“My mother used to bring me down to fish here when I was a lad."
She raised her eyebrows. It was the first mention of his mother he had ever really made to her, and she probed a little further, sensing a chance to learn more about him.
“Yer mother taught you to fish?”
He nodded.
“Aye, she was from a fishing family herself, on the coast,” he explained. “Didnae know much about inland life until she met my father, and she was certain that I’d learn everything she had when she was growing up.”
“How did your father meet her if she was from so far away?”
“He went looking for someone,” he replied, his voice taking on a slightly harder edge. “Someone he could… someone who had not learned the ins and outs of a place like this. Someone he could mold, I suppose, into what he wanted for her.”
There was a note of bitterness to his tone as he spoke, and her heart twisted in her chest, partly out of sadness for his mother. She could not imagine what it must have been like to be pulled from all that she knew and deposited in this place with no warning and no reason, stuck at the side of a man who, by all accounts, did not treat anyone with much in the way of care. She could picture her bringing her little boy out here, trying to passon to him the few pieces of herself she still had left after all this time, and it made her heart ache just to think of it.
“See? She carved this into the tree,” he continued, as he reached behind her to the oak that towered above them.
She glanced around, and sure enough, there was a slightly weathered crest carved into the wood. He trailed his fingers over it, as though he could recall all too well the day that he had come here with his mother and watched her put her mark on this place. Without thinking, she brushed her fingertips along it, feeling the roughness of it, and a small smile creased her lips. Their hands touched, just for the briefest moment, and she wondered if he could feel the same start of energy pass between them at the sensation of their touch.
He folded his fingers around hers, interlinking their hands for a moment. And it struck her that he was not touching her in such a way because he wanted someone else to see it or because he was trying to make a statement to his cousin, but because he wanted to. Because touching her seemed to be the most important thing in the world to him in that instant, and she did not want to let it slip through her fingers for a moment.
“Come,” he murmured as he tugged her towards the small pool that glistened beneath the sunshine. “This is where I used to sit with my mother, and we’d try to catch fish to bring back to the Keep.”
“For food?” she replied, raising her eyebrows. He chuckled.
“I liked to tell myself that it was for food, and the kitchen staff were kind enough to let me believe it,” he replied. “But I dinnae think I was exactly keeping the place stocked.”
“A Laird has to provide for his people,” she joked back lightly. “Only right that ye do what ye can to look after them.”
“Aye, something like that,” he agreed. “Though I’m no’ sure how far the minnows would go in providing for them.”
“I’m sure ye made a fine fisherman,” she remarked, and he stole a glance at her out of the corner of her eye.
“Are ye making fun of me, lass?”
“Why, I would never do such a thing,” she replied, widening her eyes as though it was the most scandalous thing she had ever heard. “Making fun of my own husband, the Laird of the Keep?”
“Aye, ye’d be a fool to,” he murmured.
But, before she could shoot back with a response, he drew her close, his hand on the small of her back as he pressed her close to him. His lips found hers, silencing whatever wit she had on the tip of her tongue, and she smiled into the embrace.
There was something softer, almost sweeter, about the way he kissed her now, out of sight, now that they had already tasted and drunk deep from one another. She waited for the same overheated passion that had risen the last few times he had kissed her to follow, but she found that the usual overwhelming flames were not consuming her as they had before. No, to her surprise, the warmth that filled her was more like embers, a crackling heat that spread to every corner of her being, burning in a steady rhythm rather than a destructive blaze. When he pulled back, she knew that he could feel it, too, the sweetness of it.
“You should eat,” he remarked as he glanced back towards their picnic blanket. “It’s a long ride back, and ye dinnae want to be short on food.”
“I will,” she murmured as she slipped her hand to his face again. “In a moment…”
And, as she kissed him once more, the warmth inside her cast some light, some clarity, on everything that she had been feeling. This was not the mad, fiery, all-consuming need that had coursed between them before, borne from the extremity of their physical passion. This was something else, something entirely new, something…
Something that felt dangerously close to falling in love.
They ate together at the edge of the pool, and she reached out to trail her fingers over the surface of the water, watching as the fish skittered this way and that before her. She leaned against his chest, the solid strength of him grounding her, reminding her that she had a place here. As much as this place was new to her, he was showing her sides of it that only a local would know. It was granting her that warm sense of belonging, one that she had not known she had needed so badly until she had made it this far in.
They rode back to the Keep together, taking the long way round so that he could show her the old cairn that he and his mother had laid rocks at whenever they had climbed the hill. It was weathered now, and the stones clung together with moss and plants that had sprouted between the cracks. It clearly still meant a lot to him. She hopped from her horse and scanned the area around the cairn, searching for something, and he frowned at her from where he still sat astride his saddle.
“What are ye?—”
“Ye said you added a rock to it every time ye came past,” she replied as she finally stooped down and weighed a smooth stone in her hand. “We shouldn’t come by without putting another one on the pile, should we?”
