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“Dinnae look at him,” Iona said. “Look at me.”
• • •
They went.
Alasdair watched them go. The men went first, the man with the bonnet nearly falling over his own feet to reach the door. The women went after, quick and quiet, with their good skirts gathered in their hands and every bit of the flirting gone out of them. The fair one let go of his sleeve as if it had burned her. The last skirt whisked around the doorframe, and the door banged shut.
Not one of them had looked to him for leave. They had heard the lady of the house, and they had obeyed her.
Alasdair let himself smile. It was the slow smile, and he knew she hated it, and he gave it to her anyway.
“I warned ye, lass,” he said. “In the passage. I told ye ye’d regret it if ye played with fire.”
He went back behind his desk, because if he stayed where he was he would cross the room to her, and he did not trust what he would do when he got there. Iona stood on the near side of it with the ink stain under her shoes. They were a desk apart. She was breathing as hard as if she had run all the way up from the kitchen, her fists clenched at her sides, her cheeks flaming.
He was breathing as hard as she was. He had not expected that.
He had spent the whole of that parade looking at all those pretty faces and seeing none of them. He had been watching her: her mouth going tight, her knuckles going white, the moment her chin came up and she walked onto his ink like a soldier taking a hill. I am Lady MacVey. His wife had claimed his name in his own room, and it had hit him low in the belly, a hot hard kick, worse than any blow she had ever landed. He wanted her so badly his hands hurt with it. He wanted her flat on this desk with her floury sleeves and her flaming cheeks, that furious mouth open under his, his name on it in a very different voice. He wanted to hate her for that.
“Ye enjoyed that,” Iona said.
“Every bit of it,” Alasdair said. “The end most of all. Ye sounded like the lady of this house at last.”
“Ye paid five women to rub themselves against ye in front of yer wife.”
“I paid them nothing.” He spread his hands, the bound one and the whole one, and grinned. “They came for the pleasure of it. Women have been throwing themselves at my feet since I was old enough to shave, lass. Which of them would pass up the chance to be the laird’s mistress?”
She leaned over the desk at him, so close he could smell the bread on her.
“Then the pleasure was all theirs,” she said. “Ye looked like a man buying a horse he couldnae ride.”
“Ye were jealous,” he said.
“Jealous?” Iona said. “Of a woman who had to ask ye whether it hurt? I tied that hand, MacVey. I know exactly how much it hurts, and how much more it could.”
“Ye were jealous, lass.” He leaned his knuckles on the desk, the good hand and the bound one, and looked straight into her green eyes. “Ye wanted to scratch that fair one’s eyes out for touching my hand. Yer knot. I saw ye watching it.”
The colour went out of her cheeks and flooded back. Her eyes were wet and blazing at once. He had stung her. He had meant to. He had not known it would sit so heavy in his own chest.
“Ye made me watch ye choose a mistress,” she said. “And ye smiled the whole time.”
“Ye smiled at Seumas the whole of supper.”
“I gave a man a word of thanks for a cup of ale.”
“And I gave five women a look.” His voice dropped. “We’re square, wife.”
“Square.” Iona laughed, short and hard. “I thanked a man for a cup. Ye let a woman stroke the hand I bound. We’ll never be square, MacVey. Ye’ll pay for this morning as long as either of us is breathing.”
Neither of them moved. The desk sat between them like a wall on a border, and he could hear her breathing, and his own, and nothing else in the whole keep. Her mouth was trembling with rage, and he could not stop looking at it.
Then she came around the end of the desk.
Slowly, with her eyes fixed on his face and her fists still clenched, she came toward him, and the smile went clean off his mouth.
He had no notion at all what she meant to do to him. He only knew he was going to let her try.
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