Chapter 22
The wind found them a mile before the crest of the final ridge. It came slicing through the throat of the glen, heavy with brine and cold water.
This was not the gentle breeze that had coaxed the wildflowers in the meadow yesterday. It pushed hard against the horses’ chests and snapped Edward’s cloak against his stirrups.
Beside him, Chloe rode with her chin tucked low against her collar, eyes narrowed against the grit. She had not spoken since they’d cleared the castle gates.
Then the horses cleared the rise, and the land dropped away.
The sea spread out below them, a vast sheet of slate-gray and iron-blue, stretching to a horizon so wide it made the sky look small. The waves did not lap at the shore so much as march at it, slamming into the black cliffs with a boom that carried up through the ground.
Chloe reined her mare to a sudden halt. Her hands went slack on the leather.
“Edward…” Barely a whisper, stolen instantly by the wind, but he saw the shape of it on her mouth.
Then she laughed, and before he could tighten his own grip on the reins, she was out of the saddle and down into the dune grass without waiting for him.
She ran.
Edward dismounted more slowly, throwing the reins over a low gorse branch, his eyes never leaving her. The wind went straight to work on her hair, tearing the pins loose until dark strands whipped across her cheeks. Her skirts snapped like sails around her legs. She did not slow down for any of it.
In the castle, she moved like a quiet presence through drafty corridors, still finding her fit in his life one careful step at a time. Here, with salt-spray on her skin and sand kicking up behind her boots, she looked like she belonged to the coast more than to any MacGregor stone.
She was part of the storm.
Chloe reached the hard-packed sand where the tide had retreated, her pace turning into a skip as she neared the foam. She did not hesitate. She gathered the heavy wool of her skirts in both hands, bunching the fabric up to her knees, exposing the pale, slender curve of her ankles to the bitter air.
“Chloe!” The name left his throat before he could stop it, swallowed almost instantly by the roar of the surf. “Step back from the shelf!”
She did not hear him, or perhaps she simply chose the water over his voice.
She dared the waves. She stepped directly into the retreating foam, her leather boots sinking into the cold, sloshy water.
A massive gray roller swelled twenty yards out, its crest turning white as it rushed toward the shore.
It slammed into the sand, sending a rush of icy, churning water directly over her feet, swirling around her ankles with vicious speed.
She shrieked. A high, breathless sound of pure shock and delight, and she tried to skip backward, her bare shins flashing white against the dark wool of her hitched skirts and the gray froth of the sea.
“It’s freezin’!” she called out to him, her voice cracking with a breathless, wild energy as she looked over her shoulder. “Edward, look at it! It doesnae end!”
Edward’s jaw tightened so hard a muscle twitched along his cheekbone. The sight of that bare skin. The raw, vulnerable warmth of her being exposed to the elements and the sea hit him below the ribs.
He smiled. He felt the cold, disciplined control he had spent fourteen years perfecting begin to turn slick and untrustworthy beneath his feet, like ice under a spring rain. He quickened his stride, his boots splashing through the shallow pools left by the tide.
“Chloe, the rocks are slick,” he warned, his voice low and tight as he reached the shoreline. “Hold yer ground.”
She turned to laugh back at him, her face flushed dark from the cold, her eyes brighter than he had ever seen. But as she stepped back, her heel caught on the slick, green surface of a kelp-covered rock hidden beneath the foam.
Her ankle rolled. Her balance vanished in an instant, her body tilting backward toward the deep, icy pull of the retreating tide.
“Edward!”
Edward closed the distance in two blind strides.
He caught her. His large hands wrapped around her waist, his fingers digging into the heavy wool of her cloak, stopping her fall just inches before she hit the wet stones. The momentum of her body pulled her straight back against his chest, her small shoulder blades slamming into his breastbone.
The contact hit him hard.
The air left his lungs in a sharp hiss. She was incredibly warm despite the howling wind, a radiating center of heat that burned right through the thick layers of his leather doublet and his plaid.
She felt light in his arms. She was real. She was not an entry in a ledger, she was not a political compromise, and she was not a shadow from his past. She was flesh and blood, breathing and hot against him.
For one fleeting, dangerous second, the world narrowed down to the pressure of his palms against her waist.
