Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
The pacing started sometime after midnight, when Elspeth had given up any pretense of reading and was holding the book open in her lap, staring at the same page she’d been staring at for the better part of an hour.
It came through the wall in slow, even strides. Floor to wall, floor to wall, the particular rhythm of a man working something out with his feet because his head hadn’t managed it sitting still.
She sat up.
“Magnus Wallace, will ye stop pacing already?” she muttered to the wall, as though it might carry the words through to him.
The book slid from her lap, forgotten.
She sat there in the dark, listening. Six strides, a pause, six strides back, over and over, long enough that she began counting without meaning to, long enough that she started composing, and discarding, three separate things she might say to him if he ever stopped doing it and came to a door instead.
Eventually, a door did open somewhere down the corridor, and closed again. Silence followed.
She lay back down, told herself sternly that she had no intention of lying awake, waiting for the outcome of another man’s restlessness, and was still awake fifteen minutes later when the footsteps returned. They were closer this time, unmistakably closer, and stopped directly outside her door.
She sat up so fast that the blanket slid clean off the bed.
Three knocks. Not hesitant ones.
She was across the room and had a shawl half around her shoulders before she knew it, tying it one-handed as she crossed the cold floor and pulled the door open to find Magnus standing in the corridor.
“I owe ye an apology,” he said.
“For which part?” she asked, because she remembered asking him the very same thing the night before and getting nothing useful in return, and found she wasn’t inclined to make this easier for him twice in a row.
“For…” He stopped, his jaw working. “Ye ken.”
Her cheeks warmed despite herself, and she was briefly grateful for the dim light of a single sconce rather than full daylight to give her away.
“And,” Magnus continued, before she could decide whether to press him further, “for the manner in which I have behaved toward ye since. Ye asked for outings. Ye asked to be given a choice, rather than told what to do with yer days.”
His hands were loose at his sides, and she watched him deliberately keep them there rather than cross his arms, which she was coming to understand was the closest thing he had to standing exposed.
“I gave ye instructions instead. That was wrong of me.”
“It was,” she agreed, because there was little point in denying it.
“If ye still wish it, we could go out on another outing.”
She studied him for a moment, waiting for the qualification—the “when the harvest’s in” or “once the fire’s dealt with”—that would turn the offer back into another instruction wearing a kinder face.
“An actual outing,” she said. “Nae an inspection ride where ye lecture me on drainage the entire way.”
“An actual outing.” Something at the corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, but close enough to one. “As close as I am capable of providin’ one.”
“That’s a fair answer.”
He didn’t say anything further for a moment, only looked at her. Elspeth felt the look land somewhere low in her stomach and made herself hold still under it rather than fidget with the edge of her shawl, which was what her hands very much wanted to do.
“And I promise ye this,” he added, quieter now. “I willnae touch ye again before the handfasting.”
Something in her chest folded in on itself, sharp and sudden. She could not have named why a promise clearly meant to reassure her should feel instead like a door slamming shut.
She kept her face even. She had spent a great many years keeping her face even for her father’s benefit, and the skill, it turned out, transferred rather well to Highland lairds standing in doorways at midnight.
“Ye neednae promise that,” she said, and was pleased that her voice came out steadier than the rest of her currently felt.
“I ken I neednae.” He held her gaze a beat longer than was strictly comfortable. “I’m promisin’ it regardless.”
She smiled at him, because there seemed nothing else sensible to do with her face at that moment, and because some contrary part of her refused to let him see that the promise had cost her something.
“Meet me in the stables,” he said. “After ye’ve broken yer fast. Wear somethin’ ye daenae mind getting mud on.”
“I own nothin’ else at this point.”
That did coax something closer to a real smile from him, brief as it was, there and gone before she could comment on it.
He inclined his head to her and turned to go.
She watched him walk down the corridor with the same unhurried stride, until he rounded the corner to his rooms and was gone from sight.
She closed her door and stood with her back against it, her shawl knotted crookedly at her throat, her heart beating considerably faster than any midnight apology from a man who’d promised not to touch her warranted.
She told herself it was simply the lateness of the hour.
She did not believe herself even slightly, and gave up trying to by the time she’d climbed back into bed, staring up at the canopy and replaying the whole conversation in her mind.
The pacing, the three knocks, the careful list of his faults he’d clearly worked out in advance and delivered anyway despite how plainly it cost him to say any of it aloud.
An outing. An actual one, chosen rather than dictated, with mud allowed and instructions left behind for once.
She should have been thinking of that. Instead, she found herself thinking of the way his voice had dropped when he’d made his promise.
Of the door closing somewhere inside her chest at the sound of it, and of how thoroughly unfair it seemed that a man could stand in a doorway offering her exactly what she’d asked for and manage to take something else away in the same breath.
She did not sleep again for a while.
When she finally did, it was with the shawl half-tangled around her shoulders and a smile she couldn’t quite account for.
When Becky came to wake her at first light, the first thing out of her mouth before good morning, before anything sensible at all, was to ask what state her second-best boots were in, because apparently they were bound for the stables directly after breakfast, and she had absolutely no intention of being late.
The stables smelled of hay and horse and rain drying off the cobbles. Magnus was already there when she arrived, saddling the grey mare himself rather than leaving it to a stablehand, which struck her as its own small oddity.
He looked up when she came in and stared at her a beat longer than she was accustomed to. It was not the quick, assessing glance he usually spared her, checking for mud or missing gloves, but something slower, unhurried, the look a man gave something he was deciding whether he was allowed to want.
