Page 32 of The Merciless Laird
He looked at Bronn steadily. "And the Pact is what keeps Mull standin'. Ye'd dae well tae remember that." He looked around the table slowly. "All of ye."
Nobody spoke.
"We're done," he said, and stood, and left.
The hall at supper was fuller than it needed to be.
Half his clan had apparently discovered urgent reasons to eat in the Great Hall that night, and they were doing a poor job of pretending otherwise. Heads that turned a fraction too far, conversations that paused a beat too long whenever Matilda reached for her cup.
She'd noticed. He could tell by the way she'd straightened her spine about ten minutes ago and hadn't moved it since.
She was sitting across from him in a green dress Sigrid had found for her. Her hair up properly for the first time since the night they'd left her father's castle, and she looked,
Beautiful.
He picked up his cup and looked at it instead.
She looked like she belonged there. That was the problem.
She'd walked into his castle twelve hours before, not knowing a single person in it, and she was already reading the room the way you read a room you intended to stay in. Quietly. Thoroughly.
Her eyes moved across the tables and came back, and he'd watched her file three separate things in the past two minutes without her expression changing once.
It was deeply inconvenient.
Her sleeve caught the edge of her plate. She steadied it with one hand before it went anywhere, quick and neat, and went back to her supper without comment.
He'd watched the whole thing. He wasn't sure why.
She reached for her cup and caught him looking. He looked back at his plate.
"The dress," he said. "Daes it fit?"
"Well enough." She smoothed the front of it briefly with one hand. "Sigrid has a good eye."
"She daes."
A pause. The hall murmured around them.
"It's nae me favorite color though," she said.
He looked up. She was looking at the dress, not at him, her chin tilted down slightly, her attention seemingly on her food, but the spark in her eyes was unmistakable.
"What's yer color, then?" he asked.
"Blue."
He glanced at the blue cloak folded over the back of her chair, where she'd draped it when she had sat down, and said nothing.
She followed his eyes. Looked at the cloak, then looked back at him.
"Aye, well," she said, and reached for her cup.
"Still, the dress suits ye," he said, his voice dropping into that low, rough register. "Though I suppose I am doomed tae be a disappointment tae yer wardrobe".
"Ye are merely an unavoidable presence, Laird Gunnarsson," she replied, a faint, almost-smile tugging at her mouth. "Nae necessarily a disappointing one."
Her fingers brushed the edge of the table at the same moment his hand shifted, and for the briefest instant the back of her knuckles grazed his.
