Not merely the wanting of a man for a fetching woman, though there was that, God knew. That was a daily affliction and had become so common he had begun treating it like bad weather. The flash of her ankle when she gathered her skirts from the mud. The curve of her neck beneath that damned escaping hair. The clever mouth that should have been outlawed in three shires. The way she looked at him sometimes as if he were not broken, only difficult.
Aye, he wanted her. He was made of flesh, not stone, no matter what half his household seemed to believe. But this was worse. He wanted the rest.
Wanted to sit beside her at this table when the year turned and the rushes were fresh for Christmas, wanted to come in cold from the lists and find her bent over some problem, muttering about men, mud, and the criminal absence of coffee, whatever that was. He wanted to watch her teach Alyson letters, argue with Walter over columns, bully Hob into washing his left thumb again, and look up when Thomas entered as if some private part of her had been waiting.
He wanted to be the man who unpinned that glorious hair at night, one copper curl at a time, and learned whether it truly fell to her waist as Edith claimed.
He wanted to know what she had looked like the day before she’d arrived at Ashcombe. In the place she grieved and wouldnot name. He wanted to know who had loved her, who had failed to love her properly, who had been fool enough to let her go.
He wanted to make her laugh the way Hob had made her laugh in the yard, helplessly, with her whole self.
No. Worse. He wanted her to laugh that way because of him. It was the most dangerous thing he had ever wanted.
It was not the hot wild danger of a charge or the sharp bright fear of blades in the fog. It was a softer danger, and therefore worse. It crept beneath armor. It made a man imagine mornings. It made him look at a crumbling castle and think, not merely I must hold this, but mayhap there could be joy here.
Thomas knew better. He had learned in mud and blood and smoke. Men who imagined futures invited God to take inventory. So he did what he had always done with things he wanted and could not have. He set his jaw, turned his eyes from the side of Amelia’s face, and reminded himself of the facts.
She was a stranger and he was a disloyal baron, his loyalty stained by Montfort’s banner, one bad report from crown hands in his coffers, one bad season from ruin. He had no business wanting any woman, least of all one the world would already be eager to condemn. And the surest way to ruin Amelia in this century was to be seen wanting her.
He looked toward the hall, toward the men lingering near the hearth, toward the tenants not yet out of earshot, toward Walter’s stiff profile.
Every glance mattered. Every softness could become a story. Every story could become a weapon.
Belmaine would make one if he could. Thomas had seen the way the man looked at her. His hand tightened until the table edge bit his palm. Then there was the last fact. The oldest one. The truest.
He had failed to keep alive nearly everyone he had ever let himself need. There were faces he could not forget. HughTanner’s surprised eyes. Wexford dying in the mud. Men who had trusted Thomas’s banner and been carried home under none. Boys who had followed him because he had asked and then never saw home again.
Thomas was good at fighting. Good at taking blows, and good at standing between danger and whatever stood behind him. He was not a man who got to keep things.
He had made his peace with that in the mud at Evesham, and he would make it again, every morning if need be, for as long as Amelia sat at his table.
“You’ve gone all thundery again,” Amelia said.
Thomas blinked. She hadn’t looked up from the roll.
“I have not.”
“You have. I can hear you brooding from here. It’s very loud.”
Walter made a strangled sound.
Thomas turned his head slowly. “Brooding makes no sound.”
“Yours does.”
“I am reckoning the king’s farm.”
“You’re reckoning it upside down.”
He looked down. Bloody hell, he was.
Amelia’s lips pressed together.
“Do not laugh,” he said.
“I would never.”
“You are laughing.”
