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“Think what ye like about me.” Her voice cracked and she let it. “But dinnae ye dare say I’d use her for it. She was sitting in the dark, MacVey. In the cold, with the shutters barred and her hands like ice, and not a soul in this whole house to say a word to her. Yer maids slop water on my skirts. Ye keep a guard on the hall and none at all on yer own mother’s comfort.”

“Ye’ll keep away from her,” he said.

“Why? So she can sit in the dark another month?”

“Because a Dunmore blade made her a widow.” The words came out of him like a fist. “And I’ll not have Torquil’s daughter in this room playing nurse to what he left.”

The blow landed. Iona felt it in her stomach, but she did not give an inch of floor.

“And a MacVey raid put my brother in the ground at fifteen,” she said. “I’ve no mother left to sit with. I’d have given my right hand to sit with her one more hour, and you have yours down the passage and leave her to rot.”

His face went white under the brown of it. She saw his hands close at his sides, and she was glad of it, savagely glad, and in the same breath she was aware of the heat of him inches from her breast and hated every inch of herself for it.

He took a breath to answer, and she did not let him have it.

“She needs company, MacVey. No’ another jailer.”

• • •

The word hit him harder than the inkwell had.

Jailer. He heard it ring off the bare walls. He could not remember when he had last seen that shutter open.

Rage came up in him hot and fast, and under it something worse that he would not look at. He took Iona by the arm above the elbow, to put her out of the door.

He held her hard enough that she could not mistake it. She was warm under his hand through the blue wool, and he felt the muscle of her arm go hard as rope at his touch. She turned her head and looked up at him, and her eyes were blazing green, and her mouth was so close that he could see the breath going in and out of it.

He wanted that mouth so badly that he hated himself for it. He kept his eyes on hers and his other hand at his side.

“Out,” he said.

Then she wrenched her arm out of his grip, so hard and so fast that she nearly struck the bedpost with her elbow.

His hand stayed where it was, out in the air between them, closed on nothing.

He had carried her over his saddle, and she had never once pulled away from him like that, as if his touch were dirt on her sleeve. It stung worse than any blow she had swung at him.

“Dinnae,” Iona said. “Dinnae put yer hands on me to throw me out of a room like a thief.”

“Ye’ll go where I put ye,” he said, “in my own house.”

“Then ye’ll have to carry me again, MacVey.” She tipped her head back to hold his eyes. “And ye’ll have to do it in front of her.”

“Alasdair.”

His mother’s voice. It was thin, but it carried, and he turned his head.

She had not moved from her chair. Her eyes were on him, and he had not seen them so clear in a long while.

“Leave the lass be,” Lady MacVey said.

“Mother, ye dinnae ken what she is.” He let his hand fall at last. “She’s Dunmore’s daughter. Ye ken what Dunmore did.”

“I ken it better than you.” His mother’s voice did not rise. “I dinnae need ye to tell me who her father is.”

Alasdair opened his mouth. Nothing came out of it.

“She knocked at my door,” his mother said. “She opened my shutter when I told her no. She sat on that stool and rubbed my hands till they had some feeling in them, and talked to me about buckets and lamps.” She looked at him. “When did ye last sit on that stool, son?”