Chapter 9 #2
The music shifted as they reached the floor; the fiddle started playing a slow, deep, circular melody that the pipes followed, transforming the lively reel into a heavier, rhythmic tune. The other dancers made space without being asked, moving toward the edges.
Sebastian kept his hand firm at her waist. She put hers on his shoulder, her fingers digging slightly into the heavy wool of his doublet.
They moved.
She was a good dancer. He had expected this without knowing he had. She followed his lead with reluctant, fluid grace.
“Ye’ve been starin’,” she said.
He looked down at her. “At what?”
“Me.” Her voice was entirely level. Her eyes, dark were wide beneath the lashes.
“I have been lookin’ at me new home,” he said, his voice dropping below the whine of the pipes. “And the fine celebration ye threw in me honor.”
She held his gaze, her jaw set, her hand pressing slightly harder into his shoulder. “Daenae.”
“Daenae what?” The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile, something smaller and considerably more deliberate than a smile, the barest suggestion of one. His eyes dropped briefly to her mouth and came back up. “Daenae dance with me Lady?”
Something flickered across her face. It happened quickly—a sharp, brief crack in her composure, fury, and something else she was not going to name, then gone.
Her foot missed the next beat of the music. Her leather heel caught the uneven raised edge of a floor stone, and her balance went sideways in the single graceless moment he had seen from her since the road.
His arm moved before his mind could calculate the distance. He pulled her against him hard, his forearm locking around the small of her back, and she came against his chest with a soft, sharp intake of breath that he felt through his ribs as much as he heard.
Her hand gripped his shoulder tightly to keep from falling.
Her face was inches from his jaw. He could smell her hair, a scent like wild thyme and warm wool.
He could feel her heartbeat where her chest pressed against his—a frantic, rapid thudding that had nothing to do with the rhythm of the dance.
Neither of them moved.
The music continued around them. Other couples drifted by in a blur of tartan and candlelight, with candles casting warm, shifting shadows across the Hall, highlighting the curve of her cheekbone, the darkness of her eyes, and her mouth, which was very close to his jaw and not pulling away.
He did not move either.
“I hate ye,” she whispered.
"Aye," he said. Low. Close enough that the word barely stirred the air between them. His arm did not loosen at her back. "Ye keep tellin' me that." His eyes dropped once to where her heart was hammering against his ribs, then came back to hers. "Seems yer heart disagrees."
He held her there, her weight entirely supported by his arm, one breath longer than he needed to. Then she pulled back. Her hand left his shoulder as if the wool burned. She turned and walked away through the crowd.
Sebastian stood in the center of the Hall and watched the green silk disappear into the shadows near the screens.
The candles. The music. The steady, everyday movement of two hundred people who had not noticed what had just happened in the middle of them. He thought about the letter on his desk addressed to Fergus MacKenzie’s wife.
He thought about the feeling of her heartbeat against his chest. The frantic, rapid thudding of it, entirely at odds with the steadiness of her voice when she’d said I hate ye.
He found, standing in the middle of a crowded Hall with a warm horn cup in his hand, that he could not quite leave the two things alone together in his mind.
She had meant it, possibly. She was entitled to mean it.
He was not certain she had meant it.
He set his whisky down on the nearest table, not caring that it splashed over the wood, and followed her.
He told himself it was because he had something to say.
The corridor beyond the Great Hall was dim, the celebration noise dropping behind him into a low hum as he moved further from the light. He could hear her footsteps ahead.
She was standing in the narrow stone corridor with her back pressed flat against the wall and her hands straight at her sides, and she was looking at him with an expression he had not seen from her before.
Not fury. Not the composed, strategic calm she wore like armor.
Something underneath all of it, stripped back by candlelight and a crowded Hall and a moment in the middle of a dance floor that had gotten away from both of them.
The corridor was very quiet, save for the distant, muffled thud of the drums.
Sebastian stopped in front of her.
The distance between them was not large.
He did not close it. He stood where he was, his chest rising and falling in the shadows, and looked at her and waited.
He had learned in the wars that waiting was what worked, and because some part of him understood that whatever happened next needed to come from her.
Her chin lifted, the skin of her throat pale in the gloom.
“Ye followed me,” she stated.
“Aye.”
"Ye have somethin' to say, then?"
"I did." He studied her, the weak candlelight barely reaching the pulse at her throat, which was giving her away completely. "Seem to have forgotten it."
"That's unlike ye."
"Aye." A faint, humorless curve touched his mouth. "Ye have that effect."
She held his gaze, chin lifted, refusing to be the one who looked away first. "This is a terrible idea."
"I ken." He did not step back. "Have kent it since the road."
"And yet ye followed me anyway."
"And yet." He reached out, slow enough that she could have stopped him, and closed his hand around hers in the dark.