His mouth came down on hers with the force of forty minutes of helplessness and six years of standing at windows and the specific and precise terror of watching the boy go grey at the lips. The kiss tasted of salt and rain and desperation.
She felt all of it come through the kiss like a current, fierce and uncontrolled, nothing of the managed restraint that had governed every moment between them until now. It was a violent surrender.
She froze for one heartbeat. The shock of his heat against the cold rain was staggering.
Then she kissed him back.
Her fingers caught his tunic. Both hands, fistfuls of wet wool. She pulled him closer, her body arching into his as the cold of the wall vanished.
She pulled him in because the cold of the rain and the shake in her hands and the fear that had been waiting behind the work for the last forty minutes needed somewhere to go. This was the only place she could find peace.
This was where it went, into the kiss and his hands and the solid unmovable fact of him against her in the rain. The weight of him was a comfort she hadn't known she needed.
He deepened it. His tongue traced her lip, a slow, searing claim.
His hand moved from the wall to the back of her neck, and she felt his fingers in her wet hair. She felt the breath go out of her and not come back for a moment. She felt, underneath all of it, the particular and dangerous warmth of something she had not been feeling for weeks, arriving all at once. The fire in her blood was hot enough to defy the storm.
She shoved him. The movement was sudden, a desperate reflex.
Both palms flat on his chest, hard, and he went back a step. Not far, he was too large to move far with a shove, but back, the distance between them restored, cold air replacing warmth. She stood there, gasping, her chest heaving.
She was breathing hard. Rain on her face. She did not look away. The anger was a cold, sharp blade now.
"Ye told me ye couldnae wait for me to leave," she said. Her voice was a low, trembling accusation.
He was still. His chest rising and falling. Rain darkening his hair. He looked at her with an expression she couldn't name—a mix of shame and a raw, naked want.
"Ye said that." She kept her voice level through the unevenness of her breathing. "Ye stood in this keep and ye said it plain. Cannae wait." Her hands dropped from his chest. "So how dare ye touch me as though I belong here." The pain in her voice was a physical weight.
His jaw moved. He seemed to be searching for words that wouldn't come.
"I willnae be somethin' ye reach for when it suits ye," she said. "I willnae be the woman ye pull close when ye're frightened and push away when ye're proud." Her eyes were blazing, green fire in the mist.
Her hands were shaking again. Not the post-work shake this time, the other kind, the kind that came when anger and something rawer ran together and couldn't be separated. "Daenae cage me with one hand and claim me with the other." The words landed like stones in the quiet yard.
The rain came down between them.
He looked at her. At her face, her wet hair, her hands at her sides. He looked at her as if he were seeing her for the first time, and the last.
She watched him draw breath. Watched his chest expand, watched the set of his jaw, watched the flicker behind his eyes that was not nothing. That was not the flat composure he carried in the hall and the study and the yard, that was something older and more specific, the look of a man who had heard a truth landin a place that was already damaged. He stood there, broken and magnificent in the rain.
He did not argue. The silence was his final answer.
She had wanted him to argue. She had stood here in the rain and said those words and waited for him to push back, to say,Ye're wrong. That isnae what I meant.The hope in her chest died a slow, agonizing death.
Anything that meant he was in this room with her and not on the other side of a wall she couldn't see or reach.
He stepped back. The movement was a final closing of the door.
Cold. Still. The Dragon, back in his armor, the expression closing over itself the way it always closed, the window shuttered from the inside. The man who had just kissed her was gone, replaced by the Laird of McArthur.
Silence.
Nothing.
She looked at him for one more moment. Her heart felt heavy, a cold stone in her chest.
"Aye," she said, quietly. To herself. "That is the problem." She turned away, the rain blinding her.
