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Spoken by the very devil himself.
Controlled? The two of them?
Her chest tightened.
There were secrets she needed to keep and if she didn’t gain some semblance of control, she would break.
Something she was determined not to do.
{ Chapter 8 }
”It’s still chilly in here.”
“It’s a large room to heat.” Resting on his heels as he jabbed at the coals at the base of the fire he’d started, Domnall lifted himself to standing and leaned the fire poker against the grey marble that lined the hearth. Theodora nudged his leg from where she sat next to him and with one scruff behind Theodora’s left ear, he turned to Karta. Where she’d disappeared to for the last twenty minutes, he didn’t know.
She’d stopped just inside the doorway to the drawing room. She hadn’t yet removed her cloak, the dark folds of it still swallowing her whole. He’d removed his great coat when he’d come in, but for how warm he usually was, even he could feel the snap of cold hanging in the air of the drawing room. “Should I go up and start the fire in your bedroom?”
“No, this room will be fine. The settee is comfortable enough to sleep upon.” She lifted her hands from the drape of the cloak and held up a thick-cut crystal decanter full of amber liquid and two glasses that clinked together. “I tried several times to light the fire in the kitchens to warm up water for tea, but my fingers wouldn’t cooperate. So this will have to do.”
He resisted lifting an eyebrow. His flask had been noticeably lighter when she’d handed it back to him outside. But if a touch more spirits would take the cold blue from her lips and quiver from her fingers, he wasn’t about to argue with the method.
Three long strides and he was across the drawing room to her. “It’s what I would prefer, as it is.” He needed something to steady his hands against touching her—he’d not but minutes ago promised her control inside the house, so now he had to deliver.
He took the glasses from her grip and set them down on the side table next to the settee he’d shifted into place in front of the fire.
She moved next to him, filling both tumblers half full with the brandy from the decanter.
She handed him one, then motioned to the fire. “Come, sit?”
His brow furrowed. “You are encouraging us to be in the same room, to sit on the same cushion?”
“I am. Just being apart from you for a few minutes has given me time to breathe. Time to regain my equilibrium.” Her hand wrapped around her glass. “And now that I have my senses back about me, I realize I’m being rude if I demand that you return to the abbey post-haste. For I am grateful that you appeared when you did. I do not have quite the same capability that you do for clearing that snow.” She lifted her glass to him. “And I believe that the mare I borrowed is the most thankful of all.”
The side of his mouth quirked upward. “I didn’t imagine you would be thanking me for following you. You are thanking me, are you not?”
She nodded, a wry smile crossing her lips as she moved to sit on the settee. “Yes, I am. And why would I not?”
“You’re stubborn.”
A guffaw left her mouth. “Yes, but I’m also older and wiser than I once was and my fingers were about to crack off of my hands out there, so I’m not so stubborn I cannot thank you.”
He couldn’t hide a smile as he went to the fire. He turned the top log, scruffed Theodora’s head as she splayed onto her belly close to the fire, and then moved to sit on the opposite end of the settee.
Taking a sip of the brandy, he studied her profile. She was as beautiful as the day he had first seen her—more so, even, as she had the look of the world about her. The confidence that only times of sorrow can bring a person—confidence in the quiet acceptance that the world is not all sunshine and rainbows. Her gaze was decidedly set forward, her fingertips tapping on the glass.
“Ye know it’s Christmas the day after tomorrow,” he said.
She glanced at him, then quickly shifted her stare back to the fire as a shiver shook her body. “Yes. And I thought to be alone. Well, alone with Maggie.”
“Why alone? You did not think to travel back to your father’s home?”
She shook her head. “No. Certainly not back to father. Christmastide hasn’t been happy there since my grandmother died. And the sadness of that is most poignant there.”
“Your grandmother—you never truly told me about her, just that she raised ye after your mother died in childbirth.”
Her right cheek lifted in a mischievous smile. “Well, there was never any time for long conversations between us when we were alone together. The short walks. The moments stolen in the stables.” She took a sip of her brandy, her brown eyes warm honey as she looked at him. “It was hard to think of much else besides wanting to touch you.”
He chuckled, a grin taking over his face. “There was that.”
