“That was an emergency.”
“It wasnae.”
“It felt like one.” She looked at him across the room.
The fire was between them, its light flickering across the planes of his face. She was painfully aware of the space separating them. Not as distance, but as something that was already beingclosed—possibly since the first moment she stood before him with Esther’s hand in hers, looked at him, and thought,
Oh, this one is going to be trouble.
He crossed toward her.
He moved with the unhurried, deliberate quality she had observed over months and had come to understand meant he had already decided something, rather than being in the middle of deciding. He had made his decision. He was simply arriving.
He stopped close enough that she could feel the warmth of him.
“Ava,” he said.
“Aye?”
“Stop thinkin’.”
“I’m nae thinkin’.”
He kissed her.
His hand came up to her face, the unbruised side, careful of the healing cheek, and tilted her chin, and she stopped thinking exactly the way he’d told her to.
She kissed him back with her hands, finding his chest, the warmth of him through his shirt, the solid fact of him.
He made a low sound in his throat that she felt more than heard, and walked her backward until her shoulders were pressed against the wall. She found she did not mind this at all.
“The engagement,” she said, against his mouth.
“Aye.”
“Now that we’re getting’ married, maybe we should slow down until after... ”
“Ava.”
“I’m just sayin’ that strictly speakin’, we shouldnae be doin’ this.”
“I ken what ye’re doin’.” He pulled back two inches to look at her. His eyes were dark and entirely serious. “Ye’re findin’ reasons. Ye’ve been findin’ reasons since ye arrived.”
She looked up at him. “Force of habit.”
“Aye.” His thumb moved across her cheekbone. “Ye can stop now.”
She considered this.
She considered the twelve reasons she had assembled over the last ten minutes walking down this corridor. All of them technically valid, all of them in service of the old, familiar argument that kept her safe at a distance from things she wanted too much.
She looked at them, lined up and neat.
She let them go.
“All right,” she said.
He kissed her again. This time, there was no underlying argument from either of them, and she felt the difference immediately. The absence of holding back. The particular quality of a man who has been managing himself for months and has now, quietly and completely, let go.
