Page 64 of The Merciless Laird
"Nae yet."
She looked up at him fully then. "Why?"
He held her gaze. "Because I told ye two weeks. And because ye walked intae this room and reached fer me, and that matters more tae me than—" He stopped. Set his jaw. "The two weeks hold, Matilda."
She was quiet for a moment, looking at him. Then, very softly: "And if I dinnae want them tae?"
The question sat in the steam between them. He felt it the way he felt the bath going cold, slowly, and then all at once.
He looked at her.
At the hand still flat against his chest and the color in her face and the steadiness of her eyes, and he wanted to give her the answer she was asking for.
He also wanted to be certain that when he gave it, it was because she had slept on it and woken with it still true and chosen it in daylight rather than in a steam-warm room with the fire at their backs and two weeks of careful distance finally running out.
She deserved that. He was not going to shortchange it because the moment was convenient.
"Ask me that again tomorrow," he said, and his voice was not entirely steady. "In the mornin'. When the fire's cold and the steam's gone, and it's just a plain question in a plain room. If it's still what ye want then."
She looked at him for a long moment. Her hand was still on his chest. She nodded, once, the way she nodded when she was filing something away, not as a defeat.
She was looking at his face now. Not at the scar and not at her own hand but directly at him, steady and unhurried and taking in everything he was offering, which was more than he'd meant to offer and less than he had. He let her look. There was no point in trying to manage his expression any further than he already was; she was too good at reading faces and they both knew it. The point was the hands. The hands were still. Everything else she could have.
She leaned forward slightly.
He felt the shift before he saw it, the small change in the weight of the air between them, the warmth of her coming closer through the steam. Her scent reached him: woodsmoke andlavender and underneath both of those, something that was just her, that he'd learned without meaning to over a few days in the same chamber and the same fire and the long quiet hours of the same dark. He knew that scent the way he knew the sounds of his own keep, without thinking about it, in the part of him that tracked things automatically and never quite stopped.
He leaned forward.
"Ivar." His name in her mouth, very quiet.
"Aye."
"I'm nae afraid." She said it the way she said things she'd decided on. Flat, plain, no softness put around it as a buffer. "I want ye tae ken that. Whatever happens tomorrow."
He looked at her. At the steadiness of her eyes and the color in her cheeks and the hand still warm against his chest. "I ken," he said. "I've kent fer a while."
"Have ye?"
"Aye." The corner of his mouth moved, just slightly.
Something shifted in her face at that, something that was almost a smile and was more than that and the space between them narrowed to the length of a breath. Her hand was still flat on his chest, and he could feel his own heartbeat in his palms, and the fire at his back was the loudest thing in the room except for thetwo of them not quite closing the last distance. He was looking at her mouth. She was looking at his. The space still between them was the size of a single decision, and neither of them had made it yet, and the steam moved slowly between them, and the fire crackled, and the room held its breath along with them.
Three sharp knocks at the door.
Neither of them moved.
Three more. Harder. The knock of a man who knew exactly what he was interrupting and was doing it anyway because the alternative was worse.
"Me Laird." Torvald's voice had a specific quality to it when he was genuinely sorry, lower than usual, carefully neutral, making no attempt to pretend the timing was anything other than what it was. "King's men at the gate. More than last time. They're asking tae be received taenight."
Ivar closed his eyes.
He held them closed for one full second, long enough to breathe, enough to put what had been happening in this room somewhere he could retrieve it later, and then he opened them.
She was still close. Her hand still flat on his chest, her face still level with his, color in her cheeks from the steam and from something else entirely, and her eyes on his with an expression he was going to need considerably more time than he currentlyhad to think about properly. He looked at it anyway. One moment, no more, taking it in the way he took in things he intended to remember.
"Timing," she said, very quietly, "is an extraordinary thing."
