From the middle of the table Catriona said something he didn't catch and Mairi dissolved again, shoulders shaking.
Fox woke up. Stood. Put his front paws on the bench, looked at Anthony's plate, and sat back down.
Anthony looked at the fox. The fox looked at the table with the blank focused attention of an animal that had not been thinking about anyone's supper.
Fergus, to his left, was eating and very carefully not saying anything.
"Nae a word," Anthony said.
"I wasnae goin' to say anythin'," Fergus said.
Anthony returned to his meal.
Catriona, at the middle of the table, didn't look at him.
She was talking to Mairi and then to Donal, who had leaned across to ask her something about James, by the look of it, something that made her nod and gesture with one hand, explaining.
Donal listened with his arms folded and the slow attentive nod of a man who was actually considering what he was being told.
She had been inside his walls for a week.
She'd built a place for herself here with the same efficiency with which she did everything else, without asking permission, without appearing to try.
He ate his supper and looked at the map in his head and thought about her lips.
He thought about them for the rest of the meal.
In the study he sat at the desk and did not look at the correspondence. The map lay open in front of him and he looked at it for a long time without seeing it.
He pressed both hands flat on the desk.
He had kissed her at a well in his own courtyard because she'd saidor because ye canand looked at him like she already knew the answer.
And she had kissed him back. Not tentatively, not uncertainly, not like a woman who needed to think about it. And then she had stood there with water on her face and said,
This is what lips feel like
And he had stepped back and called it a mistake.
He'd called it a mistake because the alternative was standing at that well and telling her the truth. Which was that it was the least mistaken thing he'd done in six years, and that was not a truth he had any right to offer her.
He pulled the nearest dispatch toward him. Read it. Set it aside.
He had held for six years.
He would hold.
He had no choice.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
She woke from the dream with her hand pressed flat to her sternum, her fingers trembling against the sudden heat of her skin, and the fire burned low. The embers cast a fitful, orange glow that seemed to pulse with her own frantic heartbeat.
The dream left nothing useful behind, no image she could name, only the residue of it.
A sense of heat and hands, and the particular quality of being held. Then the cold of the pillow and the dark of the room and her own heartbeat under her palm, too fast for a woman who had only been sleeping. The silence of the keep pressed in on her, and she lay still for a moment, waiting for the phantom touch to fade.
She counted her breath the way she counted everything, measured it back to something she could use.
