Chapter 6
The guilt arrived immediately. This girl had done nothing wrong. She had simply woken to find her new lady already halfway down the corridor with no intention of waiting.
“I didnae think of that,” Chloe said. “I do apologize.”
Melodie looked up quickly, surprise written across her face.
“Ye daenae need to,” she stated quietly.
“I do,” Chloe affirmed. “It was thoughtless of me. I am nae accustomed to…” She stopped. It was not the right moment to explain what she was and was not accustomed to. “I will ring for ye in the mornin’. From now on.”
Melodie nodded, her relief visible enough that she did not bother to hide it. She straightened her cap with one quick, self-conscious movement, then gestured down the corridor.
“The kitchens are this way, me Lady,” she said. “I will show ye. Cook will have made breakfast.”
The shift from maid to mistress felt like a heavy cloak that Chloe had not yet learned to wear. Although she wanted to find her own way, her new maid, Melodie, was insistent and left her with little choice.
Reluctantly, Chloe let the girl lead her through the drafty stone hallways toward the heart of the castle. When they reached the kitchens, the air was thick with the smell of roasted grain and woodsmoke, a familiar comfort that made Chloe’s chest tighten with sudden longing for Jenny’s house.
Melodie pulled out a chair at the small table near the fire, the kind the housekeeper used when she was reviewing orders, set apart from the work but still within the warmth of it.
“Sit, me Lady,” she said. “I will bring ye somethin’.”
Chloe sat. She watched Melodie move with a frantic, nervous energy, her hands trembling as she prepared a tray.
In her haste to serve the new Lady O’Brien, the girl’s foot caught on an uneven flagstone.
She stumbled, and a bowl of warm porridge tipped, spilling across the fine wool of Chloe’s skirts.
“Oh, mercy! Me Lady, I beg yer forgiveness!” Melodie cried out, her face draining of color as she began to apologize profusely, her voice shaking with the expectation of a blow or a sharp reprimand.
Chloe reacted with the practiced ease of one who had spent years cleaning up similar messes.
“Whisht, lass, ‘tis only a bit of grain,” Chloe said softly, already kneeling to help gather the spilled mess. She caught Melodie’s hands to steady them, her touch warm and grounding. “Daenae fash yerself. I’ve spilled worse than this a thousand times over.”
Melodie went still, staring down at their joined hands as though she expected them to vanish, or turn out to be some kind of trick.
“Ye’re… ye’re nae angry?” Melodie whispered.
“I’ve nae room in me heart for anger over a tumbled bowl,” Chloe replied with a small, reassuring smile.
The tender moment was interrupted by a lively, curious voice from the hearth. They turned to see a maid with a bright spark in her eyes watching the exchange with fascination.
“Isla.” Melodie’s voice carried a warning.
“Me Lady.” Isla curtsied, setting her basket on the counter, and looked at the spreading stain on Chloe’s skirt. “That’ll set if ye daenae get to it.”
“I ken,” Melodie said tightly. “I am handlin’ it.”
“Have ye got vinegar?” Chloe asked.
Both of them looked at her.
“Vinegar,” Chloe said again. “White if ye have it.”
Isla was already moving. She pulled a small jug from the shelf above the salting table and held it out. Chloe took it, poured a small measure onto the cloth, and worked it into the stain in firm, circular strokes from the outside in.
The warmth of the hearth and the thick scent of baking bread provided a shield against the rest of the castle. As Chloe worked at the porridge stain on her skirt, she felt the eyes of the other two women on her.
“Ye’ve the hands of someone who kens the weight of a scrub brush, me Lady,” Isla remarked, her curiosity finally winning out over her caution.
Chloe gave a small, rueful laugh as she wrung out the damp cloth. “I’ve spent more years with me sleeves rolled up than I have in silken gowns. There is nothin’ shameful in honest work.”
Melodie, still appearing a bit startled and cowed by Chloe’s lack of anger, watched her mistress with wide eyes. “We’ve never had one, but the stories we hear of noble ladies… They say they’re as distant as the mountain peaks and twice as cold.”
“I am nae mountain peak, Melodie,” Chloe said, reaching out to pat the girl’s arm to settle her nerves. “And I’d much rather a warm kitchen than a silent hall where every breath feels like a sin.”
