Page 99

One dark brow lifts, faintly sardonic. “Is that an indirect order?”

“It can be, if ye’re determined to be daft.”

That wins the ghost of something from him—a brief slant of amusement, gone almost before it arrives. “I’m fine.”

“James.” I stop a pace away. Long grass stirs between us, dry at the tips, whispering against itself in the wind.

“I’m well enough.”

The answer comes too quickly.

I study him. The tightness at the corners of his eyes. The pallor still clinging beneath the tan of his skin. The unmistakable strain in the hand he’s got pressed against the wall.

“No.” I whisper it as if gentleness alone might make him open up. “Ye’re not.”

For one beat, neither of us speaks.

Something in the space between us turns. Not with any dramatic flourish, nor with the foolish grandeur poets are so fond of, but into something plainer and more dangerous: honesty.

His gaze settles on me then with a steadiness that feels less like looking than being quietly held in place.

“You came to find me.”

Not a question. Not triumph. If anything, baffled wonder, as though the truth of it won’t settle in him.

Heat stirs unreasonably beneath my skin. “I was concerned for you.”

“Aye,” he says, and something low moves through his voice. “I can see that.”

I should leave it there and let him have the easy answer. Take it as the courtesy it is.

Instead, I hear myself say, “I came up, hopin’ ye’d be here. I think I needed to set eyes on you.”

The words feel perilously like stepping off a ledge and discovering, too late, that there’s no ground where I had hoped there might be.

But James doesn’t mock me for it. He doesn’t even look pleased in the way some men might. He grows strangely still.

The wind slips between us again, carrying the scent of sun-warmed grass and dry earth. Somewhere far off, a rook gives a harsh complaint to the sky.

I glance down at the bank because it’s easier than looking at him. The flowers are long gone, yet I know exactly where they had been.

“I saw them,” I say.

When I lift my eyes to his again, all trace of that near-smile is gone.

“Ye’ll have to be a touch more specific for me,” he says quietly.

“I saw the threads, James. But it was the tether between us I saw most clearly.”

There. It’s said. Plainly enough to shame me, and still not plainly enough to convey the enormity of it.

He lets the silence lengthen until it gathers weight around us. Then, at last, he turns fully toward me.

“Aye, I saw it too.”

The words reach some place tender inside me.

Hearing him say it makes the thing real in a new and more precarious way. It belongs here now, between him and me.