“Ye came,” he said, which was an unnecessary thing to say, given that she was standing directly in front of him.
“Ye did invite me.”
“Aye.” He finished with the girth strap and came around to offer her a hand up, which he had never once done in four days of inspection rides, generally leaving her to manage the mounting block herself while he sat already ahorse, reins loose, waiting with poorly disguised impatience.
She took the proffered hand. His grip was careful, deliberate, steadying her elbow as she settled into the saddle with a gentleness that felt, if she was being honest, considerably more unsettling than his usual brisk indifference to whether she managed the horse or fell flat in the yard trying.
Is he plannin’ to abandon me on some hill and rid himself of me so tenderly that I willnae even notice I’ve been left? she wondered, watching him check her stirrup length with the same careful attention.
She laughed under her breath at the thought, and he glanced up at the sound.
“Something amusin’?”
“Nay. Only wonderin’ at yer manners this mornin’.”
“I have manners.”
“Ye have orders, usually. This is somethin’ else.”
He didn’t answer that, only mounted his horse with ease and led them out of the yard at a pace gentle enough that she never once had to hurry the mare to keep beside him.
They rode for a good while in something closer to companionable silence than she’d expected.
The morning was cold enough that her breath plumed faintly, the hills rising green and wet-dark ahead of them, until he reined in at the foot of a steep rise crowned with the crumbling remains of an old watchtower, half of its upper stones scattered down the slope as if something had taken a fist to it.
He cleared his throat. “The recent rains loosened several stones.” He gestured toward the tower without quite looking at her. “I thought I might repair it.”
“Ye brought me on an outing,” Elspeth said slowly, “to watch ye do masonry.”
“I brought ye on an outing that involves somewhere worth seeing. The masonry is incidental.”
She tilted her head, considering whether that was worth arguing, and it was in the middle of that consideration that his gaze caught on something at her collar and stalled there, his whole train of thought visibly derailing.
“Where did ye find that?”
She glanced down at the embroidered vest laced over her shift beneath her cloak, dark green thread worked into a pattern of thistles along the hem. “I made it.”
“Made it?”
“From old curtains. Mrs. McAulay found the fabric for me. She said no one had any use for it, sitting in a chest since before ye were born, and I’ve never been one to leave good fabric idle.”
He looked at the stitching a moment longer, something flashing behind his eyes that she couldn’t read. “It’s well made.”
“Thank ye.” She felt the compliment land somewhere warmer than the words themselves quite accounted for, and covered it by nudging the mare forward toward the base of the slope. “I’d have thought ye too busy inspecting fences to notice a woman’s stitchwork.”
“I notice more than ye give me credit for.”
That admission seemed to surprise him nearly as much as it surprised her, and he recovered from it by dismounting rather more briskly than the moment strictly required, tethering both horses to a stunted rowan at the base of the hill.
“Can ye climb?” he asked.
“If ye can, I can.”
His mouth twitched, not quite a smile, and he offered his hand for the second time that morning. She took it.
The slope proved considerably steeper than it had looked from horseback, loose scree shifting underfoot with every step.
The first time a stone rolled out from beneath her, Magnus caught her by the waist before she’d fully registered she was falling, his hand spanning nearly her whole side, and set her back on her feet as though she weighed nothing.
“Careful.”
“I am being careful.”
“Doesnae look like it.”
She swatted at his arm, missed, and nearly went down a second time for her trouble, which earned her another steadying grip, this one lingering a beat longer than the loose stone strictly required.
Warmth ran up her side where his hand had been, disproportionate to the practical nature of the touch.
She found herself considerably more aware than was useful of how large his hands were, and how easily one of them alone could span her waist, and how little effort it seemed to cost him to keep her upright when a lesser man would have needed both arms and considerable effort besides.
She did not mention any of that. She focused instead on her footing, which required a genuine and continuous effort, given how often the ground seemed determined to slide out from under her.
Wildflowers grew wild between the rocks the higher they climbed, small and yellow and stubborn, rooted in crevices that shouldn’t have held enough soil to sustain anything at all.
Bees moved lazily between them, working the same patch over and over with the unhurried confidence of creatures that had never once considered a Highland hillside might be dangerous.
The air smelled of wet earth and crushed grass and faintly of him—woodsmoke and horse and something underneath that she’d stopped trying to name some days back, because naming it seemed to make it worse rather than better.
“How much further?” she asked, more to hear her own voice than because she doubted his answer.
“Nae far.”
“Ye said that a quarter hour ago.”
“It was true then as well.”
She laughed despite herself, and the sound seemed to catch him slightly off guard, his hand finding her elbow again, though the ground had gone level enough just there that she hardly needed the help.
They climbed on past a shelf of grey stone slick with lingering damp.
Magnus went first over the worst of it, then turned and reached back for her without being asked, his grip closing around her hand and pulling her up and over in one smooth motion that left her standing rather closer to him than the width of the ledge strictly demanded.
Neither of them stepped back immediately.
“Ye promised nae to touch me before the handfasting,” she said.
Something crossed his face, caught briefly in the act of breaking his word by inches rather than all at once.
“This,” he said, releasing her hand at once and stepping back to a more respectable distance, “was helping ye up a hillside. It doesnae count.”
“Does it nae?”
“Nae in the slightest.” He turned and continued up the last stretch of slope toward the tower before she could press the point further.
She noted, with some satisfaction, that his ears had gone faintly red at the tips, and that he did not look back at her again until they’d very nearly reached the top.