"I could." He straightened. "But I willnae. Ye'll freeze before mornin' if we daenae share the heat. I'll nae have ye ill before ye've even seen the castle."
"How practical of ye, Fergus."
"Aye."
"I thought for a moment ye might say somethin' approachin' warm."
He turned to look at her. She was watching him with that expression, the one that lived in the narrow territory between amusement and challenge, the one he did not have a map for.
"Get yer wet things off," he said.
Her eyebrows rose.
"Yer cloak," he said. "Yer outer layers. Or keep them on and wake up with the fever. It makes no difference to me."
He turned his back to the room and faced the fire. Behind him, he heard the soft, wet sound of her cloak hitting the flagstones. He removed his own. The plaid. The soaked linen. He worked through it methodically, hung what could be hung near the heat, and turned back.
She was standing in her stays and underskirt. Her hair was down, falling in dark, damp ropes over her shoulders. She had her arms wrapped around herself, and she was shivering with the fine, persistent tremor of someone who had been cold for too long and whose body was running low on the resources required to hide it.
He spread the inn's plaid on the low bed near the hearth.
"Lie down," he said.
"Ye are," she said, teeth chattering slightly, "the least romantic man I have ever encountered."
"Margaret."
She lay down. He lay down beside her. He pulled the plaid over both of them and looked up at the ceiling, beginning to treat this as a logistical problem.
The warmth spread slowly. The plaid kept it in. The fire added to it from the left. The inevitable, irrational, deeply inconvenient warmth of two bodies in the same small space did the rest. He could feel her trembling easing, moment by moment, the gentle shake calming, her breathing beginning to slow.
He stared at the ceiling.
The timber was low and smoke-darkened, crossed by two beams with a crack running diagonally between them. He focused on the crack. He was a laird. He had faced armed men in worse situations than this. He had crossed flooded rivers, negotiated with men who wanted him dead, and spent three weeks managing a screaming infant alone. He was capable of lying still beside a woman without doing anything regrettable.
He was aware of everything: the weight of her shoulder against his arm, the scent of her hair—river water and something warmer beneath it that he refused to think about. He noticed the exact moment when her body stopped resisting the warmth and gave in, a small, unconscious shift of her weight that edged her slightly closer.
She shifted again. Just slightly. The kind of movement a person makes when they are not asleep but are no longer performing wakefulness.
The fire settled in the grate with a soft collapse of ash, and the room went a shade darker and quieter. Outside, the mist pressed against the shutters. There was no other sound. No other world.Just the room and the fire and the specific, demanding fact of her.
He had not been this close to her since the river.
"Fergus," she said. It was barely a sound. It was neither a question nor a statement. It was something in between that had no clear category.
"Go to sleep, Margaret."
A pause. "Ye go to sleep."
"I'm tryin'."
"Ye're failin'."
He said nothing. She was right, which made it worse.
He did not reach for her. He understood, without needing it stated, that reaching for her now would be the wrong move. Not because she had forbidden it, but because she had not invited it, and with a woman like Margaret those were not the same thing. It was not only that which stopped him, though.
The thing that stopped him was not discipline. It was the knowledge that if he reached for her now, in a drafty inn on a road north toward a life neither of them had chosen, it would mean something he was not yet ready to be accountable for.
