Page 86 of Owned by the Scarred Laird

“I have enough.”

“As ye wish.” She did not argue it. She did not say anything else at all.

He drank from the cup anyway, because it gave him something to do with his hands that was not reaching for hers, which was the thing his hands seemed to want to do most in her presence lately, an urge he had no intention of examining too closely.

She used to say his name like it cost her nothing.

He thought of the night by the hearth, not two weeks past, broth going cold between them while she told him a man deciding she was worth the labor mattered more than he knew. He'd nearly forgotten to breathe over it.

He had not understood, until it stopped, how much of his day had been built around waiting for it.

“Ye’ve gone quiet, me Lady,” Duncan said to Chloe this time, leaning forward around Tyler to catch her eye. “Ye all right?”

“Perfectly, thank ye.” She smiled at him. It was a good smile, warm enough, polished enough that a stranger would not have caught what was wrong with it. Edward caught it. It did not reach anywhere past her mouth. “The venison is lovely tonight.”

“Aye, I said that meself,” Duncan said, “and got naught but silence for it.”

“Forgive me. I was distracted.” She reached for her cup, drank, and set it down at precisely the angle she’d lifted it from. “It’s very good.”

Duncan glanced at Edward, one eyebrow raised, a question in it Edward had no answer for. Edward looked back down at his plate.

William started fussing somewhere behind them. Melodie had him at the far end of the hall, walking him along the wall to settle him before bed, and Chloe’s head turned toward the sound before she caught herself and turned it back.

“He’ll settle,” Edward said. “He always does, once Melodie starts the second lap.”

“Aye.” Chloe did not look at William again. “I am sure he’s in good hands.”

Three days ago, she’d have been out of her chair already, cheese still in hand, crossing the hall to take the boy herself and tell Melodie to sit down and eat something for once.

He watched her stay in her seat instead, spine straight, and understood that this too was a wall going up brick by careful brick, and that he was the one who’d handed her the mortar.

“Ye’ve barely touched yer plate,” he said.

“I am nae terribly hungry tonight, Me Laird.”

Me Laird.

Two words, and they landed harder than anything she’d thrown at him in that distillery. He’d stood there and told her she had not earned the right to ask him anything, that she was a woman he’d married for a debt and nothing more, and here she was handing that exact sentence back to him across the dinner table. That was the unbearable part. The anger he could have matched. This was worse than anger. This was her believing him.

“Eat somethin’,” he said, rougher than he meant it.

“As ye wish, Me Laird.” She took up her fork and ate three small, deliberate bites, then set it down and folded her hands again.

Tyler kicked him under the table. Edward did not look at him. He did not need to look to know exactly what expression was on Tyler’s face because it was the same one Duncan had, and the same one Mrs. Donnan had worn when she was hovering with the whisky jug a few minutes earlier before she retreated to the kitchen with her mouth set in a thin, disapproving line.

They all saw it. He’d built this himself in a stone room that smelled of peat smoke, and now the whole hall could see the shape of what he’d built, and no one was going to say a single word about it to his face.

“Chloe.” He said her name plainly, with no title, and watched her hands go still in her lap.

“Aye, Me Laird?”

“Edward. It’s Edward.”

She looked at him then, finally, properly, the first time all evening her eyes had come up off her plate and stayed there. Something moved behind them, quick, gone before he could name it. Hope, maybe. Or the memory of hope, which was worse, because he had nothing ready to give it that would not collapse the second he opened his mouth again.

“Edward,” she said, testing it, careful, like a word she was not sure she still had the right to use. “What do ye need?”

He had four words in him. He’d had them standing in that distillery with her hand on the door, and he had not said them then either.