Chapter 15 #2
He personally brought the tray up. She had not expected that service either; she had assumed a tavern maid would be sent to tend to her. He carried the wooden bowl and placed it on the small three-legged table beside her armchair.
“Mind the steam,” he grunted before sinking his massive frame into the room’s only other chair across the hearth. He crossed his boots and stared fixedly into the dying coals.
She picked up the pewter spoon and ate slowly, the thick broth rich with pearl barley, roasted roots, and a deep, smoky flavor that warmed her blood. The heat spread through her limbs, making her realize just how thoroughly the damp coastal chill had seeped into her bones without her permission.
The silence stretching between them across the small hearth was not comfortable, precisely. But the violence had left it.
“William,” Chloe spoke up softly, the name a gentle bridge across the quiet. “Was the bairn born here? Within the coastal village?”
Edward did not move a muscle for a long time. She watched his profile in the firelight, tracing the hard, clean line of his jaw and the shadow of his thick lashes.
“He was found,” Edward muttered, his voice raspy.
She paused, keeping her spoon still. “Found?”
“Left at the iron gates of the fortress,” he said, reaching for his pewter cup and rotating it slowly between his fingers. “Eight weeks old. Wrapped in a soiled rag. Nay note. Nay name.”
Chloe absorbed the image, a cold ache opening in her belly. “And ye took the orphan into yer own nursery.”
“There was nay one else to claim him.”
“There is always someone else, Edward. In a clan of hundreds, a laird can easily find a tenant willin’ to raise a stray.” She held his gaze across the hearth. “Ye chose to claim him as an O’Brien. Ye chose the burden.”
He said nothing. She looked at his face and recognized the aggressive stillness that took over his features whenever something touched his soul.
She did not push further. She lowered her eyes to the bowl and ate.
He stared into the coals.
She believes he is a foundlin’.
The words sat in his chest like a stone. He had not corrected her, and he had known, in the moment the lie of omission settled between them, that he would not.
Nae yet. Nae tonight.
She had looked at him across this hearth with those steady brown eyes, and he had wanted, with a ferocity that alarmed him, to keep the look on her face exactly as it was.
The truth about William's parentage was a wound he had not yet decided how to show to another person.
That his brother — reckless, distant, near a stranger by the time either of them was grown men — was no longer here.
That their father had sent Rory away as a boy so Edward would harden into something useful, and the two of them had spent the years since paying for that decision in different currencies.
That Rory's wife, shattered by grief, had wrapped the boy in whatever cloth was nearby and had taken him to the fortress gates in the dark rather than see him grow into the face of a dead man.
That Edward had stood in the cold that morning holding a crying eight-week-old and realized, with a clarity unrelated to duty, that he was not going to give the child to a tenant, and that the closest he would ever come to knowing his own brother again was in the shape of that boy's face.
It was not guilt over anything he had done. It was the harder thing — knowing there had been time, once, to mend what their father broke between them, and that he'd let the years pass instead.
Chloe was not ready for that story yet. He was not ready to give it.
When she was, he would tell her. He was beginning to understand, with considerable discomfort, that there would be a when.
“Ye performed a noble deed,” she said softly.
He snapped his eyes to hers. The armor slipped for a fraction of a second, something unplanned softening the hard lines around his mouth.
“The lad required a protector,” he said.
“Aye.” She lowered her gaze to her bowl, her voice quieter. “So did I, once. It matters more than ye ken. A man decidin’ ye are worth the labor. Even when yer existence brings nothin’ but trouble.”
He held her gaze across the hearth, something burning in his chest that he had no intention of naming.
“Eat yer supper,” he growled, tearing his eyes away. “Before the grease turns cold.”
Chloe swallowed her broth in silence.
The bed was dangerously small.
Edward took the side nearest the damp stone wall without a word of discussion.
Chloe was already tucked beneath the heavy wool blankets, her splinted ankle propped on a bolster, her hands resting tightly in her lap.
She shifted toward the outer edge to grant him whatever inches she could spare.
Edward sat on the edge of the frame, kicked off his heavy boots, and blew out the tallow candle, plunging them into absolute darkness.
They lay rigid in the blackness.
Through the thick stone wall, the roar of the sea was a constant rhythmic drag and surge, quieter now that the midnight tide had turned, accompanied by the muffled thud of fiddle music and laughter from the taproom below.
A long moment passed.
“Ye’re nae asleep,” he said into the dark.
“Nay.”
Another silence. The fiddle played on below them.
“Does it trouble ye?” His voice was rough, careful. “Sharin’ a bed with me?”
She did not answer immediately. She stared at the invisible rafters, felt the heat of him across the narrow gap between their bodies, and thought about lying.
“It troubles me,” she said at last, “that it doesnae.”
The silence that followed was absolute.
She noticed his breathing changed, a small, almost unnoticed shift. He stayed silent. But the darkness between them now felt different, heavy with the weight of what she had just given him and could not take back.
She closed her eyes.
Edward’s breathing was slow and perfectly even. But she knew he was not sleeping; his muscles were too tight, the air between them too charged.
She was hyper-aware of his massive frame; she did not need to look at him to map his precise coordinates.
The mattress was so narrow that the distance separating their bodies was less than the width of her palm.
The radiant, brutal heat of his flesh crossed that tiny vacuum without an ounce of difficulty, scorching her side.
She forced her eyes open in the dark, staring at the invisible rafters, thinking of the wild shore. She wondered what the open ocean would look like in the brilliant light of dawn.
She thought of his rough vow.
‘Ye are more important.’
She was stuck in the maze of those four words when Edward let out a quick, low exhale through his teeth. Suddenly, his large arm swung across the mattress.
Chloe’s breath locked in her throat, and she went entirely stone-still.
Edward wrapped his heavy forearm around her waist and pulled her backward against his chest. He pressed her close to his warmth, securing her spine against the curve of his broad torso, then locked his arm around her ribs and went completely silent.
Chloe lay trapped in his iron embrace. She did not move a muscle, nor did she breathe for three solid heartbeats, terrified that any movement might break the spell and cause him to retreat back to his cold wall.
His heart was a strong, sluggish thump against her left shoulder blade. His forearm was a heavy, warm mass of muscle holding her tightly to him.
Outside, the great northern sea continued its eternal, primal pull and crash against the rocks, and gradually, without her intentionally deciding to surrender, Chloe let her shoulders relax. She drew his scent into her lungs.
She was asleep before she could even catalog the victory.