Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
He had not meant to look at her when she laughed.
It had happened before he could foresee it, the sound arriving first, low, unguarded and entirely unplanned. His eyes had moved to her face instinctively. He no longer had control over his subconscious.
He looked away immediately. He snapped his gaze back to the horse, to the long, familiar motion of his hand along Siobhan’s neck, focusing entirely on the safe and manageable problem of a frightened animal during a storm.
It was too late.
The sound of her laugh was already in his chest, sitting there.
Ach, that sound…
“What?” Alba asked.
He could feel her eyes on the side of his face at close range, in a stable that smelled of horses, wet wool, and the specific warmth of an enclosed space that was getting smaller by the second.
“Nothin’,” he said, keeping his eyes glued to the mare.
She came to stand directly beside him at the stall gate, not behind him, not at a careful, polite distance, but right beside him.
He registered the radiating heat of her body before she even touched the wood, a maddening awareness that arrived slightly ahead of the physical reality of her proximity.
Her hand remained at Siobhan’s jaw; his stayed flat against the mare’s neck. In the swinging lantern light, the space between them had shrunk.
The heat moved through him immediately, traveling down his arm, across his chest, and settling firm somewhere low in his body.
He did not step away. He had stopped pretending he was going to step away sometime around the third day, if he was being entirely honest with himself; a habit he was finding increasingly unavoidable around her.
Siobhan’s ear flicked. Her weight shifted slightly beneath his palm, a small, restless movement that was the only warning either of them got.
The thunder arrived like a solid wall.
It struck the stable roof with a sickening violence.
A single, massive crack was followed by the rolling roar of a storm that had decided, in one intense second, to make its full intentions clear.
Every horse in the row reacted instantly.
The stable erupted into stamping hooves, thrown heads, and high, urgent whinnies.
Siobhan went sideways.
It was not a small movement. It was a full, violent lurch to the left, her powerful shoulder driving hard into the stall gate until the heavy timber shuddered under the force of it.
The gate caught Alba square in the back and pitched her forward, her balance gone.
One sharp sound of surprise left her lips before she crossed the remaining distance between them.
Sebastian’s arms came up before his mind had finished calculating her trajectory.
She hit his chest, and he caught her. Both of his arms locked tightly around her, one bracing her back and the other trapping her waist, pulling her fully against him in a single motion to absorb her forward momentum. He planted his boots wide on the straw-covered floor to take her weight.
He did not stagger an inch.
She was breathing hard. He could feel it immediately. The rapid, shallow rhythm of her breath against his chest, her ribs expanding against his forearm in short, startled pulls. Her hands had come up flat against the thick wool of his shirt when she hit him, and they had not moved since.
Neither had he.
She fit against him the same way she had on the muddy road. Every line of her matched the line of him as if the geometry of their physical form had been worked out without their consultation or consent.
He felt the curve of her waist beneath his palm, the intense warmth of her skin through the fabric, and the slight tension in her body; not quite sure whether it was pulling away or settling in his grip.
He looked at her.
Her face was tilted up, dangerously close.
The swinging lantern light flickered across her high cheekbones, her jaw, and the single dark curl that had fallen loose against her temple.
Her eyes were fixed on his face, wide and dark, completely stripped of the armor she usually kept on for him.
The careful composure and strategic calm were gone.
What remained underneath looked straight back at him without any barrier between them.
Her pulse was visibly vibrating in the hollow of her throat. It was quick, telling him everything her expression was desperately trying to hide.
Outside, the rain drove relentlessly against the stable walls. In here, the lantern swung, the horses shifted, the straw muffled the ambient noise, and the foot of space he had been carefully managing since she walked through the door ceased to exist.
His hand remained firm against her waist, refusing to loosen.
“Ye should stop fallin’ into me,” he said. His voice came out low, rougher than intended, the words carrying far more weight than he had meant to put into them.
Her breath caught. He felt the small, involuntary hitch against his ribs, her fingers pressing fractionally harder into his shirt.
“Ye should stop catchin’ me,” she whispered.
