“This.” He gestured to the whole of her, helpless, furious, as if she were a riddle set before him for the express purpose of tormenting him.
“Everyone in this castle has lost their wits over ye. The bairn willnae be parted from ye, screams the roof down when ye leave the room. Me grandmaither schemes for ye behind me back, and badly. She is nay good at hidin’ it. Me sister, who’s nae spoken a single word to a livin’ soul since the leaves turned, talks. To ye. About a gown.”
His voice rose. “Even me own dog sleeps across yer door of a night and willnae so much as turn his shaggy head when I call him. Me own dog, Olivia.”
She stared at him. And then, because the day had been far too long and the fear far too large and the sudden relief that his fury was aimed at a matter so perfectly, gloriously absurd was so enormous, she felt her mouth begin to twitch at one corner.
“Did ye nae want them to like me, then?”
“Nay, I… That’s nae… I?—”
“Ye’re jealous.” She felt it bloom up bright in her chest, light and delighted. “Ye great glowerin’ Laird of Clan Cairn. Ye’re jealous because I am more likable than ye are. In yer own keep.”
For one taut breath, she truly thought he would roar at her. Instead, the scarred edge of his mouth, the one that always pulled, tugged upward against his every visible effort to stop it, and a charge passed between them across the firelit room that was not war at all, that had nothing of the feud in it, and they were both nearly smiling.
It changed the air in the small room. It changed nearly everything, Olivia felt with a lurch.
“I think,” Olivia said, more quietly now, the laughter gone soft, “that I may have been too hard on ye. From the very start. I only ever kent one side of the tale, ye see. Me own side. And I held it that tight in me fist all these long months that there was nay room left in me hand for any other to fit.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “That’s what war does to folk. It hands every soul one side of the truth and tells them, soft and certain, that it’s the whole truth.”
“But that cannae change the past, can it?”
“Nay,” he said. “Nothin’ can. I’ve tried.”
“So it cannae change the future.” She did not know why she said it. She only knew that she wanted, suddenly and badly, against all her good sense, to hear what he would answer.
“Can it nae?” he said, very softly.
The three small words went through her like a draught of warm water on a cold night.
“Nay,” she breathed, and did not believe it even as it left her lips. “So ye’re still aware of me rule, then?”
“Aye.” His dark eyes had gone steady and certain on hers, and would not be moved. “Nay touchin’.”
“Good.”
“But ye’ll share me bed for the first month.”
She blinked at him. “I beg yer pardon?”
“I willnae have two clans whisperin’ that we never consummated the marriage and so defied the Council’s edict.” He said it as reasonably as a man discussing the price of grain, which made it all infinitely worse. “Ye will sleep in me chambers. We’ll touch nay more than ye yerself wish, which is to say nae at all. But ye’ll be there when the maids come in at dawn, and ye’ll be there when they go at dusk, and if ye can manage to survive a full month of me, lassie, I give ye me word that we’ll never speak of it again so long as we live.”
She had crossed the room without once deciding to. Or perhaps he had. There was no longer any safe and sensible distance left between them, only the small, warm, dangerous space where two people stand when they have forgotten to be afraid of one another.
“Ye’re…” She had to stop and begin again, because her voice had gone unsteady. “Ye are awfully arrogant for a man who murdered me?—”
“Yer family. Aye. I ken it.” He did not flinch from the word now, did not look away from her. He looked down into her upturned face, and the firelight moved gold over the scar, the dark steady eyes, and the mouth she was, to her horror, looking at. “But that man isnae the one standin’ before ye, Olivia.”
“Then who is?” It came out scarcely more than a whisper.
“The one ye’ll wed in the mornin’,” he said. “The one who’ll keep ye, and guard ye with his life, and never once raise his hand to ye so long as he draws breath in his body. The one who’d very much like, just at this moment, to stop bein’ so cursed honorable about all of it.” His gaze dropped to her lips and lifted slowly back to her eyes. “If ye’d only let him.”
She should have stepped back. She had a great many excellent reasons to step back, a whole muddy yard full of them, and she could not for the life of her call a single one to mind, because he was so close to her now that she could feel his warm breath brush her cheek, and her own breath had gone shallow andquick, and the whole wide world had narrowed down to the space of a kiss not yet taken.
He did not take it. He waited. That was what undid her in the end—that he waited. So she rose on her tiptoes and closed the last of the distance herself.
The kiss was nothing like she had imagined, and she was startled to realize she had imagined it. It started gentle, a question pressed softly against her mouth, and when she did not pull away, it stopped asking.
