The light went long and gold and then rose over the hills, and the gloaming came down soft on the river, and they lit the fire.
The entire glen built it, and the entire glen lit it, Cairn and Blythe shoulder to shoulder, and it roared up into the violet dark sky in a great fountain of sparks while the piper played and the fiddles caught the tune and the smell of roasting meat, black bun, and Scotch broth drifted over the water.
Olivia ate too much and laughed too loud and danced the reels with shy Cairn lads and her brother’s grinning men. She watched Kate dance with Alastair, the two of them lit like a pair of lanterns, pretending fiercely that they were not. She watched Maisie teach Lucas’s stiffest councilman a game of chance that would cost him his dignity and likely his purse.
And in the long, bright evening, she did not dance with Ragnall.
She felt him the way she always felt him—a banked fire at her back wherever she went. She caught his eyes across the flames a dozen times and looked away a dozen more.
For to dance with him was to take his hand, and to take his hand was to break the one rule she had left, the rule that had kepther safe and wretched for a month, and she did not trust herself, with the firelight and the music and the whole bewitching night of it, to stop at a hand.
The fire had burned down to a deep red glow, and the music had gone slow and sweet when at last he crossed the trampled grass toward her. The crowd seemed to part for him. He stopped in front of her and said not a word. He only held out his hand, palm up in the firelight, and waited.
“Ye ken I cannae,” she whispered. “Ragnall, ye ken what happens if I take yer hand.”
“Aye,” he said. “I ken exactly what happens.” The scar tugged. His hand did not move, open and steady and waiting between them. “Take it anyway, lassie.”
And Olivia, who had defied a council and a clan and her own treacherous heart at every turn for a month, looked at her husband’s open hand in the dying firelight and stopped defying the one thing she had wanted since the bend in the road took Cairn out of her sight.
She took his hand.
CHAPTER 31
The feelof her hand in his after a month nearly brought him to his knees in front of them all.
He had touched her before. He had carried her up the stairs with her blood on his hands, bound her wound, and held her face to kiss her in a nursery he had no business kissing her in. But he had never once, in all their strange, brief history, simply held her hand the way a man held his wife’s hand—warm fingers laced through warm fingers, for no reason but that he wanted to and was at last allowed.
He pulled her gently into the slow turn of the dance, and she responded, stiff at first, then relaxing, as the firelight cast a golden glow over her face, and her eyes never left his.
He did not pull her closer. He did not need to. The careful handsbreadth he kept between them was its own torment, every spot they did not touch lit up like a brand, and he could feel her breath grow short and knew his had gone the same way, andaround them, the glen danced and never guessed their Laird was quietly losing the last of his reason.
“Ye swore ye’d tell me,” she said against his shoulder. “At the dancin’. Ye swore it on whatever I liked.”
“Aye.”
“So tell me.”
He did not answer her at once.
The fiddle went round, and the fire threw their shadows across the trampled grass, and he turned her under his hand and thought about the shape of the words and found that he could not get his mouth around a single one of them.
Ten years. He had carried it for ten years and never once said it aloud, not to Maisie, not to Alastair, not to a priest. And it seemed to him now that a thing kept that long in the dark grew a hide on it, and he had no notion at all what it would look like when it finally came out into the light, nor what she would do when she saw it.
Say it then, ye great coward. She’s asked ye plainly, and she’s stood there in front of three hundred people and told them she’s nothing left to burn, and ye cannae find yer own tongue.
“There’s a thing I swore,” he murmured into her hair. “Over me sister’s broken body. Ten years back.” He felt her go very stillagainst him. “I’ve never said it out loud to a livin’ soul, Olivia, and I find I cannae say it here, with a fiddle goin’ and half the glen watchin’ us.”
“Ragnall—”
“I’ll say it. I’ve given ye me word, and I’ll keep it.” His hand tightened on her waist. “But nae here.”
Then the tune wound down.
She did not refuse him. He had not expected her to. She had been demanding this of him since the fiddle started, and she was not a woman who let a man off the hook once she had him on it.
But he saw the flicker all the same, the small wariness that crossed her face and was gone, and he understood it, because it was the same thing that was coiling within him.
It was not the answer she was afraid of. It was the dark, and the distance from the fire, and the pair of them alone in it with a month of wanting between them and nothing left to hold it back but her rule, and her rule was already lying in pieces somewhere at the ford, and they both knew it.
