“Miss Harris. She paid for three months of parchment and ink out of her own wages. I’ve corrected it, as ye approved. But I thought ye should ken.”
“Three months?” Noah said.
“From near the start. She didnae think it was her place to ask.”
He looked at his desk. “Thank ye, Mrs. Murray.”
“She’s a good lass,” the housekeeper said, which from her was equivalent to a formal commendation, and left.
Noah sat for a moment after she’d gone.
Three months. Ava had been quietly supplementing the schoolroom out of her own wages, saying nothing, because she hadn’t thought it was her place to ask.
Still treating herself as a temporary arrangement, still keeping herself at arm’s length from the life she was building inside these walls without seeming to notice she was actually building it.
He picked up the next report.
By midafternoon, he was ahead of his work for the first time in recent memory. He found himself, somewhere around the third letter of the afternoon, thinking about the way she’d looked in the gray morning light, sitting on the edge of the bed.
Her hair loose, her shawl pulled around her, the particular careful honesty ofI daenae have the words yetsaid with her eyes steady and direct, no deflection in them.
He’d been with women who told him what he wanted to hear. He understood, now, why that had always left him with the distant sense that something was missing.
Ava Harris did not tell him what he wanted to hear.
She told him the truth and let him do whatever he pleased with it. It was, he thought, like setting aside the sixth letter andreaching for the seventh—perhaps the most attractive quality a person could have.
He wanted her again.
He’d wanted her since about an hour after she closed his door. Or maybe since she left, or perhaps the desire had just never gone away, only shifting slightly in quality from something he was controlling to something he was no longer pretending to control.
He was aware of her moving around the castle the way he was aware of the weather, not always attended to, but always there, registered in some background sense that notified him when something changed.
She’d been in the garden that afternoon with Esther.
He’d seen them through the study window. Esther was crouched over something at the base of the kitchen garden wall, with Ava beside her in the same position, both of them examining whatever it was with identical seriousness.
He didn’t know what they were looking at. He’d watched for longer than was efficient, his quill held forgotten in his hand, ink drying on the nib.
Esther had pointed at something, and Ava had tilted her head to look and said something that made Esther nod gravely. Two people contemplating a very important matter.
The November light had caught the loose strands of Ava’s hair where it had come free at her temple, and he’d watched that too, which was, he was aware, not useful.
The letter had required rewriting.
He wanted her.
The wanting had shifted from being a problem he was trying to solve to something more like a fact he had simply accepted, like weather.
She was there, in the castle, on the other side of a wall from his chambers at night, part of his household, his table, and his daily life in a way that increasingly felt like it had always been the arrangement, and the months before her arrival were the aberration.
He was aware that this was a significant shift from where he’d been four months ago.
He did not, particularly, want to go back.
He finished the seventh letter, sealed it, and set it aside.
He decided he would not seek her out tonight. He’d meant what he’d said about letting her take her time. She’d said soon, and he would trust her word and give her the space she needed to come to him on her own terms rather than his.