Isla leaned in closer, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Then ye’ll want to watch for Mrs. Donnan. She’s got eyes like a hawk and a heart like a frozen loch until ye prove ye can keep a tidy hearth.”
“Oh, she will have nothin’ to fret about there,” Chloe responded, thinking of years of training from her mother on how to keep a neat fire. “I fear the Laird thinks I am more servant than bride.”
“The Laird kens little of what it takes to keep a house,” Isla said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “He’s spent his life among the barrels or with a blade in his hand. He’s a lonely soul, for all his coldness.”
“Lonely?” Chloe paused, the word striking a chord within her.
“Feared by most, respected by all, but ken by none,” Isla added, her talkative nature revealing the clan’s true perception of Edward.
Melodie finally smiled, a small and fragile thing. “Well, he’s never brought a lady home before. Perhaps he just doesnae ken how to behave around one... and ye bein’ so gentle, too.”
Chloe looked between the two girls, feeling a sudden, sharp sense of belonging. “Then it seems the three of us have much to learn together.”
Isla glanced at Melodie, and Melodie looked back at Isla.
“Where did ye learn such tricks as removin’ stains from clothes?”
“Me mother taught me,” Chloe said, and folded the cloth neatly across her knee. She said it simply, but her mind was whirling with many thoughts about her birth mother and the woman who told her she was her daughter.
A small silence settled over the three of them, easy and unforced.
Isla pulled a stool from beneath the counter and sat on it without being invited. “She sounds like she was useful, yer mother.”
“She was,” Chloe said. “She was very useful.” She smoothed the damp cloth across her knee and did not look up.
There were things her mother had taught her that she had never thought to question.
Small, practical things like stretching a meal, lifting a stain, and making a cold room feel less cold.
She had assumed all of it was ordinary knowledge for a maid.
She gave me everythin’ she had, and kept only the one thing that would have changed everythin’.
Chloe folded the cloth once, set it aside, and raised her head. “She kent how to manage with whatever she had.”
Isla nodded, turning the apple in her hands. “The best ones always do.”
The fire shifted in the grate. Outside the kitchen window, the morning had become fully bright, and the sounds of the yard carried through: horses, voices, and the usual work of a castle that had not stopped for anyone’s arrival.
Chloe sat still for a moment. Her mind went to the man who had stood in the kirk last night and received her like a line item in a contract.
“I have a feelin’ ye will like the Laird’s sister,” Isla said. “Angela.”
A sister.
She had not expected another relative to be living here. She wondered if she would resemble the cold laird.
Melodie’s expression softened at that. “Lady Angela, aye. She has been here since the winter before last. She came when there was sickness movin’ through the outer reaches.” A pause, then in a lowered tone. “She is the only one who talks to him the way a person talks to another person.”
“Instead of the way a person talks to a storm,” Isla added pleasantly.
Melodie shot her a look.
“What?” Isla said. “It is true. Ye said as much yerself last Thursday.”
“I said he was difficult. There is a difference.”
“There is nay that much of a difference.”
Chloe watched the two of them and felt the comfort of being in a room where people were entirely themselves.
She reached for the porridge that had been sitting untouched since Melodie set it down and picked up the spoon.
“Tell me about the castle, and how the Laird likes it to be run,” she said.
And Isla needed no further invitation.
But before she could answer, the heavy tread of boots echoed in the corridor, and the three women moved apart, the warmth of the kitchen swallowed by a sudden, practiced quiet.
The iron latch felt cold against Edward’s palm as he pushed into the chamber, his mind still half-buried in the boundary disputes detailed in the survey he’d left behind. He expected the heavy silence of a woman sleeping, or at least the stiff, fearful quiet she had surveyed him with last night.
What he found stopped him dead.
The room was filled with the rhythmic clack-scrape of flint. His bride was on her knees before the hearth, her back arched, her auburn-red curls spilling over her shoulders in a wild, unpinned mess.
He stood hidden in the shadows, struck by the sight of her bare, soot-streaked arms. The bell cord hung just within reach, a golden, silky thread meant for a lady’s touch. His eyes flicked from the cord to her and back again, before finally settling on her.
A spark finally bit. He watched her lean in, her mouth curving to blow a low, steady breath into the tinder. The kindling took. She set the next log with both hands, balancing it for the best draft.
