“What do ye mean?” she said. “Katie said ye were asking for me.”
Alex shook his head once. “Nay. Bettie brought me here to read to them. Why would they?—”
The laughter faded, and the answer arrived for both at once.
Erica let out a short laugh, the sound quick in her throat.
Alex did not. He looked at the door as if the wood had failed a duty and went to it in three strides. The handle held firm in his hand. He tried it again, harder. It did not move.
“Great,” he said flatly. “They locked us in.”
She leaned a little to see the handle, then looked back at him, almost smiling. “They are children,” she said. “Mischief is their duty.”
“I am glad one of us finds it amusi—” he began, then stopped, jaw tight.
He lifted his hand from the handle and looked past her to the window, as if measuring how much trouble breaking a pane might cause.
The room took their quiet and held it. He let his shoulders relax a notch and moved to the table. The book he had checked earlier lay there, half open to a page that meant nothing to him. He closed it, but still did not sit.
“So,” he said after a moment, voice lowering a fraction. “What do we do now?”
Erica crossed to the nearest chair, then seemed to change her mind and stayed standing a few feet from the table. “Ye could break the door,” she suggested.
He gave her a look. “And if I do, they will try this again. Next time, we might end up at the bottom of a well instead of a locked room.”
She laughed, the sound small and real. “Ye enjoy their games, do ye nae?”
“I daenae ken what ye are talking about,” he said, stiff on purpose.
“Oh, please,” she said. “It is written all over yer face.”
He exhaled through his nose, not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. He glanced at the door again and rested his hand on the table to stop himself from crossing back to it.
“I am only glad they can still play like this,” he said.
The tension in him eased a notch. For a breath, he sounded more like the man who checked the girls’ copybooks than the laird who signed orders.
Erica tilted her head. “Why would they nae?”
He looked down at the grain of the wood and moved a book that did not need moving. “I worried they would never reach this level of whimsy because…”
“Because what?” she prompted.
He shook his head once, thinking of changing the subject. Then he let it go.
“Oh, ye ken,” he said quietly. “Because they never met their maither.”
The room seemed to tighten at the words, and for a minute, neither of them spoke.
He kept his hand on the table, fingers spread, as if he could hold the line there.
Erica stood with both hands at her sides, loose, then curled, then loose again. The shelves watched, while the late light thinned by another shade. The handle did not move.
“So,” Alex said, softer, as if he could undo the weight by smoothing it. “We wait.”
Erica nodded. “Aye.”
They did not sit.
