Behind him, through the rain, he heard nothing.
She did not call after him. She did not storm past him back to the castle. He could feel her still standing there. He could always feel her. The fact that she had not moved was somehow worse than anything else.
He stood in the shed with the sheep shifting nervously around his boots and the storm pressing on the roof. He understood then, with the cold clarity of a man who has run out of places to hide, that locking a door had never been enough.
It had never been about the door.
Chapter Ten
She woke to warmth and silence.
The fire had burned low. Embers breathed red and slow in the hearth, casting long, bloody shadows across the stone floor. Outside, the wind had dropped. The storm was over.
A sound broke the quiet. It came from the adjoining room. A soft, ragged exhale. The groan of a heavy floorboard under weight.
Margaret was off the mattress before she was conscious of the choice. The cold stone bit into her bare soles. She didn't feel it. She crossed the room, her shift brushing her shins, and reached for the adjoining door, and found it unlatched. He must have come through it when he returned from the fields. She pushed it open just enough to see through the crack.
He was asleep.
He looked different like this. Not in any way less, but different.
He must have come back after checkin' on the animals.After makin' sure everythin' held. After all of it.
He lay on top of the covers, fully clothed from the waist down, his boots set aside near the door. One arm was thrown above his head. The blankets had slid and were bunched at his side, leaving the upper half of him entirely unguarded.
The firelight in his room was dimmer than hers, but it was enough. It caught the angle of his jaw, the strong line of his throat, the broad slope of his shoulders tapering into the defined planes of his chest, and the flat, steady rise of his stomach with each slow breath. He was built the way men were built when their strength came from real labor—solid and without vanity, with every line of him shaped by years of purpose. The light traced the curve of his arm above his head, the muscle there even at rest, and the long shadow it cast across his ribs.
I felt those arms. Last night, in the rain. I gripped his shoulders and felt exactly how little effort it would take for a man like that to hold the whole world still.
Then the memory returned. The cold, the dark, and his hands tightening around her arms with a strength that surprised her, then his mouth, and the way she had responded instinctively, without thought, without carefully planning, despite the calm she had been working to maintain for weeks. She had kissed him back fully and without hesitation, and for that fleeting moment, it felt like something real.
Heat climbed her neck and settled in her face before she could do anything useful about it.
That is enough.
She pulled the door shut with both hands—quietly, deliberately, and with determination—but stayed in the middle of her room and took a breath. Once. Then again.
He kissed me. I kissed him back. The sheep had cried, and he had walked away.That was the whole of it, and she would do well to remember the last part as clearly as the rest.
She found her slippers and grabbed the shawl, wrapping it against her chest. She opened the corridor door and headed to the kitchen.
The stone hallway was cold and silent, with the torches burned down to stubs in their brackets, her footsteps barely making a sound on the worn flags. The castle was still asleep, during that brief hour between the end of the night watch and the start of the morning shift, when the corridors belonged to no one.
The warmth of the kitchen fire hit her before she reached the doorway. Mrs. O'Halloran was already at the long table when Margaret pushed through the kitchen door, her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, a round of bread dough in front of her. The fire was high. The air smelled of woodsmoke, warm milk, and something sweet bubbling at the back of the hearth.
"Lady MacKenzie." The cook looked up without breaking her rhythm. "Ye're early."
"I couldnae sleep."
"Aye, well." Mrs. O'Halloran pressed the heel of her hand into the dough with practiced authority. "Storm will do that. Sit, I'll have something warm for ye in a moment."
Maisie was at the far end of the kitchen, already dressed, measuring oats with a wooden scoop and humming something low and tuneless under her breath. She glanced up when Margaret entered and smiled the easy smile of a woman who had been awake for a while and was comfortable with the hour.
"Did ye sleep at all?" Maisie asked.
"Some," Margaret said, which was true, technically.
She settled onto the bench near the window and pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. Outside, the sky wore that particular pale gray of very early morning, the kind that hasn't yet decided whether it wants to be beautiful. The courtyard below was empty and wet, the cobblestones dark with last night's rain, and the air through the cracked shutter smelled of earth, damp stone, and the fresh cleanness that follows a storm.
