Page 53 of Owned by the Scarred Laird

That his brother — reckless, distant, near a stranger by the time either of them was grown men — was no longer here.

That their father had sent Rory away as a boy so Edward would harden into something useful, and the two of them had spent the years since paying for that decision in different currencies.

That Rory's wife, shattered by grief, had wrapped the boy in whatever cloth was nearby and had taken him to the fortress gates in the dark rather than see him grow into the face of a dead man.

That Edward had stood in the cold that morning holding a crying eight-week-old and realized, with a clarity unrelated to duty, that he was not going to give the child to a tenant, and that the closest he would ever come to knowing his own brother again was in the shape of that boy's face.

It was not guilt over anything he had done. It was the harder thing — knowing there had been time, once, to mend what their father broke between them, and that he'd let the years pass instead.

Chloe was not ready for that story yet. He was not ready to give it.

When she was, he would tell her. He was beginning to understand, with considerable discomfort, that there would be a when.

“Ye performed a noble deed,” she said softly.

He snapped his eyes to hers. The armor slipped for a fraction of a second, something unplanned softening the hard lines around his mouth.

“The lad required a protector,” he said.

“Aye.” She lowered her gaze to her bowl, her voice quieter. “So did I, once. It matters more than ye ken. A man decidin’ ye are worth the labor. Even when yer existence brings nothin’ but trouble.”

He held her gaze across the hearth, something burning in his chest that he had no intention of naming.

“Eat yer supper,” he growled, tearing his eyes away. “Before the grease turns cold.”

Chloe swallowed her broth in silence.

The bed was dangerously small.

Edward took the side nearest the damp stone wall without a word of discussion.

Chloe was already tucked beneath the heavy wool blankets, her splinted ankle propped on a bolster, her hands resting tightly in her lap. She shifted toward the outer edge to grant him whatever inches she could spare. Edward sat on the edge of the frame, kicked off his heavy boots, and blew out the tallow candle, plunging them into absolute darkness.

They lay rigid in the blackness.

Through the thick stone wall, the roar of the sea was a constant rhythmic drag and surge, quieter now that the midnight tide had turned, accompanied by the muffled thud of fiddle music and laughter from the taproom below.

A long moment passed.

“Ye’re nae asleep,” he said into the dark.

“Nay.”

Another silence. The fiddle played on below them.

“Does it trouble ye?” His voice was rough, careful. “Sharin’ a bed with me?”

She did not answer immediately. She stared at the invisible rafters, felt the heat of him across the narrow gap between their bodies, and thought about lying.

“It troubles me,” she said at last, “that it doesnae.”

The silence that followed was absolute.

She noticed his breathing changed, a small, almost unnoticed shift. He stayed silent. But the darkness between them now felt different, heavy with the weight of what she had just given him and could not take back.

She closed her eyes.

Edward’s breathing was slow and perfectly even. But she knew he was not sleeping; his muscles were too tight, the air between them too charged.