Page 33 of The Shape of Silence

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She made a noise that he perceived as a sarcastic snort, which he didn’t need to interpret as she followed that up with, “And how would you know?”

Fair enough. He’d only been a few days in her company. Rather than dance around it, he asked plainly, “What has untethered ye right now?”

She did not answer immediately. Instead, she strode to the small table near the door where she kept her snares and tools and lifted a coil of line from its peg. She tested it between her fingers, pulling it taut, her mouth set in a firm line.

“What does it matter?” she said at last, trimming away a frayed section with her knife.

“Ye want me gone?” he ventured. “Returned to the life ye had before I came.”

Another “hmph” answered before she said, “I don’t even know what is normal—or what is real for that matter.”

He watched her hands as she worked. She tied a new loop with quick precision, thumb and forefinger moving adeptly, then tugged the knot tight and held it up to inspect it. A strand of her light hair had fallen forward, and she blew it from her cheek rather than free a hand to move it. The gesture was unstudied, almost careless, which she was generally not, and Morggán found himself immensely curious about frustrated Avery.

“I’m nae sure I follow.”

“And why should you? You seem to know what’s going on.” She paused then, her hands dropping softly to the crude table. She closed her eyes briefly and tipped her head back, drawing in a long breath. The morning light caught along her throat and the underside of her jaw.

Morggán did not look away. She was irritated, plainly cross with him, and yet none of it dulled the fact that she was a bonny woman. The slender, delicate line of her throat where her collar had fallen open, the smooth stretch of skin there, the wee shadow in the hollow at the base of her neck, how stark was the contrast to male physicality—he found his gaze drawn to these small, ordinary details. There was strength in the way she held herself, yes, but there was also a quiet, unguarded grace in it, a woman’s shape and warmth that had nothing to do with survival or necessity and everything to do with simple, undeniable beauty. These were not things he had allowed himself to dwell upon very often.

He had resolved the night before that he could not leave her here alone, her safety now in question with an army having ridden through these woods, and that resolve had been born of duty.

What stirred now, at the sight of her bare skin at her throat and the unselfconscious way she moved, was separate.

She lowered her chin and met his gaze again.

He cleared his throat, frowning. “The talk of war has alarmed ye?”

“Alarmed doesn’t quite... say everything about what I’m feeling.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t want you gone, personally—like, it’s not anything personal,” she said, beginning to wind the trimmed line neatly around her palm. “But you’ve come, or you’re here, and you’re talking about things that just don’t make sense, and it frightens me. For ten years I’ve lived with a simple idea—not a truth or fact—just an idea of what happened, and that worked for me. So, yeah, I kind of want you gone. I want to go back to not knowing, not being made... afraid. I don’t like this at all, this... all this uncertainty.”

She sounded more frustrated than afraid, but he guessed that was pride at work, choosing irritation over admitting to fear.

She added, her voice no less irritated, “And it occurred to me that before you came here, I didn’t see fires from a distance or have armies marching across my front yard.”

Ignoring that part, since he knew for certain that he was not what brought the English close to and now inside her forest, he focused on the other thing, her confusion, “Mayhap I can help ye make sense of what did happen to ye,” he suggested, “what brought ye here for the man to find.”

She shook her head slightly, slipping the finished coil into the pouch at her belt. “I don’t remember much. It was ten years ago. I was young. I don’t know if it was a Sunday or a Wednesday. I only remember it was September, and I was missing the first week of school to go to a movie premiere in Scotland.” She waved a hand dismissively, adding in a clipped tone, “My father worked for a PR firm.”

Clearly, he wouldn’t be able to help with that, since he didn’t understand much of what she’d just said.

“What else do ye recall?”

“Nothing,” she said, turning from the table. “I need to check the snares.”

“I’ll go with—”

She stopped and turned back, fisting her hands at her sides. “I don’t need you to follow me around. I don’t want you to.”

Not offended in the least, he asked simply, “Did ye strip the horse completely?”

“What?” She asked, frowning, possibly displeased with the change of subject.

“Did ye take all from my horse,” he asked, “or did ye leave aught behind?”