Silence settled for a few beats. The fire cracked. Something outside bayed at the moon, sound faint through stone and shutter.
“Ye daenae seem nervous,” she ventured. “About being wed. About sharing a bed with a woman ye barely ken.”
“I am nae the one trembling,” he said.
“I am nae trembling,” she lied.
The back of his fingers brushed her forearm as he shifted. Gooseflesh chased up to her shoulder. “Nae now,” he said.
“Ye have done this before, then?” she blurted, then nearly choked on her own forwardness. “Shared a bed, I mean.”
Another pause. “I am nae a monk, Ariella.”
“I did nae say ye were,” she muttered, burning.
He drew his arm back then, so their skin no longer touched. The absence felt like a cold draft across her whole side.
“I will nae touch ye without yer consent,” he said. His voice had changed, deeper and slower. “Nae tonight. Nae any night. Whatever the priest said, ye have a say in that much.”
Some of the tightness in her eased. The nervous flutter did not vanish, but it shifted, less like fear and more like standing too close to the edge of a cliff.
“Thank ye,” she said quietly.
“Sleep,” he replied.
She tried. Truly she tried. She lay still, counting his breaths, tracing cracks in the ceiling with her eyes. Her thoughts walked in circles. The vows. The look on her brother’s face. Her mother’s hands. Maxwell’s eyes in the yard and his hand under her chin in the alcove. The heat of him now, inches away.
At last her body refused obedience. She rolled again, drawing her knees up a little, trying to ease the ache in her lower back. Her hip brushed his thigh. The mattress rocked with the movement.
He sucked in a breath.
“That,” he said in a low voice, “is fidgeting.”
“I am trying to sleep,” she whispered.
“Ye are very poor at it,” he replied.
“If ye have suggestions, I am listening.”
“Lie still.”
“I have been lying still for hours,” she protested. “Me limbs feel like wood. Me mind feels like a runaway cart.”
“If it were that simple to quiet the mind,” he said, “I would be out of work. Nay one would need a laird if they could simply tell themselves nae to think about raids and debts.”
She huffed a faint laugh. “So ye do think.”
“Occasionally,” he said. “Daenae spread it about. It will ruin me reputation.”
She rolled onto her side again, unable to help it, and her shoulder brushed his chest. Heat flared along that line of contact. She went motionless.
He did not move away.
For a long heartbeat they lay like that, barely touching, the thin linen between them feeling like nothing.
Then he exhaled, a long, measured breath.
“I will take the floor,” he said abruptly, and shifted as if to rise.
