Page 39 of The Emerald Oath

“Aye,” Róisín replies, unconvinced. “Dance.”

And she pulls.

I watch Ellen resist for half a heartbeat. I watch the war cross her face. Then, like the tide finally giving way, she lets herself be drawn into the circle.

The music surges—fiddle bright and wild, drum steady beneath it—and the ground begins to thrum under stamping feet.

At first Ellen moves carefully, contained. As if she means to prove she’s only there out of obligation.

But the rhythm takes hold, and I get to witness the moment it loosens her.

The joy on her face is unguarded—bright enough to make something in my chest ache. She laughs as Róisín swings her through turns, hair loosening, cheeks flushed with heat and firelight. There’s drink in it too, I think; a lightness she likely rarely permits herself, or at least rarely shows.

It’s almost unbearable, wanting to know what lives beneath that careful control. Wanting to read her the way I can read most people, to tell which parts are habit and which are her true self.

And it does something dangerous: it makes it easier to look at her. Easier to linger a beat too long, because her laughter takes the edge off my restraint. Even when her eyes are elsewhere—when she isn’t looking at me the way I’m looking at her—I can’t make myself stop.

But I keep my distance.

Not because I don’t want to close it, but because I know exactly what it would look like if I did. The laird’s son crossing the green as if he has a right to her attention, making a public claim. Drawing eyes and turning a woman’s night into a matter for other people’s mouths.

I won’t be that man.

Not with her.

Much later, when the fire has burned down to a steady heart, and the crowd has thinned into knots of laughter, drink, and low-voiced talk, I find her alone at the edge of the green.

She stands with her hands held out to the night air as if cooling them, face tipped toward the stars.

“Ellen,” I say.

She doesn’t startle. She only lowers her gaze, as if she has been expecting me for some time. That feels like a small victory.

“What d’ye want, James?” she asks, not unkindly, but without softness.

I could make it easy. I could offer a joke, a harmless excuse to have come this way. I could leave and tell myself I have done the proper thing.

Instead, I say, “What’ve I done to make ye so determined to keep me at arm’s length?”

That gets her attention.

She turns fully then, firelight painting sharp lines across her face.

“You assume ye’ve gotta do something for that to happen,” she says evenly.

“I do,” I say. “Because you watch me like you expect me to overstep.”

She lets out a quiet, exasperated breath.

“And ye’re not?” she asks.

The question lands clean and hard, because it forces the truth.

“I want you,” I say, because anything else would be an insult. “But I don’t want to take from you.”

She laughs once, sharp and humourless. “That’s easy to say.”

“I ken that.”