"I rode hard because I was afraid." He paused. Let the next part come at its own pace, because rushing it would make it smaller than it was. "Nae of losing the healer."
Her chin moved slightly. A fractional lift, bracing.
"Of losing ye," he said.
Simple. Undecorated. The plainest thing he'd said to another person in six years and possibly longer.
Her face did something then that he'd never seen it do. Not the dry guard dropping, not the professional mask shifting.Something underneath all of that, something that had been held very tightly and for a very long time, suddenly, without the strength to stay held.
Her jaw moved. Her eyes went bright and immediately furious at themselves for going bright.
She pulled in a breath through her nose and let it out slowly, and in the space of that breath, she came apart, very quietly, in the specific way of people who had been managing something enormous and then ran out of the energy to manage it.
He closed the distance before he decided to.
His hand came up and cupped her face, his thumb at her cheekbone, and she turned into it. Not dramatically, just a fractional lean, her cold cheek against his palm. He felt her exhale against his wrist, and something in his chest did something he didn't have a controlled word for and stopped trying to find one.
I want ye.
She moved toward him at the same moment he reached for her.
The kiss that followed was not like the ones before it. The others had been heat and frustration and things compressed past bearing, suddenly finding their pressure point, this was different.
This was slow. This was her cold hands coming up to his jaw and his arm going around her, and the rain falling on both of them. Neither of them was moving away from it, just standing in the archway in the wet and choosing this, deliberately and without the excuse of a crisis carrying them into it.
Her mouth was cold from the rain and warm from the inside, and she kissed him the way she did everything, with her whole attention.
He kissed her back with six weeks of accumulated restraint.
He pulled back first.
Rested his forehead against hers and stood there breathing, her hands still at his jaw, his arm still around her, the rain still coming down. He could feel her pulse in the place where his hand had shifted to her neck. Quick, uneven, matching his own.
"Inside," he said. His voice came out considerably rougher than he intended.
"Aye," she said. Not moving.
"Catriona."
"I heard ye."
A beat.
She stepped back and turned toward the door, and he saw the corner of her mouth, and let himself look at it for exactly one moment before he followed her inside.
Fox was in her chamber.
Anthony heard him before they reached the door. The quick, bright sound of a fox that was alive, followed by the scratch of claws on stone as he launched himself at Catriona the moment she came through the doorway.
She caught him mid-leap, both arms going around him, her face dropping into his fur, and Anthony stood in the doorway and watched her hold the animal and felt the tightness in his own chest ease several degrees.
He had not known, on the ridge, when Fergus reached him with his face arranged in the way it was arranged when the news was bad. He had not known, in the hard, fast ride back across the wet ground, whether Fox was alive or not.
Had not asked because asking would have required speech, and speech would have required more breath than he had to spare.
Fox was alive.
He was, in fact, conducting a thorough inspection of Catriona's face with his nose, his tail moving with the rapid, indiscriminateenthusiasm of an animal that had been worried and was now expressing the relief of it in the only language available to him.
