Page 43 of Promised to the Cursed Laird

"Ye're verra good at making a demand sound like a comfort."

"I've had considerable practice softening bad news for stubborn men," he said. "Ye should hear how I write tae the King's man."

She laughed despite herself, and bent back over the page, working the sentence into a shape closer to what he'd suggested, his presence steady and warm at her shoulder the whole while, close enough that when she reached for the inkwell her sleeve brushed his forearm and neither of them moved to correct the distance.

"There," she said, finally satisfied, reading the finished lines back under her breath. "I am safe, and treated with more honor than I expected, though I didnae choose this path myself. There has been trouble on the road…an ambush, though I was unharmed…and I write now tae ask that ye trust me tae see this through before ye act. I will send word again when I can."

"That's good," he said, and she felt an unreasonable warmth at the approval in his voice. "Verra good. He'll hear the truth in it, even if he disnae like the shape of it."

She reached for the pen to sign her name at the bottom, and it slipped through some careless angle of her fingers, tired from the long evening of drafting and redrafting. It clattered off the table's edge and onto the floor between their two chairs.

They both moved for it at once.

She bent low, reaching, and so did he, their hands reaching the fallen pen at nearly the same instant, his fingers brushing the back of hers. She looked up at exactly the moment he looked up too, and found his face far closer than she'd accounted for, close enough to see the low firelight caught gold in his eyes, close enough to feel the warmth of his breath against her own mouth.

She felt the exact moment his grip on her hand changed—thumb stroking once, slow and deliberate, across the back of her knuckles as though he was testing how far she’d let him go.

Neither of them moved.

The room went very quiet around them…the fire's soft crackle, the distant sound of the sea against the cliffs below, her own pulse loud enough in her ears that she was certain he must be able to hear it too…and she was aware, with a clarity that made her chest go tight, of every single thing this close proximity was doing to the careful composure she'd been holding together since the ambush that morning.

Her lips parted on a shaky inhale. The tip of her tongue touched her lower lip without thinking, and his nostrils flared. She watched his throat work as he swallowed. The heat rolling off him was almost unbearable this close.

One small movement, she thought, and I willnae want tae stop it any more than I wanted tae stop it then.

His eyes moved, once, to her mouth, and came back up, and she watched him make the same calculation she was making, watched the same restraint settle over him that had settled over her, both of them caught in the breathless stillness of two people who wanted the same thing and had, for reasons neither of them said aloud, decided not to reach for it tonight.

His jaw clenched. For one heartbeat she thought his restraint would break, that he’d shove her back against the chair and take her mouth like he’d been starving for it. His fingers tightened around hers until it almost hurt.

She stayed bent over the pen, breathing hard, thighs pressed together against the sudden, aching throb between them.

She took the pen.

"Thank ye," she said, and her voice came out lower than she intended, unsteady in a way that gave away considerably more than the words themselves.

"Aye." Then he exhaled through his teeth, slow and ragged, and forced himself upright. The loss of his heat left her dizzy. "Sign it, and I'll see it sealed tonight."

She signed her name at the bottom, her hand not quite as steady as she'd have liked, and folded the letter closed while he melted the wax at the candle flame. When he pressed his own seal into it, the MacKinnon crest, sharp and final, she felt something settle in her chest that was equal parts relief and an entirely different, less comfortable feeling she wasn't yet ready to name.

"I'll see this reaches him safely," he said, turning the sealed letter once in his hands before setting it carefully aside. "By a man I trust with my own life, and by a road naebody's watching. Naebody will interfere with it, Neilina. Ye have my word on that, whatever else stands unsettled between us."

"I believe ye," she said, and found, turning the words over even as she said them, that she meant it entirely. It was a plain, simple trust she wouldn't have thought herself capable of offering this man a few days ago and couldn't now imagine withholding.

He looked at her a moment longer, and she barely breathe beneath the intense heat in his eyes. Then he rose, bid her goodnight, and left her sitting at the small table with the fire burning low and her pulse still not fully settled.

She pressed two fingers briefly to her mouth, remembering the kiss that had almost happened between them, and did not, this time, try very hard to talk herself out of wanting it to have gone the other way.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Neilina was crossing the gallery above the small council chamber, a shortcut Elspeth had shown her days before, when voices rising up through the old stone stopped her mid-step. She heard Baird's gravel-rough tone, a council member she had met briefly the first few days at the keep, his voice unmistakable even muffled by the distance of a floor and a half.

"—a Chisholm bride is worth more tae this clan than the laird seems tae credit. If she leaves, the Accord's as good as broken, and we've gained naething from the raid on MacRath but a war we didnae need."

They're speaking of me.

She should have kept walking. She knew that even as she stopped, even as she lowered herself carefully to crouch beside the gallery rail where the old stone let sound bleed up from the chamber below in a way that surely no architect had intended.

"He'll nae hear reason on it." Another person’s voice now, younger, sharper. "He's told her she may leave whenever she pleases. He's shown her the gates himself, the fool. If Chisholm land ever comes under this Accord, it'll be by luck, nae by any effort the laird's making tae see it secured."