The response was barely above the roar of the roof, her eyes dark, direct, and entirely at odds with the steadiness she was trying to maintain in her voice.
He looked down at her mouth.
He had spent days not looking at her mouth with a discipline that had cost him more than any military campaign he had ever run; and he had absolutely no discipline left now.
It had entirely run out somewhere between the sound of her laughing in the amber light and the feeling of her frantic heartbeat against his ribs.
What remained in its place was the plain, unmanageable truth that he was done disregarding.
He brought his hand up from her waist, moving slowly. He gave her every opportunity to step back, to turn her face away, or to say the word she had been throwing at him in various forms for over a week.
His fingers traced the sharp line of her jaw. His thumb rested on her cheekbone, gently tilting her face up that tiny fraction of an inch.
She did not step back. She did not turn away.
Instead, her fingers curled tight into the front of his shirt.
Sebastian closed the remaining distance and kissed her.
It was not the way he had kissed her in the corridor; that first time had been hunger finding its outlet after days of accumulated pressure. Fast, overwhelming, and barely controlled.
This was different. This was entirely deliberate.
His mouth moved over hers with a thoroughness that was not born of desperation, but absolute intention to learn the shape of her, the warmth of her, and the breathtaking way she kissed him back when she finally stopped pretending she was not going to.
She did kiss him back.
She did it completely, without the half-second of resistance the corridor had carried, and without the sense of something being wrongfully overcome.
She surrendered to it. Her body leaned fully into his strength, her hands slipping their iron grip on his shirt to slide upward against his chest, her mouth opening beneath his with a soft, involuntary sound that charged through him like an blowing current and swept away the last of his restraint.
He pulled her closer. His arm around her waist drew her against his frame until there was hardly any space left between them. The full, radiating warmth of her radiated from his chest to his ribs, reaching the low, hard ache that had been building in him since the road.
His other hand moved into her hair. His fingers spread against the back of her head, tilting her face to deepen the kiss.
She let him. He could feel her give in to his touch, the firm quality of a conscious choice.
The awareness that this was not a surrender but a mutual decision moved through him with a force entirely alien to anything he had known before.
She tasted of sweet berries.
The storm raged against the stable’s roof.
The iron lantern swung in its slow arc. Siobhan had finally settled, whether from Sebastian’s earlier efforts or from the simple fact that neither of them was paying her any attention; she stood quietly in her stall with her ears relaxed, breathing in slowly.
Sebastian, however, was not certain the crisis had passed at all.
He lifted his head. Not far, just enough to breathe. His forehead came to rest against hers in the shadow, his hand still curved protectively against her jaw, his thumb moving once in a slow arc across her damp cheekbone. Her warm breath brushed his mouth, matching his own rugged breathing.
He looked at her.
Her eyes were shut tight. Then they opened slowly, meeting his at a distance that felt like no distance at all. Whatever he saw in them under the shifting amber glow of the lantern was beyond words, and he did not try to find any.
The rain hammered on. Neither of them spoke.
His hands were not entirely steady.
A faint, uncharacteristic tremor possessed his fingers as they moved along the sharp curve of her jaw and down the smooth line of her throat. Her pulse leaped beneath his touch with a frantic speed that perfectly matched his own.
He had been steady in bloody battles. He had been steady with a cold blade pressed to his throat, with fire roaring at his back, and with his own brother’s blood drying on his hands.
He was not steady with Alba MacLaren’s breath against his lips in a dark stable while a savage storm made the rest of the world irrelevant.
Her head was tilted back slightly, her eyes shut tight, fingers clutching the thick wool of his shirt. He pressed his lips to the warm curve of her throat, feeling her exhale—a long, slow release. His hand moved from her jaw to the back of her neck, fingers sinking deep into her loose hair.
She made a sound against his temple. It was soft, raw, unguarded.
His other hand found the small of her back and pulled her closer. She came to him without a shred of resistance, her body leaning fully into his, her forehead dropping heavily against his shoulder. He could feel every single point of contact.
He moved his lips slowly along her collarbone.