s not hard at all.
He walks me through the front hall, then across the courtyard. The foxgloves are still standing in the joints of the stones. The wild roses have gone over, the petals dropping in the gravel. The hawthorn in the window arch is heavy with red berries now, hard and dark.
We come through the gateway and he stops. He turns me to him and holds both my hands in his, strong-fingered and cool.
“I want you to know something before we go any further,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “It’s very, very important.”
I wait.
“When this happens between us—when you let me have all of you—things will change.”
“What do you mean? What this? What change?”
“This. When you let me have all of you, the version of me you fall asleep next to won’t be the version you wake up to. Do you understand?”
I look at him and do my best not to smile. He’s always been a very serious man but now he looks positively grave.
“Alasdair…” I begin. “Most women have heard this before, in less interesting accents. I’m not naive, I know what this is. It’s just sex. I’m not asking you to be soft for me forever. You can be…whoever you want to be. Whoever you are.”
He looks at me for a long second.
I go on. “And I’m not going to freak out on you after. We can just keep this as it is. I promise I won’t turn into a stage five clinger.”
His brows knit together. “A stage five clinger?”
“You’ve never seen Wedding Crashers?”
From the continued puzzlement on his face, I’m gonna say no.
“What I’m saying,” I continue, trying not to laugh, “is I don’t need the warning. I appreciate it; that’s more than most people get. But I know what I’m getting into.”
A strange look passes over his face for a moment, almost like…grief.
Then he nods.
“Aye, my foxglove. All right.”
“That’s it? You’re not going to try to convince me to take it more seriously?”
“No, Iris. I think you’ve heard me as plainly as I can say it. I won’t say it again.”
“Okay, but now you sound a little sad.”
“Aye. That happens.”
He kisses my forehead one more time and holds me against him for a beat. His arms are warm through the wool of his sweater and he continues to smell divine.
He pulls back and holds me by my shoulders, peering at me. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Oh, will you, now?” I muse.
“I will. You’ll come here for dinner.”
I raise a brow at his bossiness. “Well, luckily for you, I would love to.”
“Might be best that you drive here, supposed to storm tomorrow and the next few days, aye?”
“Aye, aye captain,” I joke, but he does not get the idiom.
So, I awkwardly turn around and head down his drive. I look back twice. Both times he is standing in the gateway, hands in his pockets, watching me go.
The third time I look back, however, he’s gone.
I walk home with the morning breeze on my face.
The road is long, but my legs have become used to this route now, and the air is doing me good. By the time the cottage comes into view, I’m spent in the best way my body can let me be spent. I am, for a stretch of single-track road in the Highlands of Scotland, the happiest woman alive.
I am also, somewhere under the glow, sitting with what he said before we parted.
The version of me you fall asleep next to won’t be the version you wake up to.
The category I put it in at the time was the I’m not the relationship type category.
The I’m going to disappoint you category.
The I’m going to be distant category. He was warning me he’d pull back, the way some men do, and I suppose it was kind of him to give me a warning.
That shows a bit of self-awareness, doesn’t it?