He forgot. He forgot the iron-clad promises he had carved into his own mind during the long hours in his study.
He forgot the rules of the grid. The necessity of keeping his distance, the absolute requirement to remain disciplined, and the quiet, terrible vow he had made to protect her from the cold, ruined thing that lived inside his own nature.
The fourteen years of stone and duty evaporated, leaving nothing but the salt on her skin and the heat of her body in his grip.
“I have ye,” he muttered against her hair, the words dark and rough, forced out by the sheer panic of nearly losing his hold on her. “I have ye. Quiet now.”
Against his chest, her bright laughter began to fray. It slowed, turning into a series of short, quiet breaths as she steadied herself against his bulk, her hands rising instinctively to clasp his forearms for balance.
“I slipped,” she whispered, her voice trembling slightly from the rush of adrenaline, her back pressed so firmly to his chest that he could feel every inhalation.
The wind clawed at the edges of his cloak, but inside the small space between them, her warmth remained. Her back still pressed against his chest, her hands rested where they had fallen on his forearms, her fingers clutching his leather sleeves as if the ground beneath her boots was still tilting.
She did not pull away. Edward did not loosen his grip. His palms stayed locked around her waist, the damp wool of her dress bunching beneath his fingers, holding her steady against the relentless drag of the sea tide.
When she spoke, her voice was tiny, stripped of its weight by the roar of the surf, yet it reached him with clarity.
“I used to think it would smell like iron,” she said softly.
He did not move. He kept his chin tucked low near her hair, where the scent of salt had tangled with the faint, sweet trace of the lavender soap she used in the keep. “The sea?”
“Aye.” A small, sharp breath rattled in her throat.
“When I was a girl, in the winters at the estate, the frost would get so thick inside the scullery that me knuckles would split open over the stone. I spent hours scrubbin’ those floors.
Me knees flat on the flagstones until they were numb, pushin’ the gray lye water back and forth. ”
She paused, her fingers tightening fractionally on his sleeves. “I used to close me eyes and imagine the sea. I had never seen a map of it. I only kent that it was vast, and cold, and that somewhere out past the hills, there must exist a place where life felt bigger than just survivin’ the day.”
Edward listened, his mind tracking the image with a slow, puzzling friction.
He had seen her only as she arrived, composed, clean, a lady with quiet manners who was learning how to handle a horse and settle a nursery. To think of her small hands raw from lye, her spine bent under the weight of someone else’s house, sent a strange, cold current straight down his back.
“I thought if I could just reach it,” she continued, her voice dropping into a register that made his chest ache, “if I could stand where the land ended, the world would stop feelin’ like a cage.
Me mother told me it was a foolish thing to dream of.
She told me the sea was only water, and water could drown a person just as easily as the mud. ”
“She was a practical woman,” Edward muttered, though the words felt flat, empty of the conviction they usually carried.
“She was a terrified woman,” Chloe corrected gently.
She removed her hands from his sleeves and slowly turned within his arms, her boots grinding into the wet sand until she faced him. She had to look up, her chin held high, her dark hair whipping across her brow in tangled ribbons.
“Me father told me himself, on the ride to the kirk. Wanted a male child. Threatened to kill me when I was born, and I was hidden away from me family. I was raised by our maid. I daenae regret it; she taught me a lot. Me mother spent most of her life probably regrettin’ her decisions to hide me away. It was a desperate sort of protection.”
The surf slammed into the basalt behind them, a sharp, concussive boom that seemed to punctuate her words. Her eyes remained fixed on his, clear and entirely devoid of the self-pity he detested in other people.
“And then she took the fever and died,” she said. “Confessed before she died. I was found like a stray calf. Traded into a marriage to settle me father’s debt.”
The story landed between them.
Edward felt a sudden, fierce surge of anger ignite deep beneath his ribs.
A raw, helpless heat that had nothing to do with the clan, or the winter grain, or the borders of the lands.
It was an old, feral wrath, a black iron spike driving upward into his throat.
He wanted to find the man who had made her hurt.
But beneath that anger, deeper still, was a mirror. The wounds she was describing had names he had spent fourteen years refusing to utter, names he had buried under three feet of solid limestone and the daily grind of duty.