At the door she paused and looked back.
He remained on the pallet, bandaged now, dark hair fallen across his brow, watching her with an intensity that felt almost like being held.
When she left the infirmary, the corridor beyond seemed altered, though it was the same cold stone, the same torchlight, the same distant voices.
Only she was not the same. The greater danger was no longer marriage.
It was wanting him to stay.
Reginald remained where she had left him.
If he moved too soon, whatever had passed through the room might shatter. He could still feel her. The fierce press of her mouth. Her hands in his tunic. The way she had kissed him first, not yielding, not drifting, but choosing.
That was what undid him. Not that she wanted him but that she had forgotten caution long enough to show it.
God help him.
He had meant to leave her. That had been the only honorable shape left to him. Stay long enough to make the castle safer. Leave before vows mocked her life. He had repeated the plan until it almost felt like virtue.
Now it lay in ruins.
The kiss had changed more than desire. Desire he understood. Desire could be borne, denied, or survived. This was worse.
This was the knowledge that her pain would matter to him more than his own safety. That if he won her trust and shatteredit with the truth, it would not be one sorrow among many. It would be the sorrow he could never forgive himself.
He looked down at the clean bandage wrapped around his arm and understood with bleak precision that the kiss had solved nothing.
It had only made the cost unbearable. Because when he lost her -- and he would, once truth reached daylight -- he would not only lose a woman he desired.
He would lose Aingeal.
And that was not a wound he knew how to survive.
Chapter twelve
Aingeal woke before dawn and lay still beneath the blankets, staring into the dark as though it might arrange itself into sense if she waited long enough.
It did not.
The chamber was cold. Beyond the shutters, the castle slept in that fragile hour before servants rose and hearths were coaxed awake. But she felt no kinship with the hush around her. Her body seemed lit from within, every nerve restless, every thought too bright.
She shut her eyes and saw him. The shadowed line of his face in the infirmary. Candlelight touching his mouth. The weight of his hand in her hair. The rough, startled pull of his breath when she kissed him first.
God help her. She had kissed him first.
Aingeal flung an arm over her eyes. Madness. Not because the kiss had been wrong. The world would call it fitting enough. The council had chosen him for her husband.
The kiss had not felt wrong. It had felt ruinously right. As if some part of her that had held itself rigid for years had gone suddenly, desperately still the moment he touched her.
By the time she dressed and made her way toward the hall, she had already heard his voice once from the yard below, only a low murmur as the watch changed. Even that sent a swift, humiliating current through her.
She could pick him out now without seeing him. By cadence. By the measured weight of his words. By the way he wasted neither sound nor motion.
She hated knowing that. She hated more how much she loved it.
The hall was stirring when she entered. Tomas stood with two ledgers open, listening to the steward complain about spoiled grain. Brennach spoke with Seamus about the western holdings. Servants moved with trays and baskets, the morning’s work gathering shape.
And Donal stood near the hearth, speaking with Father Cillian.
