A flicker of pure betrayal crossed his face. “Edith talks too much. She is a menace.”
“She’s very fond of you.”
“She has a curious way of showing it.”
“She feeds you.”
“She feeds everyone.”
“She gives you the best apples.”
His mouth shut.
Amelia pointed at him. “Aha.”
“There is no aha.”
“There absolutely is. That was an aha face.”
“I do not have an aha face.”
“You have at least six faces now. I’ve been keeping track.”
His eyes narrowed, but not with anger. “Have you?”
“Oh yes. Scowl one is ordinary displeasure. Scowl two is someone has touched the horse. Scowl three is Walter has found a roll. Scowl four is Hob has said something appalling. Scowl five is someone is lying to you.”
“And six?”
She met his eyes across the coals.
“Six is when you’re trying not to feel something.”
The humor left him.
For one heartbeat, Amelia thought she had gone too far. It would be just like her, wouldn’t it? To trip on a moment so fragile it had somehow survived battlefields, storms, seven centuries, and propriety, and crush it under her big modern mouth.
But Thomas didn’t look away.
The hall seemed to fall quiet around them, though it had been quiet all along. Beyond the shutters, rain battered the dark. The fire sank lower, the coals pulsing like a hidden heart. A drop from the new leak struck Amelia’s bowl with a soft plink.
Thomas looked at her across the dying fire with his ghosts behind his eyes and something else now in front of them. Not desire only, though it was there, dangerous and bright beneath the grief. Not gratitude. Not duty.
Recognition, perhaps. The terrible relief of being seen whole and not turned away from.
It was too hot in here. She barely resisted the urge to pull her shift away from her skin and blow down the front of it.
“Amelia,” he said, and the word was rough enough to be a warning.
She should have stood, should have climbed back to the loft while the night still had some boundary left.
Instead she whispered, “Thomas.”
The sound of his name in her mouth changed the air. He looked at her as if something inside him had finally stepped out from behind a closed door.
Then the roof timber above them groaned. Both of them looked up. There came a sound like a wet cloth tearing in half, followed by a sudden, spectacular rush of water from the roof directly onto the rushes three feet from Thomas’s boot.
Amelia jerked back. “What the hell?”
