Loudly.
With the specific quality of a man doing his professional duty at considerable personal inconvenience.
They both turned. Fergus stood at the yard gate with his hands clasped behind his back.
He knew he had arrived at an inopportune moment and he had decided that transparency was the only viable strategy. "Me Laird. Shall I prepare the horses for the north boundary inspection?"
Anthony looked at Fergus.
He released her wrist, she hadn't noticed he'd taken hold of it again, and stepped back. "Aye," he said.
He didn't look away from her face until after he'd said it.
Then he did.
He walked toward Fergus without looking back, and the yard became ordinary again. Stone and air and afternoon light, and Catriona stood in the middle of it holding a wooden sword and not doing anything in particular with it.
She set it against the wall. Went inside.
She didn't get far. The well at the back of the yard caught her eye.
The cold water she suddenly, urgently needed, and she veered toward it without deciding to. She pulled the bucket up and splashed her face and stood there with cold water dripping from her chin and her hands braced on the stone rim.
Footsteps behind her.
She straightened and turned sharply, one hand half-raised out of pure reflex.
CHAPTER TEN
"Ye're learnin' fast."
She registered him and lowered it. Didn't step back.
"I am a fast learner," she said.
She had water on her face and her braid had come half undone and she was looking at him the way she always looked at him. Like she was deciding which way the argument was going to go.
He stepped closer. "Defiance especially."
"Perhaps if ye didnae command every breath I take, I wouldnae need to defy ye."
"I command because I must."
"Or because ye can." She said it flat. No heat in it. Worse than heat. "There's a difference."
He felt it land.
He'd heard those words before. Not from her, from himself, in the dark after the fire, going over every decision he'd made that night.
Because I can.
Because no one had stopped him. Because he'd been the Laird's son and certain and twenty-four years old and there had been no one in that corridor willing to put a hand on his chest and saywait.
He took another step. "Ye test me at every turn."
"And ye cage me at every door."
"Ye walk freely through me halls."
