She came apart a third time with him buried deep inside her and his hand between them driving her through it, clenched tight, shuddering and pulsing around him. It was his name on her lips and no other, crying out broken into the darkness, and that was the moment that finally pushed him over the edge.
His whole body went rigid and then broke, his face pressed hard to the curve of her neck as he spilled into her with a sound that was half a groan and half her name, his arms caging her to him as if he feared the pleasure would tear the two of them apart.
For a long while afterward, neither of them spoke. He had rolled to take his weight off her and pulled her against his side, her cheek resting on his heart, his hand tracing slow, gentle paths up and down her spine, and the candle burned low. She felt more at peace than she ever believed a body could feel in this life.
“Olivia.” His voice rumbled under her ear.
She felt him gather himself, felt the old fear rise in him one final time, and felt him set his shoulder to it and shove it aside for good.
“I love ye. I ken it’s a poor time to be learnin’ the sayin’ of such a thing, with me the age I am and never once said it to a livin’ soul, but I willnae keep it behind me teeth another hour. I love ye. I have for a good while, and have been too much of a coward to admit it, even to meself in the dark. There. It’s out. And I find the roof’s nae fallen after all.”
She lifted her head to look at him, and her eyes were wet, and her smile was the sweet, unguarded thing he had spent a month coaxing out of her by inches.
“I love ye too,” she said. “Ye great locked door of a man. I love ye. And I will say it as often as ye need to hear it, till ye stop bein’ afraid of it, and then I will say it a while longer for the pleasure of watchin’ ye go soft when I do.”
“That’ll be a long while yet, I warn ye.”
“Good.” She settled her head back over his heart and felt his arm tighten around her, sure and unafraid. “I’ve nowhere else to be, and I never will.”
He lay a long time in the dark after her breathing had gone slow and even, his enemy’s daughter asleep in the crook of his arm with her hand fisted loose against his chest, and he stared up at the black beams of the tower he had once thought to keep her prisoner in, and he waited for the old dread to come and tell him what he now stood to lose.
It did not come.
For the first night in ten years, the locked room in him stood open and empty and unafraid, and he pulled the plaid up over both of them and slept the whole night through.
EPILOGUE
Six months on,Cairn Castle had never in its long, grim history seen a fuss made like the one it made over the first birthday of a bairn nobody had even troubled to name for the first month of her life.
Olivia stood in the middle of the Great Hall with that same bairn on her hip and looked at what half a year had wrought, and thought her heart might not be big enough for the size of it.
The hall was hung with greenery, and the last of the autumn brambles and swags of Crawford green and Blythe blue twisted together the whole length of the beams.
There were bannocks stacked in towers, and a great pot of Scotch broth going at the fire, and black bun cut in dark, rich slabs, and a wee honey cake in the middle of it all that Cook had guarded from the hound with her life since the gray of the forenoon.
A fiddler and a piper had struck up together in the corner, and Blythe and Cairn folk danced the reel between the tables with no more thought to it than if they had done so their whole lives. On the high wall, the two clans’ colors hung side by side, where a year past, there had hung only Crawford green above a barred and watchful gate.
Her mother had come, and Lucas, riding openly under Blythe colors to a Cairn feast, which would have been madness a year ago and was only a homecoming now.
Anne had also arrived, wearing her spectacles, her sharp eyes missing nothing and her quiet mouth curved in the small private smile she reserved for those she loved. She had taken one look at Olivia among the Cairn folk, who now called her their Lady without a hint of hesitation, squeezed her hand tightly, and said nothing—yet, in her own way, saying everything.
Her mother found her in the thick of it, the way she always could. She pressed a warm, dry kiss to Olivia’s cheek and stood a moment at her side, taking in the two colors twined the length of the beams and the Cairn wife laughing at some jest of Lucas’s over the broth.
“I told ye once,” she said softly, “that things happen for the reasons they happen, and ye nearly bit me head off for sayin’ it, as I recall.” There was no reproach in it, only the deep, settled calm of a woman who had buried a husband and a son and gone on believing in kindness all the same.
“I willnae say I am glad of the road that carried ye here, lass. Some roads are too dear-bought to be glad of, and I will grieve yer faither and yer braither for the rest of me days. But I am glad beyond any tellin’ of the place it set ye down.”
Olivia had no answer to that. She only leaned her head against her mother’s shoulder, there in the middle of the loud, bright hall, and let herself be held like a girl again.
And then Kate came through the crowd toward them with the birthday girl on her hip, Olivia taking Rosie in her own arms as soon as they reached her.
Elspeth did not let go of Olivia, but Olivia felt her arm tighten and then go still.
“She willnae come to me at all now,” Kate laughed, holding out her arms and getting a decided turn of a chubby shoulder for her trouble.
Rosie buried her rosy face in Olivia’s neck and gripped a fistful of Olivia’s bodice and made her opinion of being handed off perfectly plain.
“A year I’ve spent healin’, and the wee traitor’s decided in that same year she’d liefer have her auntie than her own ma.”
