“Kate—”
“Daenae.” A small shake of her head. “Daenae be kind about it. I’ll come apart, and I’ve a wee one to feed.”
They sat.
“Now,” Kate said after a while, “ask me the thing ye actually want to ask me. Ye’ve been circlin’ it since we sat down, and it’s makin’ me dizzy.”
Olivia laughed wetly and rubbed at her face with her sleeve.
“Do ye think he feels it too?” she asked. “Yer braither. Under all his fine words about me bein’ his wife. Do ye think, when he looks at me, he sees what they see? A Blythe. Me faither’s daughter. The enemy he’s saddled with for the sake of a truce.” Her voice dropped. “He’s kind to me. But kindness isnae the same as—I daenae even ken what it’s the same as. Forget it. Forget I asked.”
“Ye shouldnae be askin’ it of anyone but me, wife.” Ragnall’s voice came from the door.
Olivia lifted her head to find him standing in the doorway with one shoulder against the frame. She had no idea how long he had been there or how much he had heard. His face was unreadable in the dim nursery light, and her heart pounded up into her throat.
Kate rose at once, gathering up the baby and a fistful of the dog’s scruff, her eyes bright with what might have been hope or warning.
“I will take these two down for their dinner,” she said, and was gone before Olivia could beg her to stay, drawing the door nearly shut at her back.
And then Olivia was alone with her husband, with the question she had not quite dared to ask hanging raw in the air between them, and he was looking at her in a way she could not name, and could not bear, and could not look away from.
CHAPTER 22
He had not intendedto speak. He had gone to the nursery to tell her about the maids, to say that he had already heard about the cold shoulder they were giving her, and that he would see it stopped, that she only needed to come to him. He had come to be useful, which was his only safe way of caring for her.
He had not meant to overhear his sister’s confession, nor his wife’s small broken question. And now he stood in the room with the truth of it burning a hole clean through his chest, and his wife was on her feet with her red hair loose and her eyes bright and brave and frightened, and he knew, with a sick lurch, that he was about to do the hardest thing he had ever done in his life.
He was about to drive her away. To save them both.
She did not come to him. She stood her ground in the small room with her chin up, the way she faced down everything, and she asked it plainly.
“Do ye feel the same as yer clan does? About me. About me blood.” Her voice was steady, and the steadiness cost her. “I need the truth, Ragnall. Nae the kind word, but the truth. When ye look at me, am I yer wife? Or am I only a Blythe ye are makin’ the best of?”
Ragnall. His own name, in her mouth, simple and unadorned. Not me Laird, not Cairn, not the murderer she had called him at the gate. Just Ragnall, the way a wife said a husband’s name, the way no one had said it to him in years without wanting something from him. It sank under his ribs, past every guard he had, and lodged there.
And there it was—the open door. He only had to walk through it. Just cross the three feet between them, take her face in his hands, and tell her what he had been lying awake with every night since the wedding.
That she had gotten completely under his guard in a way no one had managed in thirty years, and he did not know how to let her go back out. That he wanted her beyond all reason and safety. That the sight of her with the bairn and the dog in the morning light stirred something in his chest that he had no business feeling.
He thought of Kate.
He thought of his sister’s bones knitting crooked, of the half-year of silence, of the cost of one woman loving one man with her whole reckless heart and nothing kept back.
He thought of how love had been the very knife that gutted his family, over and over, the whole length of his life, and how he was the last one left standing, and how if he let himself care for this fierce ungovernable woman and it ruined her, ruinedthem, there would be no one left to carry up the pieces.
“Nay,” he said.
He watched the word land. He watched it sink in.
“I daenae feel the same as me clan,” he said, and his voice came out flat and cold and even, the Laird’s voice, the one that gave nothing away, and he hated himself with a completeness that astonished him.
“I harbor nay hatred for ye. I told ye that the first day, and it’s still true. But ye asked me for the truth, so here it is. I daenae want to feel anythin’ for ye, lassie. Nae the one way nor the other. I cannae afford it. I’ve watched what the feelin’ does in this castle.”
“What do ye mean?”
“I mean that I will keep ye safe, and I will keep ye honored, and I will keep me word to the last letter of it. But daenae ask me to want ye, Olivia. I willnae do that to either of us. I willnae be the death of one more soul. I…”
He stopped. He had said too much. The last word had very nearly got out of him.
