Catriona said nothing. She just watched him, her eyes dark with a depth of understanding that made him want to flinch.
"A scarred orphan," he said. "Runnin' a clan I was never supposed to run, with a child in the east wing who breathed wrong because I had nae listened to me mother in a courtyard at twenty-four years old." He looked at her. "That is the tale."
She was looking at him with an expression he had not seen on her face before. The dry, professional guard was gone.
He didn't know what to do with what had replaced it.
Not pity, he would have closed the door on pity. Not the clinical assessment she gave everything that needed treating. Something else.
Both hands still on the table, her eyes on his face, looking at him the way you looked at something you were not going to look away from.
She had heard all of it, and she had not moved back.
Then she crossed the room.
He didn't step back. The instruction was there. The same one he'd used at a well in the courtyard, at a door in the dark corridor, every charged moment in the weeks between. His feet didn't take it.
She reached up. He watched her hand rise.
Her fingers touched the scar along his cheek.
He stopped breathing.
'Daenae
Not the clinical touch. Not the two-finger press on a wrist, not the palm on a sternum.
Flat fingertips, moving along the ridge of it the way you traced something you were reading. Unhurried. As if she had decided to learn it and was not going to be rushed.
He didn't know what his face was doing.
He couldn't feel it.
He couldn't feel anything above the point of contact.
She looked at it. Then at him. Close enough that he could see the freckle at the corner of her left eye. The slight asymmetry of her mouth. The tremor in her lower lip she hadn't hidden.
Her breathing was steadier than his. She was managing herself more carefully than he was managing himself.
He had no idea what she saw when she looked at him.
That was the thing. That was the part he couldn't withstand.
Not the touch, not the closeness, but that he could not read her and had no ground to stand on and nothing left to hold.
The last of it gave way.
He caught her wrist. His grip was firm, desperate, his pulse jumping against her palm.
She looked at his hand on her wrist. Then at his face. She didn't pull away; she leaned into the contact, her gaze challenging him to find the strength he thought he'd lost.
His other hand found her waist. He felt the solid, warm reality of her through the wool of her dress, and the air in the room seemed to disappear.
He pulled her forward. One step, she came with it, her free hand came up between them and her fingers found the front of his tunic. She did not push away, she pulled. A single deliberate fistful of wool, and that was the last of whatever had been holding. The friction of her body against his was a shock to his system.
He kissed her.
Hard. The impact was desperate, a collision of two people who had spent too long in the cold.
