Chapter Twelve
Jacob Jamison had been at Wolvesly for three weeks, and nothing was as she’d dreamed it might be.
The last time she’d seen him she’d still been wearing shorter kirtles and was more often than not found barefoot, with her hair a tangle flying loose around her head—quicker with a dare than a needle, surer on horseback than even Michael. She had been so certain he would return with her father’s men, and she had waited for it the way a child waits for the first thaw, half impatience, half faith. She wanted him to see her now—not as she’d been when last they’d met, not as a tagalong in the yard, not simply Liam MacTavish’s daughter, but as herself.
Memory, she had learned, did not keep whole days; it kept shards. Sunlight on the stables. Sand cooling between her toes. The extravagant freedom of slipping out at first light with her hair unbraided, a sharp stone tucked in her palm because hens would peck if you came too near their chicks. Jacob stood in so many of those remembered fragments that it seemed impossible he could return and not belong to them still.
He had always had more patience with her than her brothers, and he never tattled on her misadventures. She had worshipped him with the blunt devotion of a child. He’d been polite, occasionally attentive, often aloof, and always beyond her reach.
Still, she had thought things would change when he came back.
Sometimes, alone, she rehearsed what she would say when she saw him again, lowering her voice, practicing the calm her mother employed at council. She imagined herself lifting her chin, meeting his eyes without flinching, speaking as though she belonged in the same world he did. She studied her own face in her mother’s prized looking glass—the one her father had brought up from the north of England—tracing the sharper lines of her cheekbones, the bold arch of her brow, the way her hair, no matter how carefully managed, still tried to slip its confines. She’d learned when to speak with conviction and when to hold her tongue. She’d learned to bear the small humiliations of being the younger sister to two unbearable brothers. She wondered whether Jacob would recognize her at all.
The night before the army returned, she could barely sleep. She kept turning beneath the covers, watching the line of moonlight creep across her chamber floor as she arranged—again and again—all the ways she might greet him: serene, indifferent, full of cool wit and poise. She almost convinced herself she could treat him like any other returning kinsman, that she could mask the childlike hope that still lived stubbornly in her chest.
Then, three weeks ago, he had returned.
It had been almost exactly four years since she’d last seen that familiar sweep of dark hair, those quick, animal-bright eyes. She spotted him at once—picked him out as easily as she ever had—moving at the edge of the group, a head taller than many, hair grown long with the careless look of months on the march. He looked older, his face leaner, shadowed where she remembered softness. He dismounted with a practiced efficiency that made her stomach tighten, and for a moment shecould not move toward him at all, caught on the simple truth of it: Jacob Jamison was not the boy her younger self had kept safe in her mind. He was a man now—utterly, undeniably—and the newness of it struck her hard enough that she almost missed her cue. There was a stillness about him, a contained watchfulness she did not remember from the boy who had once lifted her onto stones so she could watch the dogs hold the sheep.
She watched him then as everyone did, all eyes on the returning men. It was natural to look.
It became less natural as the days went on.
Jacob did not seek her out. Not once. He spoke to her when courtesy demanded it—kind, respectful, unchanged in every way that mattered—and that sameness began to ache. He listened when she spoke, smiled when she said something clever or sharp, but his attention never lingered. He never stayed when others drifted away. Never chose her company when another presented itself.
Each morning she told herself it did not matter. Each evening she found herself forced to revise that belief.
She noticed everything: the scar along his jaw she did not remember, the way his hands moved now—deliberate, economical, as though no motion was ever wasted. The quiet authority with which other men deferred to him, even those older than he. Once she caught him laughing with her father over something she could not hear, his head tipped back briefly, and the sight startled her for its ease.
When he spoke to her at all, it was with a politeness so exact it felt measured. He waited for others to address her first. He stood when she approached, but never moved closer. Where once he had spoken to her as though she were simply there, now he seemed always aware of the space between them, careful notto breach it. His eyes never lingered. Never once was there an incidental touch, as there once had been.
She chose her dresses with more care during those weeks, lingered longer in the yard or the hall when she knew he would be there, invented errands that brought her briefly into his path. He acknowledged her every time—always kindly, always correctly—and then turned away as though nothing in him had been stirred at all.
Gradually, painfully, she began to understand what his distance must mean. He was neither angry nor reproachful, but it was not indifference alone; there was something colder in it. Whatever wee place she had once held in his regard had remained fixed firmly in the past, and the present version of herself warranted even less consideration.
By the morning he was to leave, she had already grieved him.
The yard was busy with preparations when she came down, men and horses crowding the space. Jacob stood near her father, half armored, his cloak fastened neatly at his shoulder. To Blackwood, he was bound.
She stopped at the edge of the yard, uncertain whether she belonged there at all.
Stubbornly, she did not wait for him to notice her. She wanted it finished. She needed to know—cleanly, finally—that she had been clinging to something that had never existed outside her own head.
She approached and stopped before him, her teeth locked together.
For a moment he only looked at her, and the intensity of his amber gaze made her stomach drop, because part of her still wanted to mistake attention for meaning. Then he stepped closer, just close enough that she could see the faint lines at the corners of his eyes, marks of years she had not shared.
“Ye’ll be cold,” he said, lifting his hands.
His fingers caught the edge of her mantle where it had slipped at her shoulder, the gesture so familiar—so him—that humiliation and hope tangled together in her throat.
Then he stopped.
His hand stilled, hovering. Something crossed his face—awareness, restraint—and the withdrawal that followed was careful, deliberate. He lowered his hand slowly, leaving the clasp undone.
“Ye never secure yer mantle,” he said instead, his voice even.
Her throat tightened. “I... I only came to give ye a farewell.”
