Chapter 4
By the second meal she had refused, Olivia understood that hunger was simply going to be the price of her pride, and she found she was prepared to pay it.
She had sent her excuses for dinner the first night, pleading the long journey, and for breakfast this morning, she had pleaded nothing at all, which was its own small flag run up its own small pole.
Let him eat alone at his long table. Let the whole house of Cairn wonder among themselves whether their Laird had brought home a bride or a prisoner, and let them wonder which the new Lady considered herself to be.
She would sit here in this borrowed room and starve like a saint on a pillar if it kept her from sitting across from that scarred, infuriating, unfairly handsome face one moment before she was dragged to it by a priest.
It was a poor sort of rebellion, she knew, the kind a child would stage in a nursery, refusing her supper to punish a world that would not so much as notice the empty place at its table.
But it was the only rebellion the Council and the edict and her own helpless circumstances had left her, and so she meant to wage it to the bitter, growling end.
The trouble with her plan, as it turned out, was the dog.
Tattie had appeared at her door before dawn and scratched at the wood with one heavy paw, patient and relentless, until a sleepy-eyed maid had given up and let him in.
Now he lay across her feet like a felled tree, vast and shameless, and every time she tried to ignore him, he heaved a sigh so deep and so tragic that it might have been heard clearly in the next glen.
“Go away,” she told him, without conviction. “I am nae supposed to like anyone in this keep. Do ye nae understand that? It’s the entire shape of me situation. I am to be miserable here. It’s the only choice left that’s mine to make.”
Tattie rolled onto his back and presented the broad pale expanse of his belly to the ceiling, all four legs folded in the air like a dead beetle, and gazed at her upside down with such perfect, uncomplicated hope that her chest gave way.
She held out against him for a count of ten.
Then she gave up the whole campaign and sank her fingers into the warm fur of his chest, and the beast let out a sound of pure idiotic bliss.
Despite the dead, the edict, and the man somewhere down the corridor, the knot in her chest loosened by half a turn.
“All right,” she murmured. “All right, ye great daft article. But ye’ll be the only exception. The one and only. And ye cannae go tellin’ yer master, do ye hear me? Nae a word. That will be our secret till the grave.”
“A bit too late for that.”
She did not shriek. She would swear ever after, against any witness and under any oath, that she did not shriek. But she came up off the floor very fast and spun about, one hand at her throat.
And there he was, filling her doorway, one broad shoulder propped against the frame as he watched her court his hound with an expression that was not quite a smile and not quite anything safer than one.
“But then again,” he continued, “ye and I cannae very well have secrets, can we? We’re to be wed in less than a week.”
“Do ye nae knock?”
“I knocked. Twice, in point of fact.”
He pushed off the frame and took one step into the room, and the room, which had been a perfectly adequate size only a breath before, seemed all at once to lose half its air.
“Ye were too busy makin’ an alliance with me hound to hear it. Ye missed dinner. And breakfast. Me grandmaither’s convinced ye are ill and wants to send up a tonic. The maids think I’ve locked ye in the tower like a tale. One of them, I am reliably told, thinks I mean to eat ye.”
“And what do ye think, me Laird?”
“I think ye are punishin’ me the only way that’s left to ye,” he said. “And I think ye are hungry enough by now to gnaw the bedpost, and I think the two facts have been at war inside ye since the breakfast bell, and I think hunger’s very close to winnin’ the field.”
The galling part, the truly galling part, was that he was right.
“I daenae want yer pity,” she said.
“It isnae pity. It’s breakfast. There’s a difference between the two, though I grant ye it’s a hard one to make out on an empty stomach.
” He nodded toward the cold gray morning beyond the window.
“But before ye eat, lassie, there are a few matters we ought to set straight, ye and I. Plain words, while there’s nay one about to hear us perform for an audience. ”
She crossed her arms over her aching middle. Here it came. “Go on, then. Say yer piece.”
