Page 88 of Owned by the Scarred Laird

Chloe did not let him get far ahead of her. She rose before her own plate was properly finished and followed.

He was already at the desk when she arrived, a ledger open under one hand, a single candle burned down past its first quarter. She set the letter down in front of him without a word.

He read it. She watched his jaw work once more, then still, the same motion twice now in one evening, as though something in him kept trying to say a thing and kept losing the argument with itself before it got anywhere.

“They never had a reply from ye,” he said. Not quite a question.

“I wrote back. The first time.” Chloe pulled the second chair around from where it sat against the wall and lowered herself into it, smoothing her skirts more out of habit than need. “Whatever became of it, I couldnae say. Poor roads, maybe, same as they think. Or it sat in some saddlebag and never left the yard at all.”

“Ye never told me ye’d written.”

“Ye never asked,” she said. “There’s a great deal I daenae tell ye anymore, Edward. I’d thought ye preferred it that way.”

He did not answer that. He closed the ledger instead, squared it against the desk’s edge with two fingers, a habit she’d come to recognize as the closest thing he had to fidgeting.

“I could take William,” she said, before the silence could set in fully. “If I went. Jenny would like to meet him. And the roads are safer this time of year, Alfie said as much, just last week, going on about the passes clearin’ early.”

“Ye want to take the boy?”

“He’s never been off Wallace lands in his life. It might do him good, seein’ somewhere new before he’s old enough to remember nae havin’ seen it.” She kept her eyes on the ledger rather than his face. “And it would give Mrs. Donnan a rest from him for a while. She’d never admit she needed one. She does.”

Edward pushed back from the desk and crossed to the window, where the shutters stood half open on a yard gone dark and quiet, most of the torches banked for the night. He stood with his back to her, and she understood she was looking at the identical wall from last night from a slightly different angle, no more scalable now than it had been then.

“If ye wish to go, ye may go. I willnae stop ye.”

“That’s nae what I asked.”

“Ye asked if ye could take the boy. Aye. Take him.” His voice had gone flat. “Might be better. The two of ye away from here a while.”

“Better for who?”

“For both of ye.” He said it to the window glass, not to her. “Safer.”

“Safer from what, Edward?”

He did not answer that. She watched his shoulders for some crack in the line of them, but it was always the same patient search, always finding the same locked seam no matter how long she gave it.

“I will write back tonight, then,” she said. “Tell them we’ll come.”

“We?”

“William and I.” She let it sit there, plain and uncorrected, with no softening added. If this was how he wanted things between them now, she could give him formal and careful right back, and let him feel the exact weight of it. “Unless ye’d rather I go alone.”

“Whatever ye think best.” He still had not turned from the window. “Ye daenae need me permission for it.”

“Nay. I daenae.” She stood, picked the letter back up off the desk, folded it along its original creases, and tucked it into her sleeve, close against her ribs. “I only thought ye might want to ken where yer nephew was goin’, and for how long.”

“How long, then?”

“A fortnight. Perhaps longer, if Jenny has her way. She always does.” Chloe found, standing there, that she could talk about fortnights and roads and Jenny’s stubbornness with perfect steadiness, one careful sentence after another, none of it costing her anything she’d let him see. “I will take Melodie, if she’ll come. And two of the guard, if ye can spare them.”

“I will send four.”

“Two is enough.”

“Four.” He turned from the window at last, and there was something in his face for half a second that might have been the start of an argument, or the start of something else entirely, gone again before she could decide which it had been. “The roads havenae been as safe as Alfie thinks. There’s been talk.”

“Four, then,” she said. “Thank ye.”