She laughed, a short, soft, undone sound, and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth as though that might help, and it didn't help at all. Tears cut tracks down her rain-damp cheeks and she laughed through them.
He stepped forward and took her face in both hands and tilted it up, and she was still laughing when he kissed her. Still half-laughing against his mouth before the laughing became something else. Her hands finding his chest, her fingers curling in the wet fabric of his tunic, the cloth dropping somewhere between them, forgotten.
She kissed him back the way she did everything.
Completely. Without reservation.
Without the careful management of a woman protecting herself, without the half-held quality of their earlier kisses, where part of her had always been deciding.
This was decided. This was her choosing, actively, with both hands, and he felt the difference in it like the difference between standing outside a fire and being inside one.
He pulled back just enough to breathe.
Her hands were still in his tunic. His were still at her face, thumbs tracing the line of her cheekbones, and he looked at her in the low firelight.
The red hair dark with rain, the green eyes bright, the freckles across her nose that he had spent a considerable amount of time not thinking about over the preceding weeks. He felt something settle in his chest that he recognized, distantly and without panic, as the absence of the weight he'd been carrying since he was twenty-four years old.
Not gone. He was not naive enough to think it was gone.
But set down. For now. Here.
But soon, soon it'll be gone.
"That's nae an answer," he said.
She looked at him with the specific expression she wore when he'd said something she was going to make him wait for. That expression, which he'd first seen on a cliff ledge in the western glens when she'd had powder in her hand and fury in her face, had become over the preceding weeks one of his favorite sights in the world.
She reached up and closed her hand in his collar and pulled him back down.
He took that as an answer.
She's definitely saying yes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The fire in Catriona's chamber had burned low, casting long shadows across the furs strewn over the bed. The scent of dried lavender and beeswax clung to the air, thick with the warmth of the hearth.
She stood by the window, her fingers tracing the cool glass where frost had begun to creep along the edges.
The wool of her gown clung to her hips, the fabric worn thin from years of use, but she didn't move to undo the laces at her back.
Nae yet.
The silence between them wasn't uncomfortable. It was heavy, like the pause before a storm breaks, charged with something unspoken.
She reached for him. There was no urgency in the movement.
It lacked the compressed, frantic heat of the well-side or the desperate tension of the rain-soaked archway. Those moments had been collisions, breaking apart before they could truly begin.
This was slower.
This was her hand lifting in the dim orange light to find the heavy line of his jaw, her thumb brushing the stubble as she turned his face toward her. Anthony went still under her touch, a sudden, absolute cessation of movement that he granted to very few things in this world.
She traced the scar.
She had wanted to do it properly since the night he'd told her about the fire, since he'd stood in the study with his voice hollowed out like a burnt-out shell and let her see what lived behind the commands and the locked doors.
Her fingers followed the jagged topography from his jawline down the sensitive cord of his throat. She moved unhurriedly, learning the map of him with the same specific, clinical care she brought to the things that truly mattered.
