His hand rose to cradle the back of her head, gentle and reverent, at odds with the raw need she could feel restrained behind it, and she made a small sound against his mouth that she would never admit to afterward, along with his low groan that she felt all the way down to her toes.
She had never been kissed before, not once. She had spent her whole life keeping men well away from her, suitors and hopeful fools alike, at arm’s length and farther.
And now here was the one man she had most cause to hate, kissing her as if he had been starving for years and yet determined to be a gentleman about the meal, and the contradiction of it was the most ruinous feeling she had ever known.
It was that very thought, that ruinous thought, that brought her back to herself.
She broke away from him, both of them breathing hard, her fingers pressed to her swollen lips as if to hold the kiss in or push it off. She truly could not have said which.
“I-I…” she stuttered. “I have to—the gown—me maither—they will be lookin’ for me?—”
She fled. She clutched the loch-blue skirts in both fists and hurried out of his study like the coward she had never been, rushing down the dark corridor with her heart pounding like a war drum beneath the borrowed silk, her lips still burning from the kiss, and her carefully built world tipping completely off its axis and tumbling into the dark.
Behind her, low and rough, edged with something that might have been laughter and might just as easily have been despair, Ragnall called, “See ye at the weddin’, Olivia.”
CHAPTER 10
Ragnall did not movefor a long while after her footsteps had faded down the corridor.
The fire had burned down to a low red eye in the grate. Across the room, the chair she had not sat in stood empty, and the door she had fled through hung wide in the dark.
Tattie, who’d come inside some time after Olivia left, lifted his great head off the hearthrug. He looked at the open door. He looked back at Ragnall with what could only be called reproach and released the long, gusting sigh of a hound whose favorite soul in all the castle had just walked out of the room.
“Aye,” Ragnall told the dog. “I ken it.”
He could still taste her. That was the whole trouble, laid out plain. He had kissed his share of women and forgotten most of them within a fortnight, and he already knew, with the flat grimcertainty he brought to weather and to war, that he was not going to forget this one if he lived to be a hundred.
One kiss. One foolish kiss the night before the weddin’, and here ye stand like a green lad who’s never been touched in his life. Get a hold of yerself, man.
He dragged a hand down his face, over the old scar that drew tight at the corner of his mouth whenever he frowned. He was frowning now.
He knew this road. He had walked it once already, the whole black length of it, and he had carried what waited at the end of it in his arms up a long flight of stairs. She had weighed almost nothing back then, his sister. All her bright bones gone to splinters inside her.
That was the price of letting a person matter past all good sense. Kate had loved like that, with her whole reckless heart held out in both hands and not one scrap of it kept back. It had very nearly killed her, and the man who did the killing had shared a name and a hearth with the woman now sleeping somewhere under Ragnall’s roof.
Ye can keep her safe. Fed, and warm, and guarded, and honored before the whole clan till the day ye die. That much is yer duty, and ye’ll do it gladly. But ye’ll nae do this. Ye willnae put into any woman’s hand the blade that almost gutted yer sister and call the wound love.
It was a solid, well-made decision. He had made it before, several times, right here in this room. It held firm until a fiery-haired hellion rose on her tiptoes, dressed in a gown the shade of deep water, and kissed him as if to settle the dispute with that gesture.
He needed work. Whenever his mind turned traitor on him, work had always been the cure, and there was a task he could see to tonight that was real, and useful, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the burning print of her mouth on his.
He would go ask the healer about his sister. Kate would want to feel better by morning. It was a good reason to leave this room, and it also happened to be true.
The castle slept around him as he went, banked low and quiet, the rushes hushing underfoot and the torches guttering in their brackets.
He passed the nursery door and slowed down without meaning to. Within, he could hear the soft burr of the night nurse, and beneath it the small sleeping snuffle of a bairn who was not his. She had her grandmother’s dark hair and her dead father’s worst blood and, God help them all, Olivia’s clear eyes looking up from her round wee face.
He stood there for a moment, his hand flat against the door, and did not go in. Then he walked on.
The healer’s room sat at the cold north end of the keep, and he could see a strip of warm light beneath the door. Brigid kept late hours. She always had, even as a bairn, when her father was healer before her and the pair of them ran wild together through these same corridors.
He knocked once and let himself in. The room was small and dim, green with the smell of drying herbs, bunches of them strung from the rafters. A single tallow candle burned near a stub. Brigid was bent over her worktable, grinding something to a paste with a slow and even hand.
“Me Laird.” She did not look up. “Come callin’ the night before ye wed another woman. There’s a thing to set the auld wives’ tongues waggin’ for a twelvemonth.”
“I came to ask after Kate.”
That lifted her head. Whatever edge had been gathering in her face smoothed clean away, and for a breath, she was only the healer’s daughter who had trailed after him around the castle since the pair of them were small enough to hide in the meal chests, the one who had wept harder than he had at her father’s burial.
