She straightened then, slowly, and turned to face him. "I am nae yer prisoner."
"Nay." He held her gaze. "But ye are under me protection."
Her eyes sharpened. "Protection does nae require permission." "In me lands, it does."
The silence that followed had weight to it.
The particular weight of two people who had both decided not to move first.
She was good at this. Better than most men he'd faced across a table. She stood with her arms loose at her sides and her chin level and looked at him with the direct patience of someone who could do this all morning.
"I will be gone but an hour," she said at last. "Or do ye fear I shall vanish into the hills?"
"I fear many things." He kept his voice even, his gaze steady on hers. "Ye among them."
Something shifted in her face. Brief, involuntary, there and gone.
Her fingers stilled against the bundle of herbs in her hand, the twine slipping slightly before she tightened her grip on it. She looked at him for a moment that ran a beat longer than she'd intended.
Then she folded her arms. "Then come with me."
For one brief moment, clean, immediately unwelcome, he almost said yes.
The market. An hour. Her moving through stalls with that particular attention she gave things. The fox at her heels, no crisis requiring him, no one watching.
"I have duties."
"Of course," she said. Lightly.
The lightly was the problem. It landed somewhere between permission and dismissal, and she knew it.
He stepped closer, dropping his voice below the range of the corridor.
"Ye will nae leave alone."
"I always leave alone."
Not here. Not while I can stop it.
"Nay longer." He turned from her before the thought could form any further. "Fergus."
His man-at-arms appeared with the promptness of someone who had been nearby on purpose. "Me Laird."
"Ye will accompany the healer to the market and back." He kept his gaze on Catriona while he said it. "She doesnae leave yer sight."
Fergus looked between them with the expression of a man who had walked into the middle of something and was identifying the safest position to occupy. "Aye, me Laird."
Catriona went still. The particular stillness she had when she was composing a response she intended to be precise.
"I need nay guard," she said. Quiet. Controlled.
"Ye have one."
Fergus cleared his throat. "I'll keep me distance, lass. Just orders."
She didn't look at him.
Her gaze stayed on Anthony, and in it was something he recognized, not anger, not quite. The look of someone who had been told the terms of a situation they'd had no hand in designing and were deciding how much of themselves to spend on fighting it.
