He did not move.
The light through the shuttered window was thin, silver-gray, the color of mountain dawns before the sun crested the peaks. It caught the curve of her shoulder. The soft swell of her breasts rising and falling with each breath. The shadow pooling in the hollow of her throat.
He had bedded women before. Brief encounters, bodies meeting in the dark and parting before morning. He had always been the one to leave. He had never stayed long enough for dawn.
He had never wanted to.
In sleep, her face had lost the animation that usually drove it. No questions forming behind her eyes. No observations building in the furrow of her brow. She was simply present, breathing, taking up space in his bed as though she belonged there.
She did not belong there. She was a Valdaran archivist on a three-month assignment. She had a position waiting for her, a life that had nothing to do with orc warchiefs and mountain fortresses.
His hand moved without his deciding to move it.
He traced the curve of her hip through the furs. Followed the line upward, over her belly, the dip of her waist, the flare of her ribs. His palm came to rest against her side, fingers spanning from spine to sternum, and he felt her heartbeat against the heel of his hand.
Steady. Trusting. She had not flinched in her sleep when he touched her.
The last woman who had slept beside him had been his mother, when he was a child small enough to fit in the curve of her body. That was forty years ago. Forty years of sleeping alone, of waking to empty chambers, of keeping the space around him clear because a warchief could not afford softness.
Verity shifted. Her breath caught, released. Her hand uncurled from her chest and found his wrist where it rested against her side. Her fingers closed around him, not pulling, just holding. A grip that said,I know you're there.
She did not wake.
He watched her fingers against his wrist. Small and ink-stained, the nails bitten short, the knuckles rough from wintersspent in archive cold. Her hand looked fragile wrapped around his forearm. It was not fragile at all.
The shutters creaked. The wind had shifted in the night, coming down from the high passes now, carrying the scent of snow. There would be patrols to organize. Reports to hear. The River Clan delegation was still in residence, which meant Tormund would have opinions about yesterday's dispute that required managing.
He did not move.
The light strengthened by degrees. Gray became silver. Silver warmed toward gold. The sun was rising behind the eastern peaks, and soon the fortress would wake, and the chain of obligation that bound his every hour would reassert itself.
He had five more minutes. Perhaps ten.
He spent them memorizing the woman in his bed.
The way her lashes fanned across her cheekbones. The small crease between her brows that appeared even in sleep, as though she was working through a problem in her dreams. The scatter of freckles across her nose and cheeks, denser than he'd noticed before, revealed by the growing light.
The fullness of her. Breast and hip and thigh, soft flesh that yielded beneath his palm when he tested it. Valdaran women were taught to minimize themselves, to take up less space, to apologize for bodies that did not conform to narrow standards. He had seen that teaching in how she moved when she first arrived. Shoulders hunched. Arms crossed. Trying to fold herself smaller.
She was not folded now. She sprawled across his bed with the unselfconsciousness of deep sleep, one leg kicked free of the furs, her whole body open and unguarded.
He wanted to see her like this every morning for the rest of his life.
The thought should have alarmed him. It did not. It settled into his chest like a stone finding its place in a wall, heavy and permanent and exactly where it belonged.
Her eyelids fluttered.
He watched awareness return to her in stages. The small frown deepening, then smoothing. Her breath changing rhythm. Her fingers tightening on his wrist before loosening, the grip shifting from instinct to intention.
Her eyes opened.
Brown. Warm in the growing gold of morning light. Confused for a moment, then focusing on his face, and something in them softened when recognition arrived.
"You're still here," she said. Her voice was rough with sleep.
"I live here."
"I meant—" She stopped. Blinked. Her gaze dropped to where her hand still wrapped his wrist. "I expected you to be gone. Warchief duties. Important things."
