She knew the patterns now the way she knew the sounds of her own kitchen. This was a patrol coming in off the passes.Ours.
She got up. It was not graceful. She rolled to one hip, got a hand flat on the wall, and hauled herself upright with a grunt.Then she was moving across the yard as fast as a woman at the very end of her pregnancy could move, an urgent rolling waddle.
The gate stood open. The two gate-dogs were already up and barking. They were Brownie's leftover pups, and they poured past her toward the incoming horses with their tails going like flails.
And there he was.
Dust on his leathers, his hair half-loose from the braid, the favor she'd tied to his chest strap filthy and fraying at one corner and exactly where she'd knotted it. Carried out over a pass and home again, exactly as he'd promised.
He saw her before he was fully through the gate.
He came down off the horse before it had properly stopped and crossed the frozen ground to her in a handful of long steps. She had time to say his name once before he reached her.
He did not haul her up the way he used to. She saw him remember, mid-reach, that he couldn't just drag her against him the way he had a hundred times before. His hands changed in the air. They came to her careful, one spreading wide and warm against the side of the huge belly, the other cradling up under her jaw, and he held her there at the length of his own arms and looked at her.
"Look at you," he said. His voice had dropped to gravel. "Look at the size of you. Gods, woman."
"Nine days." Her own voice wasn't steady either. "You said six."
"Greytooth Pass was closed. We went around."
And then he did lift her, but not the way he used to. He gathered her against his chest with one arm under her shoulders and the other braced beneath her thighs, and he eased her weight up slowly, letting the belly settle between them. She felt him adjust. Felt his arms find the new balance of her, the shape that was her-plus-one, and lock there.
"Put me down," she said into his neck. "The whole yard is watching."
"Let them. I've thought about nothing the whole way home but getting my hands back on you."
She put her hands on either side of his freezing face. "You're home," she said.
"I'm home." He turned his head and set his mouth to the heel of her palm. "And you're the size of a grain barrel, and I have never wanted you more in my life."
Somewhere behind them a garrison man made a sound. Varek turned his head a quarter-inch and the sound stopped.
They made him eat and report before the bath, and she sat wedged against his side at the long table while he told Targesh about the Greytooth road with one hand splayed flat over the swell of her the whole time, keeping his place on her like a thumb in a book. By the time they got up the stairs, she was so tired she was seeing double and so awake in her own skin she could have gone back down and scrubbed the flags.
He came out of the bath with his hair wet and found her sitting on the edge of the enormous bed in her shift, both hands pressed to the small of her back. He stopped in the doorway to look at her.
"Don't," she said.
"Don't what."
"Look at me like that. I'm huge. You said so yourself."
"You're huge," he agreed, crossing the room, "and I've been hard since the gate." He went down on his knees in front of her, which put his face below hers for once, and set his big warm hands over her knees. "Nine nights on cold rock. You want to know what I thought about, every one of them?"
"What?"
He pushed the shift up over her knees. "Lay there every night with my men breathing all around me and my cock achingagainst the ground like a green boy," he said. "Thinking about your tits. They're heavier now. I've felt it. Come home and they're heavier still. This line down the middle of you here, that they say the babe draws. Wanted my mouth on that. Wanted my mouth on the whole ripe swollen size of you, every changed inch, and I've got nine nights of it saved up. So you're going to lie back and let me take my time."
"You are the filthiest man I have ever—" Her breath snagged as his thumb found her. "—ever met."
"I know what I am." He was watching his own hand move. "And you're already wet for me. I can smell it on you."
She could not lie to him. She'd given that up months ago.
He did not put her on her back. They'd both learned, over the long summer of her getting bigger, the ways that worked now and the ways that didn't, and flat on her back with the whole weight of the child bearing down was one that didn't. Instead, he built her a slope of pillows against the headboard and settled her back into it, half-reclined, propped and open, and knelt between her spread thighs where he could see the whole of her. Then he lowered his head and set his mouth to her the way he always did, like a man with nowhere in the world he'd rather be and all night to be there.
He took his time. He worked around the belly, one huge hand spread warm and sure over the top of the swell while his mouth stayed on her. She couldn't see past herself to watch him, so he narrated it for her instead.
