Chapter 17
Melodie reached the chamber door, her fingers clenched tightly into the linen of her apron.
“Lady Angela is waitin’ in the corridor, me Lady,” Melodie said. Her voice dropped into the small, quiet space of the room. “She thought… That is, we both thought, that perhaps tonight ye might wish to come down to the great hall.”
Chloe set down the book she had not been reading. The leather binding was cold against her palms. “Why?”
“For supper.” Melodie’s hands moved briefly to her cap, smoothing a small stray thread that did not need smoothing. “With the clan.”
Chloe looked at the window. The Highland light had gone gray and flat, the rolling hills beyond the glass reduced to jagged dark shapes against a darker sky. She had been in this chamber since they had returned from the nursery, sitting perfectly still while the fire burned down to ash.
“Aye,” Chloe said, the word scraping low in her throat. “All right.”
Melodie’s relief was so visible it was almost comic; her shoulders dropped with a heavy, sudden breath.
Angela was indeed in the corridor, leaning her back flat against the rough stone wall.
Her arms were crossed tightly over her chest, and her chin was raised.
She examined Chloe once, her eyes sharp as they surveyed her wool gown, nodded in approval, and then stepped in line beside her.
Her boots clicked rhythmically against the floorboards.
“Ye look well,” Angela said, her skirts swishing with her long stride.
“Ye are a terrible liar.”
“I am an excellent liar. That was a genuine observation.” She glanced sideways, her dark eyes glittering in the torchlight. “Ye also look like someone who has spent six hours alone thinking too hard. Which I will note is a habit that runs in this family, though I intend to break it in both of ye.”
Chloe said nothing. She kept her jaw tight and her eyes fixed straight ahead. Angela did not appear to require her to speak.
They descended the main stone staircase together, with Melodie trailing a half-step behind, moving quietly and smoothly. The sound of the great hall reached them—a low, heavy murmur of deep voices, the clink of pewter, and the crackle of the huge fire burning in the central hearth.
Chloe straightened her spine. Her chin came up. She had spent ten years entering rooms full of people who outranked her and were perfectly aware of it. She knew how to hold her breath so her chest did not shake. She could manage this.
The heavy oak doors opened wide. The hall was not full, but it was full enough.
A long trestle table ran the full length of the room, heavy iron sconces holding sputtering tallow torches along the walls.
The fire at the far end threw a warm, thick amber light across the damp flagstones.
The air hit her nose first. It was heavy with roasted mutton, melted fat, and the sweet, sharp bite of peat smoke.
Perhaps thirty clan members were already seated. Heads turned instantly at the groan of the hinges. One by one, they settled back to their conversations, though Chloe felt the heavy weight of the attention that remained, those quieter, sideways glances.
Tyler was on his feet before she had taken three steps into the room.
“Lady O’Brien.” He bowed low, his green doublet catching the firelight. The flourish was precisely theatrical enough to be charming rather than foolish. “Ye honor us with yer company. We had begun to fear the Laird had hidden ye away in a tower.”
“Only one flight of stairs,” Chloe said, her voice steady enough to cut through the room’s damp heat. “Hardly qualifies.”
He grinned. He had the kind of broad face that grinned easily, which she suspected was both his greatest social asset and the exact reason Edward trusted him with everything that mattered in this glen.
He pulled out the heavy oak chair at the Laird’s right hand and gestured to it with a small, elegant bow.
She sat, the wood cold and unyielding through her wool skirts. Angela took the seat beside her. Melodie disappeared toward the far end of the hall.
Chloe looked at the head of the table.
Edward’s massive chair was empty. The silver goblet beside it sat untouched. The place setting was undisturbed, laid with the same meticulous care as all the others. She moved her eyes away from it deliberately, her pulse ticking in her throat, and reached for her own goblet.
“He attends when he can,” Tyler said, leaning forward slightly, his tone not quite casual. “Clan matters. This time of year, there’s always a dispute or boundary to resolve.”
“Of course,” Chloe said, her fingers wrapping tight around the cold pewter stem.
Mrs. Donnan was seated three chairs down on the opposite side, her posture as upright and rigid as if she were made of the same stone as the castle walls. Her dark eyes were already fixed on Chloe.
