Page 83 of Owned by the Scarred Laird

“He wouldnae settle for his nap,” the nursemaid said. “Kept turnin’ toward the door. I think he wanted his uncle.”

“He’ll have to make do with me.” Chloe pressed her mouth briefly to the top of his head and breathed him in. Milk and wool and something faintly of the stables that clung to everything in this castle. She set him back down when his eyes finally went heavy. She stood over the cradle longer than she needed to, one hand resting on the rail, not ready yet to let go of anything.

She found Melodie in the corridor with an armful of linen.

“Ye’re back early,” Melodie said. “I thought ye’d be gone the whole day.”

“The wind turned.” Chloe kept her voice light. “Where’s Edward?”

“The distillery. He went straight there when ye came in, didnae even change out of his ridin’ boots.” Melodie shifted the linen to her other hip, watching Chloe’s face with more attention than the question warranted. “Ye all right, me Lady?”

“Fine.” Chloe was already moving. “Truly.”

The distillery sat at the far edge of the yard, a low stone building she'd been inside only a handful of times. Once on a tour Mrs. Donnan had given her first week, that had mostly consisted of Mrs. Donnan explaining, at length, why Chloe should not touch anything, and once more with Edward, on a night neither of them had spoken of since.

The smell from the distillery reached her before she opened the door, peat smoke and something sweeter underneath it, malted and close.

She pushed the door open without knocking.

Edward stood at the far end of the room, his back to her, one hand resting flat against the curve of a copper still. He did not turn around.

“What are ye doin’ here?”

She let the door fall shut behind her. The room was warm, warmer than the yard, lit by a single lantern and the low red glow of the fire under the still. “I wanted to see ye.”

“I am workin’.”

“Ye’re standin’ with yer hand on a kettle.”

That got him to turn, finally. Enough to look at her over his shoulder, and whatever was on his face was gone again before she could read it properly. He crossed to a shelf along the wall and took down two small cups, poured a measure into each from an unmarked jug, and held one out to her without quite meeting her eyes.

She took it. The whisky burned going down, sharper than the wine she was used to, and she managed not to cough only through sheer will.

“Strong,” she said, once she trusted her voice again.

“It’s young.” He turned back to the still, checking something at its base she could not see the purpose of. “That’s the whole trouble with it.”

“Trouble?”

“Aye.” He crouched, adjusted something, and straightened again. “Ye can rush a batch. Pull it too soon, sell it too soon, and it drinks like this. Hot, unsettled, more fire than flavor. Or ye leave it. Cask it and forget it’s there for years and let it work on itself in the dark, and what comes out the other end is somethin’ else entirely.”

He said it to the copper, his voice level and unhurried, a man discussing a subject he’d discussed a hundred times before. “Ye cannae hurry it along by wantin’ it done. It goes at its own pace, or it doesnae go at all.”

Chloe turned her cup slowly between her fingers, watching the firelight catch in it. “And if it’s left too long? Does it spoil?”

“Nay.” He considered this with care. “It just gets harder to open. The cask, I mean. Wood swells shut over enough winters.” He glanced at her, then away. “Ye have to want it badly enough to break the seal.”

The room went quiet around that, just the low hiss of the fire and the drip of the machinery. She thought about the sea, about his hands doing up her cloak in a place where nothing had needed doing up, about the field where he’d stopped himself mid-sentence twice in one afternoon and called both silences nothing worth remembering.

“I daenae understand ye,” she said, quietly. “Nae the way I’d like to. We stood in that cave and somethin’ happened, and then ye said one true thing to me and walked the rest of the way back as if it hadnae. I keep waitin’ for ye to open the cask, Edward, and I keep gettin’ the wood.”

He did not answer that directly. He reached for the jug again, refilled his own cup, though he had not finished the first. She watched him do it and understood it for what it was, something to do with his hands that was not looking at her.

She should have left it there. She knew that even as she kept going, the whisky loosened something in her chest that four days of patience had not managed to.

“Mrs. Donnan said somethin’, the day Beathag looked at me ankle. About ye kennin’ how to care for someone, after all the violence ye’ve ken.” She watched his shoulders, not his face. “She didnae finish it. I’ve been turnin’ it over since. I only meant…” She took a breath. “I only meant I wanted to understand it. Whatever it is.”

The change came so fast she nearly missed the start of it. His hand, which had been loose around the cup, closed hard enough that she heard the pottery creak in protest. He set it down on the shelf with care, as though setting it down gently were the only thing keeping the rest of him from doing something less gentle.