“Because some things daenae make sense,” Ava said instead. “Nay matter how ye look at them.”
Caitlin studied her for a moment with eyes that were considerably sharper than her cheerful chatter suggested. Then she unfolded herself from the chair, picked up a pillowcase to fold, and let the subject rest.
But the thought wouldn’t fade. It sat in Ava’s chest with the steady certainty of something that had been true long before she had words for it.
She was a village lass who had run from her father’s house at sixteen with nothing but the clothes on her back and enough stubbornness to keep breathing. She had swept tavern floors and mended children’s stockings at the orphanage and been grateful, genuinely grateful, for a dry place to sleep and enough to eat.
She was not fit for… she didn’t even have a word for what the alternative would be. The idea of it was so shapeless and implausible that her mind kept sliding off it like water off a stone.
A laird.
Ye are nae qualified for a laird, Ava Harris. Ye are nae the right shape for that life, and ye never will be, and the sooner ye get that clearly in yer head, the better off ye’ll be.
There was actually a sense of relief in it. A clear line drawn.
Something she could hold onto when her mind started drifting back toward towers, starlight, and hands that tied laces witha gentleness that shouldn’t exist in the same body as all that controlled, coiled intensity.
She was an employee.
A good one, she thought, without false modesty. She was good with Esther, was earning her wages honestly, and had no intention of doing anything that would jeopardize either of those facts.
He’s the Laird,and ye are the help. And whatever happened on that tower was?—
She didn’t finish the thought. She had not been finishing it for three days and had gotten rather good at the technique.
What she was less skilled at was the part where she would wake in the small hours, lie in the dark, and feel the imprint of his hands at her waist as clearly as if they were still there.
That part she hadn’t managed to reason away yet.
Give it some time, it’ll fade away.
She picked her book back up and tried to read, this time with more success.
Three floors below, in a study that had seen considerably less work completed in the past seventy-two hours than its occupant would admit, Noah stared at the same paragraph of the same trade report he had been fixated on since before breakfast.
The words made sense on their own. However, they refused to come together into anything meaningful because an irrational part of his mind kept interrupting with unrelated information.
The way she’d tasted.
He set the report down. He stood up and moved to the window. He stood there with his hands pressed against the stone, looking at the rain, and told himself firmly that he was a laird with a clan to lead and work that needed doing.
He sat back down and picked up the report.
The way she’d tasted...
The thought arrived again with the unstoppable quality of something that had stopped asking permission.
Her mouth opening under his on the tower, the small broken sound she made, the way her hands gripped his shirt as if she was deciding something, and then made up her mind.
The taste of her, the memory of her body still stuck in his head.
Stop.
The trouble was the silence.
He hadn’t been alone with her since the tower, a fact he was growing more sure she’d planned on purpose.
She came to meals. She smiled when Esther spoke. She answered him directly and pleasantly when he addressed her, with the careful courtesy of someone who maintained a distance they had measured out to the inch. And he’d let her, because the alternative was cornering her, and the alternative was something he wasn’t ready to name yet.
