She laughed.
Not the contained kind, not the kind she managed.
The kind that escaped before the door was closed on it, bright and real and too loud for a woman sitting at a laird's table who was supposed to be keeping a professional distance from the proceedings.
Mairi beside her dissolved immediately. Seumas made a sound that was half-cough, half-surrender. One of the kitchen lads at the far end of the table abandoned all pretense and put his face in his hands.
Catriona pressed her fingers to her mouth. It didn't help.
She looked up, because she couldn't help that either, and found Anthony watching her.
Not the plate. Not Fox, wherever Fox had taken himself and his prize. Her.
Look away.
His expression had the quality it sometimes had. Neutral on the surface, something else entirely underneath. The thing she kept catching at the edges and not quite being able to name before he put it away again.
He was watching her laugh and not looking away, and the steadiness of it, the deliberateness of it, pulled the breath out of her mid-exhale.
She stopped laughing.
She didn't mean to.
Her mouth was still curved, her shoulders still shaking slightly with the last of it, but the sound stopped because he was looking at her with that expression and something in her chest went very quiet and very careful.
Name it.
Some stubborn part of her pushed.
Look at it straight and name it.
She couldn't.
A heartbeat. Two.
He looked away first.
He cleared his throat, a small, gravelly sound in the quiet. His hand reached calmly for the bread at the edge of his plate. He tore a piece. He ate. Unhurried. Cut the next piece. Nothing in his manner suggested the last few seconds had happened.
But she saw the way his fingers were stiff as he held the knife.
So he did feel it.
The thought settled in her chest like a coal, small and quiet and far too warm.
"The beast," he said to no one in particular, "has been stealin' from me for weeks." His voice was dry, but there was a flicker of something in his eyes—not quite a smile, but a softening.
"He's consistent," Seumas said. The old man's eyes were twinkling with mischief.
"He has a system," Catriona said. Her voice came out even. She was pleased about that. She looked down at her plate, her heart still hammering against her ribs.
"Aye." Anthony looked at his plate. "So did the MacLennans. I dealt with that too."
Fergus made a sound. A short, sharp bark of a laugh that he quickly muffled with his napkin.
Mairi leaned close to Catriona's ear. "He compared the fox to a rival clan," she breathed, reverent. "That's practically an acknowledgement." She gave Catriona a meaningful nudge.
"Eat yer supper, Mairi," Eidith said, from three feet away, without looking up. There was a hint of a smile on her lips.
