Chapter 22
He had not intended to speak. He had gone to the nursery to tell her about the maids, to say that he had already heard about the cold shoulder they were giving her, and that he would see it stopped, that she only needed to come to him.
He had come to be useful, which was his only safe way of caring for her.
He had not meant to overhear his sister’s confession, nor his wife’s small broken question.
And now he stood in the room with the truth of it burning a hole clean through his chest, and his wife was on her feet with her red hair loose and her eyes bright and brave and frightened, and he knew, with a sick lurch, that he was about to do the hardest thing he had ever done in his life.
He was about to drive her away. To save them both.
She did not come to him. She stood her ground in the small room with her chin up, the way she faced down everything, and she asked it plainly.
“Do ye feel the same as yer clan does? About me. About me blood.” Her voice was steady, and the steadiness cost her. “I need the truth, Ragnall. Nae the kind word, but the truth. When ye look at me, am I yer wife? Or am I only a Blythe ye are makin’ the best of?”
Ragnall. His own name, in her mouth, simple and unadorned.
Not me Laird, not Cairn, not the murderer she had called him at the gate.
Just Ragnall, the way a wife said a husband’s name, the way no one had said it to him in years without wanting something from him.
It sank under his ribs, past every guard he had, and lodged there.
And there it was—the open door. He only had to walk through it. Just cross the three feet between them, take her face in his hands, and tell her what he had been lying awake with every night since the wedding.
That she had gotten completely under his guard in a way no one had managed in thirty years, and he did not know how to let her go back out.
That he wanted her beyond all reason and safety.
That the sight of her with the bairn and the dog in the morning light stirred something in his chest that he had no business feeling.
He thought of Kate.
He thought of his sister’s bones knitting crooked, of the half-year of silence, of the cost of one woman loving one man with her whole reckless heart and nothing kept back.
He thought of how love had been the very knife that gutted his family, over and over, the whole length of his life, and how he was the last one left standing, and how if he let himself care for this fierce ungovernable woman and it ruined her, ruined them, there would be no one left to carry up the pieces.
“Nay,” he said.
He watched the word land. He watched it sink in.
“I daenae feel the same as me clan,” he said, and his voice came out flat and cold and even, the Laird’s voice, the one that gave nothing away, and he hated himself with a completeness that astonished him.
“I harbor nay hatred for ye. I told ye that the first day, and it’s still true. But ye asked me for the truth, so here it is. I daenae want to feel anythin’ for ye, lassie. Nae the one way nor the other. I cannae afford it. I’ve watched what the feelin’ does in this castle.”
“What do ye mean?”
“I mean that I will keep ye safe, and I will keep ye honored, and I will keep me word to the last letter of it. But daenae ask me to want ye, Olivia. I willnae do that to either of us. I willnae be the death of one more soul. I…”
He stopped. He had said too much. The last word had very nearly got out of him.
“One more soul? What did ye mean to say?” Her eyes were blazing now, wet and furious. “Finish it. I’m the one who’s forever beggin’ folk for the truth, am I nae? So give it me. One more soul what, Ragnall?”
“It doesnae matter.”
“It’s the only thing that matters.” She crossed the room fast and stopped a handsbreadth from him, glaring up into his face, close enough that he could see her pulse going wild in her throat.
“Ye stand there tellin’ me ye feel nothin’, with yer hands shakin’ and yer jaw set like a man holdin’ a door shut against a flood.
Ye’re the worst liar I’ve ever seen, and I was raised by a grand one, so I’d ken.
” Her breath hitched. “Tell me ye feel nothin’ for me.
Say it again. Look at me and say it, and I will believe ye and never trouble ye with it again. ”
He opened his mouth to say it. But he could not.
It had cost him every coin he had to say it once, and now she was close enough that he could feel the heat of her, could smell the heather in her hair, and her mouth was right there, furious and trembling and asking, and thirty hard years of iron discipline simply went to water in his hands.
He kissed her.
There was no gentleness in it, none of the kirk’s soft restraint.
It was the wedding-night fire and worse.
It was two nights of lying rigid and aching a handsbreadth from her in the dark, which was nothing at all, which was no time at all, which had been quite long enough to undo the work of ten years.
It was the whole black weight of everything he would not say, poured into the one act he could not keep himself from.
His hands slid up into her hair, and she made a small wrecked sound against his mouth and gave it straight back to him, fierce and clumsy and furious, her fists curling into his shirt and yanking him down.
For one endless burning moment, there was no feud and no fear and no dead lying between them. There was only this. Only her.
He could have had her. He knew it. She was his wife, and she was kissing him as if she would die if he stopped, and he could have lifted her and carried her to a bed and ended the whole long torment of it.
Which was the very reason he tore himself away. He stepped back, breathing like a man hauled half-drowned from a river, and put the width of the room between them before he could change his mind.
“That,” he said raggedly, “was a mistake we shouldnae repeat. The blame’s mine.”
Olivia swayed where he’d left her, her lips swollen, her eyes wide. “Ragnall—”
“Ye were right.” He could not look at her.
He looked at the wall, the floor, the cold hearth, anywhere but at her stricken face.
“Ye said it yerself, that first week. We should stay apart while we serve out this edict. I was a fool nae to heed ye. I will have a chamber prepared for ye, a good one. Ye willnae have to share me bed nor suffer me company again. It’s better for both of us. It’s safer.”
“Safer,” she repeated. Her voice had gone very small.
“Aye.”
“And what I felt just now… What ye felt… That’s—”
“That’s a thing we’ll both forget,” he said, “if we’ve any sense left between us. Goodnight, Olivia.”
There. It’s done. She will hate ye now, and she will be safe in the hatin’. That’s the kindest thing ye’ll ever do for her, ye coward. Ye great lyin’ coward. Let go. Let go now, while one of ye still can.