Page 23 of Owned by the Scarred Laird

“Just try it,” she murmured.

He sighed, raised his hand, and held it above his face. He spread his fingers and moved them slowly through the light, the same way she had done it.

The sunlight came through the gaps between his fingers in thin, warm lines, shifting as his fingers moved, breaking apart and reforming. Warm and gold and strangely satisfying.

“I used to do this for hours as a child,” Chloe said quietly. Beside him, her own hand was still raised, her fingers moving slowly. “When everythin’ else became too loud.”

“Is everythin’ too loud now?”

“If anythin’, it’s too quiet here.”

He said nothing. But he remembered his sister’s words about how lonely she was. He moved his fingers again and watched the light shift through them.

They remained in companionable silence, playing the game a few more times. Then all at once, laughter came out of him before he could stop it.

Chloe lowered her hand and turned to look at him.

He did not know how long the silence lasted. Long enough for the sounds of the castle around them to fade and then vanish completely. Long enough for him to realize the distance between them on the grass, and at the same time, to recognize how little of it there actually was.

She was looking at him with those brown eyes. Totally unaware that the sunlight was catching the copper in her hair and the freckles across her nose in ways that were doing things to him.

Something shifted in the air.

He felt it the same moment she did. He saw it in the way her breathing changed, the slight stillness that moved through her, the way her lips parted just enough that it registered.

He lowered his hand, and in the process, his fingers brushed hers in the grass. The contact was brief. The side of his hand against the side of hers, light and entirely accidental, the kind of thing that happened when two people lay close enough on the same patch of ground.

Neither of them moved away.

“Ye said everythin’ was too quiet here,” he said, after a moment.

“Aye.”

“What was it like before? Where ye were.”

She turned her head slightly toward him. “Loud. Jenny’s house was always loud. Someone was always comin’ or goin’, always somethin’ was happenin’ in the hall or the kitchens.” A pause. “I didnae ken how much I liked the noise until it stopped.”

“Ye miss it.”

“I miss kennin’ where I stood.”

He was quiet for a moment. “And here? Do ye nae ken where ye stand?”

She gave him a sideways look. “Ye are nae exactly an open book, Edward.”

“Most men are nae.”

“Most men have nae dragged me across the country and married me in a dirty kirk,” she said pleasantly.

The sound that came out of him surprised them both. Low and reluctant, almost a laugh. “It was nae that dirty.”

“The candles were half-burned.”

“They were lit.”

“There was a draught.”

“There is always a draught. It is a kirk.”