“One more soul? What did ye mean to say?” Her eyes were blazing now, wet and furious. “Finish it. I’m the one who’s forever beggin’ folk for the truth, am I nae? So give it me. One more soulwhat, Ragnall?”
“It doesnae matter.”
“It’s the only thing that matters.” She crossed the room fast and stopped a handsbreadth from him, glaring up into his face, close enough that he could see her pulse going wild in her throat.
“Ye stand there tellin’ me ye feel nothin’, with yer hands shakin’ and yer jaw set like a man holdin’ a door shut against a flood. Ye’re the worst liar I’ve ever seen, and I was raised by a grand one, so I’d ken.” Her breath hitched. “Tell me ye feel nothin’ for me. Say it again. Look at me and say it, and I will believe ye and never trouble ye with it again.”
He opened his mouth to say it. But he could not.
It had cost him every coin he had to say it once, and now she was close enough that he could feel the heat of her, could smell the heather in her hair, and her mouth was right there, furious and trembling and asking, and thirty hard years of iron discipline simply went to water in his hands.
He kissed her.
There was no gentleness in it, none of the kirk’s soft restraint. It was the wedding-night fire and worse. It was two nights of lyingrigid and aching a handsbreadth from her in the dark, which was nothing at all, which was no time at all, which had been quite long enough to undo the work of ten years. It was the whole black weight of everything he would not say, poured into the one act he could not keep himself from.
His hands slid up into her hair, and she made a small wrecked sound against his mouth and gave it straight back to him, fierce and clumsy and furious, her fists curling into his shirt and yanking him down.
For one endless burning moment, there was no feud and no fear and no dead lying between them. There was only this. Only her.
He could have had her. He knew it. She was his wife, and she was kissing him as if she would die if he stopped, and he could have lifted her and carried her to a bed and ended the whole long torment of it.
Which was the very reason he tore himself away. He stepped back, breathing like a man hauled half-drowned from a river, and put the width of the room between them before he could change his mind.
“That,” he said raggedly, “was a mistake we shouldnae repeat. The blame’s mine.”
Olivia swayed where he’d left her, her lips swollen, her eyes wide. “Ragnall?—”
“Ye were right.” He could not look at her. He looked at the wall, the floor, the cold hearth, anywhere but at her stricken face. “Ye said it yerself, that first week. We should stay apart while we serve out this edict. I was a fool nae to heed ye. I will have a chamber prepared for ye, a good one. Ye willnae have to share me bed nor suffer me company again. It’s better for both of us. It’s safer.”
“Safer,” she repeated. Her voice had gone very small.
“Aye.”
“And what I felt just now… What ye felt… That’s?—”
“That’s a thing we’ll both forget,” he said, “if we’ve any sense left between us. Goodnight, Olivia.”
There. It’s done. She will hate ye now, and she will be safe in the hatin’. That’s the kindest thing ye’ll ever do for her, ye coward. Ye great lyin’ coward. Let go. Let go now, while one of ye still can.
CHAPTER 23
Ragnall did not sleep.He had not intended to.
He went down to the training yard at first light, before the castle woke, because steel was the one cure he had ever found for a night spent loving a woman he could not have, and he had a great deal of loving to beat out of himself.
He was not the only person outside early. He turned the corner of the armory and froze, for there at the edge of the yard, in the faint gray light, stood his sister.
Kate. Out of doors. Watching Alastair put a green lad through his paces with a practice blade. Laughing. A real laugh, low and rusty and astonished at itself, at some daft jest his man-at-arms had made.
And Alastair—great, solid, dependable Alastair—who had stood at Ragnall’s shoulder through every black hour of the past year, was looking at her with his whole honest heart in his stupid face,as he had looked at her since the two of them were sixteen and Ragnall had pretended for a decade not to see it.
Some knot loosened in Ragnall’s chest, just slightly, for the first time since the nursery.
Kate took herself off when she saw him, with a small private smile that said he had seen a great deal more than she would have liked, and he took up a blunted blade and faced his friend across the cold yard.
For a while, they simply fought, the good clean ring of steel against steel driving everything else clean out of his head.
Alastair was the better swordsman on his best day. Ragnall was the better on his worst, because Ragnall fought as if losing it would cost him dearly. Which, this morning, it very nearly did.
