Page 76 of The Merciless Laird
The vibrant orange glow of the lanterns chased the darkness back toward the jagged cliffs, turning the grey, restless water of the sound into a dancing tapestry of amber light.
Matilda stood at the periphery of the gathering, her pulse a steady, rhythmic thrum of pride.
Torches lined the stone dock, their flickers mirrored in the black depths below, while overhead, the pennants the lads had spent the morning bickering over snapped lazily in a light breeze.
The town looked ready, draped in the finery of a clan at peace, and for the first time since her arrival, Matilda felt her own spirit settle into the stone.
The air was a thick with the savory scent of roasted venison, the sharp sting of salt spray, and the heavy, fermented sweetness of Highland ale.
It was louder than she had expected. The whole island seemed to have poured into the harbor. Merchants with their sharp eyes, traders from the mainland, the King's men in their stiff tunics, and families whose names she had spent two weeks memorizing. Their voices blended into a low, physical hum that vibrated against her skin.
Nearby, Henry was a dark smudge against the torchlight, his quill moving in a sharp, neurotic scratch across his parchment. Always watching, always recording. A reminder that their peace was being measured by a broader, colder world.
Ivar stood thirty feet away, deep in conversation with Bronn.
Matilda found she didn't need to look for him to know exactly where he was. It was a magnetic awareness, the way one feels the proximity of a hearth fire without seeing the flames.
The pull toward him was a constant, grounding thrum in her sternum, a tether that had grown tauter with every passing day.
She smoothed the front of her skirts, her palms damp against the fine wool, and forced her gaze back to the crowd.
The music began at the water's edge. A fiddle took the lead, a high, sweet thread of sound that cut through the roar of the gathering, followed by the deep, resonant heartbeat of a drum.
The crowd shifted instinctively, a space clearing near the dock as the rhythm took hold.
Ivar heard the fiddle and knew.
He wrapped up the conversation with Bronn in two sentences and was already moving.
He knew what the music meant. He knew what the gathering required. He also knew where she was. He had known since the moment he'd stepped into the harbor, the same way he always knew, some internal mechanism that had recalibrated without his permission sometime over the last two weeks.
He crossed the distance without pretending he wasn't going directly to her.
She was standing at the edge of the light in the dark green gown, her chin up and her hands still and her eyes moving across the crowd he'd come to understand meant she was working very hard at looking calm.
The torchlight caught the line of her jaw and the way her throat moved when she swallowed.
He stopped close. He held out his hand, palm up.
She looked at it for a moment. At the calluses, at the scar along his knuckle from a fight in his twenties that had left him less handsome and considerably more careful.
He waited. He had learned, with her, that waiting was not passive. Waiting was the whole thing.
She took it.
Her fingers were cool against his. He closed his grip carefully and led her into the light.
At first, he held her at a formal distance. Her right hand in his left, his other hand resting light at her waist, barely a ghost of a touch, because she was in front of the entire clan and the King's observers and he was not going to be the thing that made her uncomfortable in front of all of them. He was going to be steady.
He was very good at steady.
"Ye're holdin' yer breath, Matilda," he murmured, his voice low beneath the music.
"I'm countin'," she whispered back.
"Stop countin'. Listen."
His hand at her waist settled more firmly. He felt the shift in her breathing when it did. The small, quiet exhale, and kept his expression neutral as a man who had been schooled by eleven years of not showing his face.