Chloe reached for the loaf of barley bread. She did not slice it; she broke it with two hands, her calloused thumbs sinking into the crust the way she had done at every kitchen table for twenty-five years, and set half of it neatly on the rim of her plate.
Something in Mrs. Donnan’s face shifted. A serving girl appeared at her elbow, her hands trembling as she lifted a heavy copper ladle of broth.
Chloe thanked her by name. “Thank ye, Jean.”
The girl startled slightly, a small gasp escaping her lips as she nearly spilled the liquid. Across the table, two of the older women exchanged a sharp, significant glance. Chloe kept her face pleasant, her features smooth, and reached for her spoon.
The broth was good, thick with barley and something deeply smoky underneath. Chloe ate steadily and listened to the conversations around her without inserting herself.
She was learning what she could, mapping the room by its sounds—who deferred to whom, which of the older men spoke with easy authority, and which ones measured every single word. She noticed where the laughter came easily and where it had to be earned.
Ten years in reading rooms had taught her to find the shape of a household quickly. This one was tightly knit, guarded with outsiders, and fiercely loyal to something she had not yet fully identified.
Edward’s empty chair pulled at the edge of her attention. She looked at the empty wood once more, her throat tightening, then forced her gaze away.
Maybe he regrets the intimacy of the other night.
Soon, the main dishes arrived. Tyler refilled her goblet without being asked, his eyes never quite leaving the doors.
“Ye’re nae eatin’,” she said.
“I ate at noon.” He did not sit. “Ye always learn the kitchen girls’ names on yer first try?”
“Only the ones brave enough to answer me.” That earned half a smile, though his gaze had already gone back to scanning the hall. “Jean’s all right. Skittish, but all right.”
“And ye’re nae eating because?”
“Because someone ought to be watching that door instead of the broth.” He said it easily enough, but he had not so much as glanced at his own plate.
Then the great hall doors slammed back against the stone.
The change in the room was immediate. A sudden straightening of spines, a dead settling of voices. She set down her spoon, her heart striking against her ribs, and looked toward the doors.
Edward came through them, a second man walking close at his side.
The stranger was perhaps Edward’s age, exceptionally broad through the shoulder, and easy in the way he carried his heavy frame.
His dark hair was pushed back carelessly.
He was talking rapidly as they walked, gesturing with one large hand to emphasize a point, and Edward was listening with his head slightly inclined.
Edward’s eyes found her the exact moment he crossed the threshold.
It was so fast it almost did not happen.
A single, icy flick of pale blue light shot across the smoky length of the room to where she sat at his table, right in his chair’s shadow, and then it was gone.
His expression had not changed in the slightest. He was still listening to his companion, his stride remained unbroken, his scarred jaw set in its familiar hard line.
She reached for her goblet to keep her shaking hands busy.
They reached the head of the table. Edward pulled out his chair, his tall frame blocking the hearth fire, and looked down at her. His voice, when it came, was an even, composed stone. It carried no trace of the nursery.
“Lady O’Brien.”
“Me Laird,” she said, her own voice matching his, equally level and cold.
“This is Laird Angus O’Calloran.” He gestured briefly to the man beside him with a sharp nod of his chin. “A neighbor of ours.”
Angus O’Calloran bowed deeply. “Lady O’Brien.
I have heard very little about ye, which, from what Edward tells me, is everythin’ I need to ken.
” His dark eyes moved to Angela with the same easy, teasing warmth.
“Lady Angela. Ye have grown wiser since I last had the misfortune of losin’ an argument to ye. ”
Angela’s face opened into a genuine, unforced smile. “Laird O’Calloran. Ye have grown nay better at losin’ them.”
Angus laughed, a loud, chesty roar without self-consciousness that made the pewter plates rattle. Several people at the table smiled reflexively. Even Mrs. Donnan permitted her mouth a brief, rare softening around the eyes.
Chloe watched Edward watch his friend, and felt something tight and sharp catch somewhere behind her ribs.
He was different. That was the only word for it, and it was completely insufficient. His massive shoulders had dropped a fraction, barely perceptible to the room, but she saw the subtle difference between a man braced behind a shield and a man at rest.
