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There was nothing left for women, nothing meaningful, and certainly nothing moving.
Which is why he was surprised to find that, notwithstanding his current, dire circumstances, and their direct connection to those consequential duties, he was enjoying the distraction Senna provided, with her bright eyes and bright wit and the bright, surprising things she kept saying and doing.
“Why do ye do that, Senna?”
She flipped open the flap of her pack and knelt carefully upon it, as if it were a small table linen, then started rebraiding her hair. As her fingers twirled in and out of the reddish-yellow silk, he kept remembering how it had felt, crushed in his palms. How she’d arched her body for him, and—
“Why do I do what?” she asked.
He dragged his gaze from her hair. “Accounts. Ledgers. Hide yourself from the sun.”
He’d never known a woman who kept accounts. And he could not imagine why she would choose to be bound up in a line of numbers, clicking wooden markers across a stone, when she could be out in the sunrise she just admitted to missing for the past three years.
“The books need to be kept.”
Ah. Well, then.
She adopted a look of exasperation. “The business is large, ever expanding,” she explained in a tone of…was she reprimanding him? “You’ve no idea the work it takes, Finian.”
He stretched out on the ground, head resting on his crossed palms, grinning a little. “I’d know if I loved sheep as much as ye do.”
A moment of shocked silence ensued. “I do not love sheep. Not a’tall. I love—”
Then, mystery of mysteries, she faltered.
“Money?” he suggested.
A pale flush slid up her cheeks.
Which is why, even if he had been inclined for more than a tumble—which he most certainly was not—her all-but-admission that money ruled her world should have been enough to cool his ardor. His experience with women said only that Senna was more honest in admitting to it.
It didn’t make her any less mercenary. But it definitely made him less interested.
Or should have.
“’Tisn’t funny.” She was all about reprimand now. The edges of her mouth puckered around disapproval. She picked up a stick and began shredding it. He could see the light of determination in her eye. Or mayhap it was something not so nice.
It mattered naught, either way. Mercenary or saint, she was not his.
“Wool is highly lucrative business,” she declaimed. “I have been building it for…I know every penny that comes in and goes out…I am in charge of everything. I hire the carters and wagons. I ensure we’ve stalls at the fairs. I negotiate the contracts. Barns, ewes, safe conducts, I arrange them all. I charter the ships. I hire the laborers. I pay the creditors. I—”
She must have hit some internal sea wall, for the deluge of instruction on the merits of the wool business—or perhaps of her—came to an abrupt halt.
He waited.
A moment later, staring at the ground, she said in a quiet voice, “I’m awfully good at it.”
He was certain she was. The best. But her face looked as if it had been carved from wood, and her voice was hoarse, like sand had swept over it in a storm.
“Awfully, is it?” he echoed.
She stared at the stick in her hands. “You’ve no idea.”
She said it so quietly he might not have heard, her words like moths fluttering away from a light extinguished. Then she tipped her chin up with a sudden shove, as you might if you were preparing to lift a heavy weight.
“I know about awful things,” he said, surprising himself. He did, indeed, know of dark things. He simply never spoke of them.
She considered him out of the corner of her eye. “Do you?”
