And that was the whole of it. That was the entire conversation.
He sat at the head of the table, and she sat at the foot of it with the whole grim length of oak between them, and he askedAlastair about the barley, and he asked Maisie about her hip, and he did not once, not one single time during the whole meal, look at her.
It was unbearable. She had not known a man could be so loud with his silence.
She watched him subtly. She had become horribly good at that. The scarred hand around his cup. The way he listened to Maisie with his head tilted, patient, the way he only ever was with his grandmother.
Once, only once, when she reached for the bread, his eyes lifted and caught hers and held for a beat too long, and something went through her like a bell being struck. But then he looked away and said something to Alastair about the drainage in the low field, and she sat there with her heart racing like a hare and a piece of bread in her hand that she had no intention of eating.
She got up before dessert was served.
He caught her in the passage. Of course he did.
“Olivia.”
“Me Laird.”
“Daenae.” His jaw was tight. “Daenaeme Lairdme. Nae after.”
“What would ye have me call ye?” She rounded on him. “Ye put me out of yer bed. Ye had a room prepared for me by a maid who couldnae look at me while she did it. Ye had itarrangedlike a delivery of grain, and I’m to sit at yer table and make small talk about the barley and call ye by yer given name?”
“It was for yer sake.”
“Och, it wasfor me sake.” The laugh came out of her jagged. “Ye’re all the same, the whole pack of ye. Elders and lairds and braithers. Every wretched thing that has ever been done to me was donefor me sake, and nae one of ye has once had the courtesy to ask me what me sake actually is.”
“Then tell me,” he said. “Go on. Ye’re never short of words. Tell me what ye want, Olivia, and I’ll do it, and God help us both.”
She opened her mouth. But she could not say it. It sat there in her throat, enormous, the whole shape of it, and she could not put a single sound to it, because to sayI want ye to take me back up those stairswas to hand him everything and to admit that she had lost, and she had been losing steadily for a fortnight, and she was not ready to lay down the last of her weapons in a cold passage with a maid listening around the corner.
“I want to go to me room,” she said. “Menewroom. Ye’ll ken where it is. Ye chose it.”
His face closed like a door.
“Aye,” he said. “I did.”
She did not go down for supper the second night. Nor the third.
Rosie had discovered that if she pulled herself up on her uncle’s knee and let go, she would fall over, and she had decided that this was the finest game ever invented.
Ragnall caught her for the ninth time. She shrieked with joy and set about doing it again.
“Ye’ll drop her,” said Kate from the fireplace.
“I willnae drop her.”
“Ye’re nae lookin’ at her.”
“I am lookin’ at her.”
“Ragnall,” said his sister, with the awful patience of a woman who had known him all his life, “ye have been lookin’ at that corner of the room for the better part of an hour, and there’s nay bairn in it.”
He did not turn round. He was aware of the exact degree to which his ears had gone hot.
Olivia was in the window seat with a book she was not reading. He knew she was not reading it because, in an hour, she had turned two pages, and she had been on the second one so long that the light had moved off it. She had her feet tucked up under her, and Tattie’s great head lay across her ankles like a paperweight, and the last of the sun was coming through the glass and doing something to her hair that he had no words for and was not looking for words for.
He had put her out of his bed to keep her safe from him.
It was, he was beginning to understand, the stupidest thing he had done in his entire life, and he had once ridden into a broken gate to fight a man over a woman’s honor with three of his own men and no plan whatsoever.
