Page 68 of The Merciless Laird
Two weeks had changed the arithmetic of proximity entirely. Before, he'd been careful about distance, deliberate, considerate, always leaving her room. Now the room was still there but it was hers to close or not close, and she had been closing it by degrees, so gradually he might have missed it if he hadn't been paying attention.
"Ye're daein’ it again," she said.
"Daein’ what?"
"That thing where ye go quiet and think very loudly."
He looked at her. "I dinnae think loudly."
"Ye dae" She turned at the fig tree without breaking stride, unhurried, entirely at home in that small cold garden that she'd found herself and made hers. "Ye get a look. Like ye're running calculations."
"I'm always running calculations."
"Aye, but usually they're about coastal patrol routes and grain stores." She kept her eyes forward but she was almost smiling. "These ones look different."
The silence that followed lasted exactly long enough to be its own answer. He watched her register that and decide, graciously, not to press it, which was its own kind of torture.
They turned at the end of the path.
The afternoon sun had shifted, laying its thin warmth along the south wall now, and she moved toward it instinctively the way she always moved toward light. Not thinking about it, just finding it.
Then she stopped.
There was a flower along the south wall. Late, pale, barely there. Sheltered enough by the stone that it had held on past its season, past any reasonable expectation of survival. Small and stubborn and entirely improbable in the cold.
She looked at it for a long moment without speaking.
"That's beautiful," she said.
She'd simply seen it and said so, the way she said things that were simply true, without dressing them up.
He looked at the flower. Then at her face, which was open in the way it was only when she'd forgotten to manage it.
The cold had put color in her cheeks and the light was on her hair and she was looking at a small pale flower on a wall in his garden as though it had done something worth remarking on.
He was not, absolutely not, thinking about the bath and the steam and the specific warmth of her palm flat against his chest.
He reached past her and pulled the flower by its stem. He held it out.
She turned from the wall and found it there, in his hand, closer than she'd expected. He watched the awareness of that move across her face in the half-second before she composed it.
She took the flower. Her fingers brushed his in the taking of it, and neither of them moved immediately, and the garden was very quiet, and the wall was warm behind her from the afternoon sun.
"Ye pick flowers now," she said. Her voice was steady. Her eyes were not entirely.
"I picked one flower." He dropped his hand. "Dinnae make it a habit."
"God forbid," she said, "anyone think ye capable of a gentle gesture."
"I'm nae gentle. I'm practical. Ye wanted it. It was in me way."
The corner of her mouth curved again. "It was in yer way."
"Aye."
She turned the flower once between her fingers, looking at the pale petals. He felt his own pulse in his palms.
"Thank ye," she said quietly.
