“We’re in the corridor,” she said against his mouth.
“Aye.” He pushed his door open behind her. “Come inside.”
She looked at his chambers, then at him. Then she straightened up, the way she did when she had made a decision and was finished deliberating.
“If ye make me regret this,” she said. “I will make yer life extraordinarily difficult.”
“I daenae doubt it,” he said.
She stepped through the door.
He followed, closed it behind them, and the corridor lay empty and still, the candle burning quietly in the wall sconce, with the castle maintaining its silence. Inside, the fire had burned down to deep embers, casting an amber, warm, and dim light in the room.
Ava stood in the middle of it with her arms loosely at her sides, looking at the hearth instead of at him. Taking a breath, he realized, in the way she always did before doing something she considered worth the risk.
He crossed to the fire and added a log. Straightened up. When he turned around, she was looking at him. Clear-eyed, her hair loose around her shoulders, her chin at the angle that showed the decision had been made.
“So,” she said.
“So,” he agreed.
“Ye love me.”
“Aye.”
“And ye’ve apparently felt this way for weeks without mentionin’ it.”
“I was workin’ up to it. Let’s just say I wanted ye then, really wanted ye.”
She pressed her lips together. “That’s the most Laird thing ye’ve ever said.”
“Probably.” He crossed toward her. “Any other objections?”
“A few.” She held her ground as he came close, tilting her face up to look at him. “I still think this is complicated.”
“It is.”
“And I still daenae have the words for,” She stopped. Her hand came up and pressed flat against his chest, not pushing, just resting there. “For what I feel. I want ye to ken that it’s there. Whatever it is. It’s, it’s very much there. I just cannae give it a name yet.”
“Ava.” He covered her hand with his. “I ken.”
She looked up at him, and whatever she found in his expression seemed to satisfy something, because the last of the tension left her shoulders, and she stopped holding herself so carefully away from him.
“Right,” she said softly. “All right then.”
He kissed her, and she rose onto her toes to meet him, her free hand sliding to the back of his neck.
This time, the kiss was slower, more deliberate, relaxed like two people who have stopped debating whether they should do this and are now simply doing it.
“Yer hands are cold,” he said against her mouth.
“Yer castle is draughty.”
“I’ll have the fire built higher.”
“Later,” she said, and pulled him back down.
He got his hands in her hair, and she made the sound he’d been thinking about for days. The quiet, involuntary one that meant she’d stopped thinking. She looked up at him with her hair tousled and her eyes dark.
