Chapter 16 #2
It was not because she doubted his abilities.
She had seen the remarkable, subtle skill he had brought to William’s suffering during the teething storm.
She hesitated because he was close enough that she could see the strong pulse pounding against the tanned skin of his neck.
The raw, intense heat of his flesh crossed the small gap between them, burning her skin just as it had in the dead of night in that narrow tavern bed.
Her lungs suddenly forgot how to breathe.
Slowly, she handed the child over to his care.
Their fingers collided and tangled during the brief transfer, her palms cradling William’s warm, heavy weight, while his massive hands slid beneath hers to claim the prize.
Neither of them completed the exchange. Edward’s thick, rough fingers fully closed over her smaller hands, stopping the movement altogether.
Chloe felt the roughness of his calluses, the scars from brutal swords, the thickened skin hardened by years of violence, and the cold mountain air still lingering on his knuckles.
She froze in place. Edward did not pull back.
They remained locked together, their hands forming a physical cradle beneath the orphan, while William slept peacefully between their chests, completely indifferent.
Then, with a low intake of breath, Edward slipped his hands free, taking the full weight of the child, and Chloe let her arms drop to her sides, her skin tingling from the loss of contact.
William settled against the broad expanse of Edward’s chest without a single flutter of his eyelids. It was an instantaneous surrender. The boy’s flushed face relaxed. One tiny, damp fist opened against Edward’s plaid.
“Ye strike absolute terror into the hearts of hardened Highland warriors,” Chloe murmured, the words slipping from her lips almost entirely to herself. “Yet infants surrender to yer hands without a single term of treaty.”
The moment the sentence left her mouth, she wished she could claw it back. It was too soft. Too terribly true.
Edward looked down at the crown of the boy’s head, his jaw tightening, but the rigid line of his broad shoulders shifted slightly. A deep, tiny release moved through his muscles. A yielding he would have forcefully suppressed if he had been aware of his own defenses.
Without a conscious thought, Chloe reached out.
The heavy tartan wool of his plaid had bunched up when he claimed the child, the rough fabric pressing at a sharp, uncomfortable angle against William’s soft cheek.
It would have left a red mark if the boy had been awake to protest. Chloe lifted her bare hand, her fingers gently smoothing the thick wool flat against his collarbone.
As her palm slid across the fabric, the sensitive backs of her knuckles accidentally grazed the hot, bare skin at the base of his throat.
Edward went completely rigid. Regret flooded her veins instantly.
It was not because she wished to pull her hand away.
It was because she desired, with a sudden, intoxicating violence, to leave it there.
That was the sin. The terrifying reality crashed over her all at once.
How close she was standing to his massive chest, how her hand lingered just an inch above the pulse point at his neck, how the intoxicating musk of his skin was filling her lungs with every breath she stole.
Slowly, she lifted her eyes to meet his.
He was already gazing down at her, his pale blue eyes burning with a dark, suffocating intensity.
The space between their faces was too small to survive.
Whatever boundaries she had planned to keep when she entered this nursery had turned to ash.
The air between their lips was heavy and hot, like a match hovering a millimeter above dry black powder.
“Edward.” His name came out low and unsteady, barely a sound at all. “If ye daenae step back right now…”
“Aye.” His voice was rough. Scraped raw. “I ken.”
He did not step back. His eyes dropped to her mouth and stayed there, his jaw tight with the effort of holding himself still. One of his hands came up slowly; it stopped just short of her face. His knuckles hovered a breath from her cheek.
William shifted between them and let out a small, imperious sound of protest.
The spell fractured.
Edward’s hand dropped. His eyes snapped away from hers. Something violent and painful moved across his hard features.
He gently thrust William back into her arms, both hands making sure her grip was firm before he released her. Then he took a large step back, and the cold flooded in.
“Me work demands me presence,” he growled, his voice flat and level.
He was already turning on his heel.
“Edward.”
The heavy timber door clicked shut behind him.
Chloe stood frozen in the pooling, amber twilight of the nursery, William’s warm weight pressed against her hammering ribs. She stared at the empty oak panels, her chest heaving as she finally forced air back into her lungs.
William stirred against her collarbone, letting out a small, indeterminate grunt of annoyance. Mechanically, her hips fell back into that slow, rhythmic sway.
She did not comprehend the man. She understood that he harbored monsters beneath his ribs that he refused to name.
She understood that he desired things his pride would never allow him to articulate; she understood that whatever fire burned beneath his icy exterior was massive, complicated, and rooted in a deep trauma that demanded absolute isolation. She understood much of his shadow.
But understanding a broken warrior and knowing how to heal him were two entirely separate damnations.
She lowered her chin, pressing her cheek gently against the velvet-soft down of William’s head.
Her mind drifted back to the suffocating blackness of that narrow tavern room by the harbor. She remembered how she had surrendered to sleep faster than she had since she was a child in her mother’s care.
She swayed in the amber light, the child breathing soft rhythms against her collarbone, while somewhere deep within the bowels of the stone fortress, Laird Edward O’Brien was sitting behind a broad oak desk, or pacing a freezing corridor, or staring out an arrow-slit window, desperately convincing his own soul that he possessed urgent clan business to attend to.
And Chloe stood in the warmth of the sanctuary he had built for a stray he had chosen to love, and quietly admitted to her own heart, without any ceremony, that she was no longer just praying he would return to their marriage bed tonight.
She was praying, with a terrifying new desperation, that he would finally choose to stay.