Page 63 of The Merciless Laird
"A costly one."
"Aye," he said. "Most useful ones are."
She was quiet for a moment, still tracing.
He could feel the exact position of her fingertip, the way you felt a flame held close. Not burning, not yet, but the heat of it impossible to ignore.
Nobody had touched that scar in fifteen years, either by accident or on purpose. He hadn't let anyone close enough to find it. Yet here she was, and what she was doing with it was not pity; she was just learning it.
The same way she'd learned the keep and learned his men and learned the garden and the burn and the sound of the tide off the north cliffs. Quietly, thoroughly, with a dedication that felt as though it was something worth knowing.
Something in his chest that he had kept at a careful distance for fifteen years moved closer without his permission.
His mind cast back to the rule. He had made it in the storage room the first night and held it on the road and in the tent and on the crossing and in the kitchen, and he was keeping it here. He did not take more than she offered, and he did not let what was happening in his chest show on his face more than he could reasonably prevent. He was aware, in a way that was becoming difficult to manage, that he was preventing less than he'd intended.
What he wanted was not complicated.
It was, in fact, entirely simple, which was its own kind of problem.
He wanted to lift his hand from the rim of the tub and put it against her face and bring her mouth to his, and he wanted to do it slowly. He wanted the steam and the firelight and all the time she needed and none of the waiting.
He wanted to stop being careful. He had been careful for almost two weeks, and careful had cost him something, and he was running a balance on it that was approaching its limit.
He kept his hands where they were.
She moved her finger to his collarbone. The line of his shoulder. Her wrist dipped close to the surface of the water and hewatched her face instead of her hand—the small line between her brows, the focused, genuine attention she gave things she was actually trying to understand rather than things she was performing interest in—and then he looked at the wall instead because watching her face was not helping him hold the rule together.
The wall did not help either. Nothing in this room was going to help.
"Ye're very still," she said, without looking up.
"Aye."
"Is that difficult?"
The honest answer was that difficult didn't begin to cover it. That he was holding himself in place by the edge of his teeth, that the specific weight of her fingertip against his collarbone was doing things to his self-possession that no amount of cold patrols in the dark would have managed to undo.
He considered all of that and gave her the version of it that was still true.
"Ye have nay idea."
She looked up at that. Her eyes met his and held for a moment, and something passed through them that wasn't quite a smileand wasn't quite a question but sat between the two. She looked back at her hand.
"Good," she said, very quietly.
He felt the word land somewhere between his ribs like an ember finding dry ground, and did not move a muscle, and understood with complete clarity that he was in a great deal of trouble.
She was taking her time, which was the thing he hadn't anticipated. He had thought, in the part of his mind that was still capable of thought, that if she reached for him at all it would be brief and tentative, something to be gotten through. Instead she was learning him the way she learned everything—quietly, thoroughly, without apology for the time it took—and the patience of it was considerably harder to withstand than urgency would have been. His jaw was locked. His knuckles had gone pale against the rim of the tub. He was aware of his own heartbeat in a way that had moved well past inconvenient.
Then she spread her palm flat against his chest.
The breath left him as one long, slow exhale that he hadn't decided to release and couldn't stop, and under her hand his heart was going hard and fast and there was no amount of effort whatsoever that could disguise it. There was nothing to be done about that. The heart was not par tof the rule. The hands were the rule, and the hands were still where they were supposed to be.
"That," she said softly, her palm still flat against him, "is nae the heart of a man who's unaffected."
"Nay," he said. His voice had gone rough. "It isnae."
"Ye're nae going tae dae anything about it, are ye?"