The line of his jaw was still set, still hard, but the defensive steel in the quality of the hardness had changed.
He was not holding himself against a blow.
He was simply standing. And when Angus turned to him and muttered something in a low voice that she could not catch, the corner of Edward’s mouth moved into a smile.
She had not known, until this moment, that he had a face for the people he trusted and loved. She had known he was capable of patience. She had seen it in the nursery, in the stables, in the careful, protective way he held William. But patience was effort; it took work.
This was something else.
Angus settled into a heavy chair that Tyler had found somewhere and started telling a story with both hands, his fingers cutting the air, about a hunt that had gone terribly wrong near Laird Hendry’s lands the previous autumn.
Edward reached for the clay jug, pouring himself a dark stream of whisky from the head of the table. Angus stopped mid-sentence, lifted the cup, tasted the liquor, and set it down with an expression of exaggerated reverence.
“Ye impossible bastard,” Angus said, scowling with mock terror. “How long was this one?”
“Four years.”
“I have a barrel at three.” A heavy pause. “Ye are a deeply unpleasant person to compete with.”
“Aye,” Edward said.
Angus set his cup down and stretched his arms above his head. “I ride to Hendry’s lands at first light,” he said. “A hunt, three days, maybe four. Cailean is already there.” He looked at Edward. “Come. Hendry will sulk if ye daenae and ye ken how he gets.”
“Nae this time,” Edward said. “I’ve duties here.”
His gaze moved as he said it. Barely. A single fractional shift across the table to where Chloe sat, so fast it would have been invisible to anyone not already watching him. She had been watching him.
She looked down at her plate.
Angus caught none of it. Or pretended to catch none of it. He laughed instead, leaning back in his chair.
“Duties,” he said. “Aye, well. I will stay the night then. Long enough to finish that whisky.”
“Ye’ll finish nothin’.” Edward refilled his cup anyway. “Angus’s own brew tastes like bog water and regret,” he added, to no one in particular.
“It tastes like character,” Angus said with great dignity. “Somethin’ yer palette is too refined to appreciate.”
“It tastes like the bog Hendry went into.”
The laugh that went around the table was immediate and loud. Angus pointed a finger at Edward across the table.
Chloe had not moved. She was unsure if she had even breathed. She had seen him patient. She had seen him guarded, deliberate, and in one unguarded moment in a small tavern room, impossibly warm. She had cataloged every version of him.
She had not seen this.
This man, who sat with his shoulders an inch lower than usual and his jaw unclenched.
This man, who laughed without deciding to, whose eyes stayed bright long after the sound had gone.
This man, who had friends, who belonged to people, who belonged to her in a way she had not known to look for, because nothing in the fortnight before tonight had suggested it was possible.
He had not looked at her once. Through the story and the laughter and the whisky argument and Angela’s easy teasing, through all of it, his eyes had not found hers a single time.
She had told herself it did not matter. She had told herself a great many things since arriving at Castle O’Brien and had believed fewer of them each day.
Then Angus rose, and Tyler appeared at his shoulder, and the evening started to fade away. Edward stood up. He said something brief to the men nearby, and they nodded before dispersing. He then turned toward the door to see his guest out.
He looked at her, his gaze intense but fleeting, lasting no more than a breath.
He saw Angus to the door, and she thought that was the last of him for the night. But he stopped on the threshold and turned back, his eyes finding hers down the length of the table.
“A word, Lady O’Brien.”
She did not wait to be asked twice. She set down her spoon and rose before Mrs. Donnan could remark on it, crossing the length of the hall with her chin up, aware of every eye that followed her.
“Ye gave me a look,” he said, once she’d reached him. “When Angus spoke of the hunt. What was it?”
He had seen, though she would have sworn he had not looked her way all night.
“Ye could have gone,” she said. “Three days. Yer friend wanted ye there.”
“Aye.”
“Then why did ye stay?”
“I have duties here.” The same words he’d given Angus.
“That’s what ye told him. It isnae what I asked.”
For a moment, she thought he would not answer at all. His eyes moved over her face, unhurried, like he was deciding something and taking his time about it.
“Ye ken why,” he said.
Then he was through the door, and this time she was not the one left wanting.