Page 83 of The Merciless Laird
His eyes finally focused, truly focused.
He looked at her. He looked at the dried blood on her sleeve, his mind filing the detail away even through the haze of pain.
"The men," he wheezed. "The passage."
"Dealt with. Torvald has the harbor." She held his gaze with a steady, unyielding fire. "It’s done, Ivar. We’re safe."
He stared at her for an eternal moment. His hand was still wrapped around her wrist, his grip no longer a strike, but a desperate anchor. She didn't pull away.
"Ye’re stayin'," he said, and for the first time, it sounded like a plea.
"Aye." She didn't add fluff or give him excuses. She gave him the only truth that mattered.
He fell quiet.
The fever burned high, red spots on his cheeks, and his eyes were still too bright, but they werehiseyes. Sharp, present, and fixed on her like she was the only thing in the world worth seeing.
His grip loosened, his fingers sliding down until his thumb moved in a slow, agonizingly deliberate circle across the pulse point of her wrist.
"Ye’re bleedin'," he whispered.
"It’s naethin'."
A ghost of a smile touched the corner of his mouth, exhausted, dry, and entirely him.
"Aye," he murmured. "That’s what I said."
"Lay still."
"Matilda."
"I saidlay still.”
He obeyed.
She pressed the cool cloth back to his brow and felt the tension slowly bleed out of him, the way the tide retreats from the shore. His hand remained open on the table, his fingers loosely twined with hers.
She stayed.
She didn't move as the amber light of the candles began to flicker and die. Then came the first, pale grey of the dawn. She sat in the silence and watched him breathe, thinking of a man who had walked into a wall of smoke just to find her.
She was still there when the sun touched the floor, and for the first time in eight years, she realized the dark hadn’t mattered.
She had everything she needed right there.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Four days in that chamber was three days longer than Ivar found acceptable.
He’d said so on the second day, his voice a low grate of frustration, and Oswin had looked at him with the flat, unimpressed expression of a man who had heard this argument a thousand times before.
The healer had developed an effective counter to it. He simply didn't move and waited for the man making the noise to remember that he had a fresh hole in his side and couldn't enforce a single command.
Matilda had been worse.
She had been there every time he surfaced from sleep, watching him with that level, hazel gaze that he had learned to read by now. Every time he’d suggested he was well enough to rise, she’dsaid nothing at all. Her silence was a heavy, suffocating weight, somehow more conclusive than any argument he could muster.
On the fourth morning, he got up anyway.