“We marry in six days. After that, ye’ll be Lady Cairn, with everything that comes with the name. Me protection, before all else. Me name on ye, which in these hills is a wall around a body. The respect of every soul under this roof, whether or nae they care for yer Blythe eyes.”
His voice was even, almost gentle, the voice of a man laying out terms he had thought through in the dark, and that was worse than if he had shouted them.
“In return, I will ask of ye only what the Council asks. Peace between us, before the world at least. And, in the fullness of time, an heir.”
There it was. The demand she had been waiting for.
“Let me set somethin’ straight,” Olivia said, and was glad to hear her voice come out steady and cold.
“Ye may have me name on a paper sealed by old men. Ye may have me sittin’ at yer table and smilin’ for yer people like a tame thing.
But ye will never, nae once, nae in this life, lay a hand on me.
Ye will get nay heir from me, me Laird. Find another woman to give ye one.
The Highlands are full of them, I am told. ”
Danger moved through his stillness, a current sliding under flat water. “I will need an heir eventually, lassie.”
“And I willnae be the one to give him to ye.”
He came another step closer, and she made herself hold her ground, which meant they were close enough now that she could see clearly the place where the scar caught at his lip, close enough to feel the heat radiating from the breadth of him like a banked fire on a cold hearth.
“Have a care,” he said, his voice low. “I’ve been kinder to ye than ye’ve the first notion of. I willnae be disrespected under me own roof, by me own wife, before me own people.”
“Kind!” The word came out like a drawn blade. “Ye’ve been kind to me? Truly? Should I thank ye for it, then, me Laird? Shall I sink down on me knees here on yer floor in gratitude for yer great kindness?”
He crossed his arms as he watched her.
“Or should I just wait, wait quietly and patiently like a good wee biddable bride, for the day ye grow yer beard back and become once again the madman I ken ye to be? The one I watched cut down me faither in his own yard. The one who killed me braither and rode out the broken gate whistlin’?”
She was breathing hard, and so was he. They stood close enough to share the same warm air.
It was full of all those months of her grief, but now it held something else as well, hot and unwelcome.
She could not for the life of her understand how fury and that nameless wanting could live so close together in one body without one of them killing the other.
For a long moment, he said nothing at all. His dark eyes moved over her face like a man reading a letter in a hand he half remembered and could not quite place.
Step back. Step back from him. Whatever this is, it is more dangerous than his anger ever was.
“Nay,” he said at last, very quietly. “Ye’re right. Ye shouldnae have to wait for it.”
He stepped back. The cold air came rushing in to fill the space where he had been.
“Ye can stay here until the weddin’,” he added. All the heat had gone out of him now, leaving his face flat and shuttered. “I will send a maid up to take yer measurements. Ye willnae have to suffer me at yer table, nor anywhere else ye can help it.”
He turned around. She thought he would simply go, and was appalled to find that some small traitorous part of her did not want him to.
But then, he paused, one hand on the doorframe, his broad back to her.
“Ye think ye ken what I am,” he said. “Ye watched the one terrible hour of me life and built a whole man out of it, and ye’ve been livin’ alongside that man in yer head ever since, feedin’ him.”
He glanced back over his shoulder, and for just one heartbeat, the tiredness on his face cracked clean across, and she glimpsed what lay under it. She had no name for it and was almost afraid to learn.
“There’s more to that day than ye ken, lassie. More about this keep and who lives in it and why. When ye are ready to hear it, ye ken well enough where to find me.”
Then he was gone, and the door slammed shut behind him, loud and final.
Olivia stood alone in the middle of the room, her heart pounding against her ribs like a creature trying to break free, furious and frightened at the same time, no longer sure which emotion ran deeper.
The dog whined and pressed his big head into her open hand.
“Daenae look at me like that,” she whispered into his warm fur. “I called him a monster to his face, and I meant it, and I’d say it again.”
She was almost certain that was a lie.