Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Rose had read the letter six times by the time the door opened.
She had paced the length of Logan’s study until she knew every board that creaked beneath her slippers. The rain had softened outside, no longer striking the glass with force, but sliding down in slow, silver threads that made the world beyond the window look distant and blurred.
Her mother’s words waited in her hands.
Every time she looked down at them, her throat tightened all over again. Home seemed suddenly close enough to touch and impossibly far away. Her father’s study. Her mother’s hands. Marion’s quick laugh. Giselle’s solemn little frown whenever she tried too hard not to cry.
Rose pressed the letter carefully against her chest, then lowered it again, smoothing one thumb over the fold.
What were they saying?
If the Council refused, she did not know what she would do.
The door opened.
Rose turned so quickly that the skirt of her gown whispered sharply around her ankles.
Logan stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
For a moment, he said nothing. He only looked at her, and the study seemed to draw itself around him, the firelight catching the rugged line of his face, the damp darkness of his hair, the firm set of his mouth.
He looked as hard and composed as he always did when the weight of others had settled on his shoulders.
But his eyes found hers, and immediately softened.
Rose’s fingers tightened around the letter. She could not make herself ask. The words sat beneath her tongue, too fragile, too desperate to release.
Logan crossed the room slowly.
“We’ll go,” he said.
The breath left her in a broken, soundless rush.
She stared at him. For a heartbeat, she did not trust herself to understand him correctly. Her fingers loosened around the letter and tightened again, the parchment crinkling softly beneath her touch.
“Truly?” she whispered.
“Aye.” He stopped before her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him. “But we go carefully. Conn will ride wi’ us. Armed men too. Scouts will go ahead before we leave, and I’ll patrol the road meself where I can before we bring ye anywhere near that inn.”
“You are coming yourself?” The question slipped out before she could soften it. Her gaze moved over his face, catching on the fatigue beneath his eyes, the tension at the corner of his jaw. “Logan, you need not?—”
“I need,” he said quietly, “tae ken the road is safe fer ye. That this is nae a trap.”
The words settled into her chest with such force that she almost looked away.
She should have argued. A proper woman would perhaps have thanked him and accepted the protection without letting it move so visibly through her. But Rose stood there with her mother’s letter in her hand and Logan’s vow in her ears, and she knew she could not manage distance.
“Thank you,” she said, though the words felt far too small for the ache behind them.
His face softened.
It did not happen all at once. Logan was not a man who surrendered expression easily. It began with the faint easing of his brow, then the quiet shift of his mouth, then the way his eyes lowered to the letter in her hands before returning to her face with such tenderness that her throat closed.
He reached for her hand. Rose let him take it.
His thumb brushed once over her knuckles, slow and rough and warm. She looked down at their joined hands and felt her heart expand with a quietness that was almost worse than sobbing.
“I was afraid you would say no,” she admitted.
His fingers tightened around hers. “I thought about it.”
She lifted her eyes.
“I know,” she said softly.
Pain flickered across his face, quick and raw before he buried it. “Nae because I want tae keep ye from them.”
“I know that too.”
His throat worked. For a moment, the hard line of his mouth faltered, and his hand tightened around hers.
Rose stepped closer.
Their joined hands rested between them, caught against the soft wool of her gown. The study was quiet around them, filled only with the faint hiss of rain, the crackle of the fire, and her own heartbeat, which seemed suddenly too loud.
“I trust you,” she whispered. For deep down, she knew this could be dangerous.
Logan’s eyes darkened.
He drew in a slow breath, and she saw the effort it cost him not to pull her into him at once. His other hand lifted, stopped near her cheek, then lowered again.
“Aye,” he murmured. “And that is why I’ll be careful.”
For a moment, they only stood there, hands linked, neither looking away. His thumb rested against the inside of her wrist, right where her pulse beat too quickly, and after a while the pressure of it changed from reassurance into something quieter that made her breath loosen without her permission.
Rose felt herself lean toward him by the smallest degree.
Then Logan’s mouth curved faintly. “We have a game tae play.”