He had thought about leaving twice in the last four minutes. Both times, he looked toward the door, and both times something stopped him, though he wasn't examining that too closely.
What was the point of leavin'?She would simply appear wherever I go next. She has a talent for it.
Margaret moved beside him to check the dough's consistency, reaching past him to press two fingers into it. Her sleeve brushed his arm. He stilled, said nothing, and kept his eyes on his work.
"Better," she said. "Slower still."
She stepped back. She reached for the flour sack again to dust the board, and he did not know exactly how it happened—whether the sack shifted or her grip slipped—but a cloud of flour billowed up faster than they expected.
She turned her face away, which meant the flour caught her from the side. Her cheek. Her jaw. The curve of her bare neck above her collar and the upper slope of her chest where her neckline sat open in the morning warmth.
She blinked. Looked down at herself.
And then she laughed.
It was not a polite laugh. It was a genuine one, her head tilting back slightly with it. Her hand rose to touch her dusted cheek as if confirming what had just happened, then she laughed again. The sound echoed through the kitchen. It was full, warm, and completely unguarded—the laugh of a woman who had momentarily forgotten to be careful about anything.
Fergus forgot to breathe.
He became aware of this approximately three seconds after it happened, standing at the kitchen table with his flour-covered hands and his chest doing something that had nothing to do with the bread. The flour on her skin caught the morning light coming through the window. The freckles on her neck were visible beneath it. She was still laughing, softer now, her eyes bright.
This bonnie, annoyin' lass is me wife.
It landed differently than it had before. It had always been a fact, a legal arrangement, a complication. Standing here right now, watching her dust flour from her collarbone with the back of her hand and smile at nothing in particular, it felt less like a fact and more like something he had not yet fully understood.
He looked back at the dough before she could catch him looking.
* * *
The rest of the morning passed the way mornings did when a man was trying to outwork his own thoughts. He drove fence posts in the south yard until his shoulders ached. He went over the grain tallies with Angus, corrected two errors, and sent word to the MacAlister steward. He inspected the repaired sheep shed in the daylight, checked every beam, every rope, every joint that had taken the weight of the storm.
It was useful work. Necessary work.
Damnit. I cannae take me mind off that lass.
By afternoon, he had run out of things that genuinely required his attention and had moved on to things that could wait, which was how he found himself walking the east wall at a pace that had no destination, hands behind his back, jaw set, thinking about flour on a woman's collarbone with the focused intensity he usually reserved for military strategy.
Realizing working himself into the ground was not enough of a distraction, he turned back to go inside the castle.
The noise reached him even from afar. The laughter, loud and overlapping, was the kind that came in waves when children had decided something was funny. Beneath that, the softer murmur of women's voices, unhurried, shifting between topics with the ease of people not trying to accomplish anything in particular, and they were better for it.
Fergus came around the east wall and stopped.
The courtyard was filled with afternoon sunlight. Margaret sat in the middle, cross-legged on the grass with Lilly tucked against her chest, and three of the clan children gathered around her in various stages of attention. Two older women sat nearby on a low bench, carding wool and talking without looking up. Maisie was laughing at something one of the children had said. A girl about six was trying to braid Margaret's hair from behind, showing more enthusiasm than skill, and Margaret watched calmly.
She looks like she has always been here.
He stood at the edge of the courtyard, arms crossed, weight shifted back—an attitude of a man contemplating a situation before deciding what to do next.
Once, he would have watched for a moment and then moved on. Filed it away. There was always something that needed doing, always a reason to keep going, and a laird standing idle at the edge of a women's gathering served no purpose he could name.
He did not move on.
He was not entirely sure when he made this decision. One moment, he was watching from the wall, and the next, he had stepped forward. The grass was soft under his feet. One of the older women looked up, noticed him, and went back to her wool without comment. The children did not notice him at all. They were too busy listening to whatever Margaret was telling them, her voice low and lively, her free hand tracing shapes in the air.
He found a place near the edge of the group and sat.
Not beside her. Not close enough to be pointed. Just near enough to be present.
