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“I havenae been able to put it from my mind,” I admit. “I’ve tried, but every time I think about anything else, it comes back.” I let out a breath that feels thin. “I needed to know whether I had imagined it. Whether⁠—”

I break off. Even in my head, the rest feels too much like a confession.

Whether it touched something deep in you and left you altered too.

Whether I’m alone in this.

James’s jaw shifts once. His gaze drops briefly to the grass at our feet, then lifts to me again.

“I didnae sleep,” he says.

The turn in conversation catches me off guard.

“What?”

“Last night. I didnae sleep.” He drags a hand over the back of his neck, rough with unease. “Every time I shut my eyes, I saw the creature again. But that wasnae the worst of it. You were elsewhere, and I kept wonderin’ whether you were safe.” A brief, joyless huff leaves him. “I hated not havin’ an answer.”

A tenderness pulls tight beneath my ribs.

“I near went to find ye more than once.”

He looks away from me and out over the slope. The angle of his face reveals a strain I hadn’t fully grasped until now. Not just weariness. Not just pain. A vulnerability deeper than either, because he’s carried it inwardly and alone.

The world doesn’t stop.

The wind still moves. The tall grass still bends and whispers. All around us, the living world continues, oblivious.

But mine comes apart quietly beneath his words.

The ground, the sky, the stretch of hill before us—all of it falls back until there is only him, and the unbearable knowledge that his want has never been careless. It has been worry. Fear. Vigilance. Devotion.

It’s one thing to suspect oneself desired. Some men desire easily. Negligently. Sometimes cruelly. Desire can be little more than appetite dressed in gentler manners.

This isn’t that.

“After all that ye endured, you still nearly came to find me?” I ask.

His gaze cuts back to mine with startling force. “That’s not the point.”

The answer is immediate, almost fierce. Then he catches himself, closes his eyes briefly, and reins it in.

When he opens them, the intensity hasn’t left them. It’s only deepened into something that seems to carry the weight of a thousand unspoken things.

“The point,” he says, more carefully now, “was that I had no need for a tether to tell me to care. I only kent you were out of my sight, and I hated not knowin’ whether you were safe.”

The honesty of it strips me bare in places I had thought well-defended.

I swallow. “I reckon I was right to be troubled by how ye looked this mornin’.”

It sounds meagre once spoken. Pitifully smaller than the truth.

Something in his face gives. Not into ease, not entirely, but into something less tormented, as though the simple fact of being cared for has lightened him already.

“Aye?”

I nod. “You look…” I stop, searching for a word that won’t offend his pride and finding none worth the effort. “Dead on yer feet.”

To my astonishment, he laughs.