How could she possibly ken to do this?
The question sat like a stone in his gullet.
She shifted to reach the basket, her eyes catching his silhouette.
She was on her feet in a heartbeat, the log hitting the grate with a heavy crack. Her hands dropped to her sides, palms gray with ash, her breath coming in quick, shallow hitches.
“I apologize, me Laird,” Chloe said, her voice a frantic whisper. She glanced down at her filthy hands, then back to his face. “I didnae hear ye come in.”
Edward stepped into the room, the heavy thud of the door closing behind him echoing like a sentence. He did not move toward the table. He moved toward her.
“Does Lady O’Brien intend to handle the domestic chores of the household herself?” he asked, his voice a dry, low rumble.
He saw the apology die in her throat, instantly replaced by a spark of defiance. She looked him straight in the eyes.
“The fire had gone out,” she gestured toward the hearth.
“There is a bell.”
“I ken there is a bell.”
She knew, and she had chosen the labor instead. She stood there, ash-stained and disheveled, looking less like a lady and more like the maid of a great house.
“I have never seen a noble lady build her own fire. It is almost as if ye were nae one,” he remarked dryly, watching the way the firelight caught the silver scars on his own hands.
The hit landed. He watched her jaw tighten, her spine snapping straight as she faced him.
“There is nothin’ shameful in it,” she said, her voice dropping into a steady, resonant tone. “It is honest work. More honest than pretendin’ to be something I am nae.”
The air in the room suddenly felt too thick, too hot.
Edward crossed the space between them, deliberately keeping his stride slow and predatory.
He stopped so close he could catch the lingering smell of rosemary in her hair and the sharp scent of woodsmoke clinging to her skin.
She had to tilt her chin to keep his gaze, her eyes wide and dark, reflecting the flames she’d just built. She did not step back.
“Ye’ll learn to behave as Lady O’Brien,” he murmured, his voice dropping an octave as he crowded her space. “What is expected of ye in this house is for me to decide, nae for ye to handle yerself as one of the maids.”
“Ye daenae get to decide who I am,” she countered, her voice trembling but refusing to break. “That is nae in any contract.”
A silence followed, where he was trying to decide how to handle this lass her father had assured him would be as quiet and docile as a mouse.
Without conscious thought, he raised a hand toward her face.
The flinch came from her small frame, but it was clear in the way she locked her shoulders and braced for a blow. It stung his pride that she expected violence from him, but he did not pull away.
His hand reached her face as he had intended, but his fingers rested gently against her jaw. He brushed his thumb across her cheek, wiping away the smudge of ash.
The contact was a jolt. Her skin was startlingly soft beneath the grit.
Chloe went very still. “Are ye always this free with yer hands, or is it a special occasion?”
He did not move his thumb. “Ye had ash on yer face.”
“I am aware of that.”
“It was distractin’.”
“From what, exactly?”
He had no answer for that. Not one he intended to give her. He let his fingers linger a moment longer than was necessary, his thumb resting just at the corner of her lips, and watched her try to decide whether to hold her ground or step back.
“Ye argue a great deal for someone who has been here less than a day,” he said.
“And ye give orders a great deal for someone who hasnae earned the right to give them.” She tilted her chin up. “We are well matched in that regard at least.”
From this close, he could see the sunlit freckles on her nose and the fierce, wild intelligence in her eyes. The part of him that usually felt only rage or duty became subdued, and he felt a sudden, starving pull toward the warmth she gave off.
What is this? I have to get out of here.
He needed to be anywhere but this quiet, firelit room with a woman who looked at him as if he were a man and not a monster.
But before he could move, the thud of the door opening shattered the silence. Melodie stumbled in, an armful of logs clutched to her chest. She stopped so abruptly that two logs rolled off and thundered against the stone.
The maid looked at the logs, then at Chloe’s ash-stained face, then at Edward’s hand still hovering near his wife’s throat. Her face went white.
“I will just…” the girl started, her voice a squeak.
“Leave them,” Edward barked, the sound rough and jagged in the small room.
He snatched the survey from the table without looking at the ink. He walked out, his boots striking the stone with unnecessary force, his thumb still tingling where it had touched her skin.