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Something shifted in his expression then, subtle but unmistakable. Hope carefully restrained beneath all his discipline. “Then don’t.”

Still, he did not pull her closer. He left the choice open between them, as though he understood it needed to be freely made, or it would mean nothing at all.

“You are not an easy man.”

The corner of his mouth curved faintly. “I have heard that before.”

“But you are an honest one.”

“I try to be.”

A small smile touched her lips. “If I remain at Lemlair, it will not be as a petitioner.”

“Nay.”

“It will not be because I feel trapped by obligation.”

“Never.”

She stepped closer until scarcely any space remained between them. “It will be because I have decided there is nowhere else I would rather stand.”

His breath caught softly. “And if I asked you to stand beside me?” he asked. “Not merely through Yule, but after?”

Emotion rose unexpectedly in her throat, fragile and frightening and hopeful all at once.

“I think,” she whispered, “I would like that very much.”

Gavan drew her fully into his arms, and this time neither of them pretended the closeness meant anything less than what it was becoming.

She reached for him, sliding her fingers up his coat and curling them into the fabric near his shoulders. He did not pretend control any longer. His hands came to her waist and pulled her in, and when he kissed her, it was not gentle or hesitant; it was days of held-back hunger breaking loose.

She answered without hesitation, rising into him, her breath catching as his hand caressed her back, drawing her closer.

“Not here,” he murmured against her mouth.

She nodded, breath uneven, as he opened the door to his room. Inside the chamber, he closed the door behind them with a soft finality. Silence filled the room, not empty, but heavy with everything they were about to become.

He did not rush her as his hands rose to cradle her face, thumbs brushing along her jaw, his gaze searching her one last time. “You are certain?”

Her answer was steady. “I am not choosing out of fear.”

He had been holding himself in check all this time; she had felt it in the hands at her cheeks. But now, as she slid her hands up his chest, something shifted. The tension in him eased. His hands moved down her neck, across her shoulders, and down her back, fingers pressing, not tentative anymore but certain, as though some final wall had cracked inside him.

She felt it and answered back when he kissed her again, slower now, deeper, letting urgency give way to something more deliberate.

He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the bed, breaking the kiss only long enough to set her upon the coverlet. The look in his eyes was not triumph. It was reverence.

Sorcha felt it in the way he hovered, not above her, but close enough that his breath brushed her skin, that she could see the tension in his jaw and the restraint still binding him even now. She knew the weight of a man’s body, the shape of desire, the familiar rhythm of touch. She had known a husband’s bed before. Yet the way Gavan looked at her, as if the moment itself mattered more than the claiming, stirred something deeper than memory.

He did not reach for her immediately. He watched her instead, as if waiting for her to guide him, as if he would not take what she did not first offer. Her husband had never waited like that for her. The thought unsteadied her as she allowed herself to look at his strength, the undeniable awareness of his desire; it sent a slow, heated pulse through her body that she did not try to deny.

It startled her. Not the desire itself, for she was no innocent, no stranger to a man’s touch. But the depth of it. The way her body answered him without thought, without restraint. It had been so long since she had felt anything close to this. Not with James and their short marriage.

This was different. This was raw. This was choosing.

“Come here,” she whispered, her voice not trembling from fear, but from the strange, unfamiliar tenderness pressing into her chest.

He obeyed, but even then, he did not simply take. His hand braced beside her head, his weight kept carefully from her, the restraint still evident in every line of his body. When he kissed her, it was slow and unhurried, as though he intended to savour rather than devour, and the quiet patience in it unravelled her in a way urgency never could.