Page 19 of The Merciless Laird
It was the most unguarded she'd seen him.
In a courtyard full of violence, he'd been composed.
On a dark road with a stranger pressed against his chest he'd been composed. Singing badly into a forest so she didn't have to ask for what she needed, still composed.
But this small, helpless, quickly hidden laugh, this was something else.
She faced forward and told herself that the warmth in her chest was only the cold finally easing.
It wasn't the cold.
CHAPTER FIVE
"Here."
Matilda stopped walking and looked at where Ivar was pointing.
A flat stretch of ground set back from where his men were making camp, far enough that their sounds came to her muffled—the low voices, the scrape of equipment, the settled noise of men who had done this many times––close enough that she could see the shapes of them against the firelight.
"That's further than the others," she said.
"Aye."
"Why?"
He looked at her with those dark eyes that gave very little back. "Because I said so."
She opened her mouth. Closed it.
She was too tired to argue about tent placement and she suspected he knew that, so she took the bedroll Torvald held out to her and walked to the spot he'd indicated and didn't say another word about it.
The tent was small and practical and smelled of pine resin and damp canvas.
She got it upright on the third attempt, which she considered a reasonable result for someone who had never put up a tent in her life and wasn't planning to admit that.
When she turned around Ivar was crouched behind her, wordlessly repositioning two of the pegs she'd driven in at the wrong angle. She decided she hadn't seen it and ducked inside.
She could hear him settling outside.
She lay on her back on the bedroll and stared at the canvas above her and listened.
The camp had gone quiet quickly, the way it did with men who knew how to sleep fast and lightly, ready to wake the same way.
The fire crackled somewhere close.
Further out, the forest breathed in the dark. Branches shifting, leaves turning over, the small constant sounds of things that lived in it.
A branch shifted closer than the others.
She sat up.
It was nothing. She knew it was nothing.
She had enough experience with her own mind by now to know the difference between a sound that meant something and a sound her body had simply decided to treat as though it did.
Eight years of reading threats had made her very good at cataloguing and only moderately better at letting go. She lay back down. The fire crackled. An ember shifted. Somewhere in the dark, an owl made its opinion known and went silent.
Another sound. Smaller. Closer to the left.
