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She closed her eyes.

His breathing steadied behind her, slow and even, and she lay very still and stared at the wall and thought about eastern passes and bolted doors and the inconvenient softness of a mouth she had not been prepared for.

It meant nothing, she told herself again, more firmly.

She decided she would believe that in the morning.

It was easier than deciding it now.

CHAPTER EIGHT

She woke before he did, which gave her exactly long enough to understand what she'd done.

Grey light seeped through the shutter's cracks. The fire had gone to embers.

Marcas slept beside her, one arm still curved loosely where it had settled across her waist sometime in the night, his face unguarded in a way she suspected it rarely was awake.

For one traitorous moment, she let herself look at him properly.

And regretted it at once. He was unfairly handsome.

Sleep had softened the hard, watchful expression she was starting to know so well. His dark auburn hair had fallen untidily across his brow, and without the sharpness of his blue eyes fixed upon her, he looked younger. Less dangerous. Perhaps that was worse.

Her gaze travelled over the strong line of his jaw, the straightness of his nose, the faint shadow along his chin. Even asleep, there was something commanding about him, something that made the narrow bed seem suddenly far too small.

Her stomach gave a peculiar little flutter. She frowned at it.

Ridiculous.

He was merely a man. An infuriating, arrogant, excessively handsome man, but a man all the same. The way she kissed him the night before suggested otherwise.

Her eyes betrayed her again. She looked at his mouth. Her breath caught.

Oh, this is becoming a problem.

Heat crept into her cheeks, and she shifted beneath his arm turning away from him, only to become painfully aware of the warmth of his body at her back and the weight of his arm around her waist.

Her stomach gave another traitorous flutter. He was asleep, and somehow he was still managing to unsettle her. She lay on her back and fixed her gaze firmly on the shutters.

She would not look at him again. She lasted perhaps three seconds.

Then the moment ended, the way moments like that always did, and what replaced it was worse.

What did ye do.

She eased out from under his arm with the same careful movement she'd once used to work a corroded window latch in the dark, and stood, and looked down at herself. Her gown was creased, her hair ruined, her palm bandaged in linen he'd tied himself and felt something in her chest close hard and fast, a door slamming on a room she'd wandered into without meaning to.

Ye kissed him. Ye kissed him and meant it…like a woman with nae sense at all, and now ye'll ride tae his land carrying that, same as ye carry everything else, and he'll know it, and Fearchar will have been right about the danger, only the danger isnae what he thought it was.

She dressed with her back to the bed, fast, methodical, lacing what needed lacing and not looking at the mirror or at him or at the small ordinary domestic wreckage of the room, the tray from supper still on the table, his sword belt against the wall, evidence of a night she had no idea what to do with.

She heard him wake behind her. The mattress shifted and there was a pause, long enough that she knew he was looking at her and reading everything in it that she was trying not to say aloud.

"Neilina."

"We should ride soon," she said, to the shutter, not to him. "The light's good."

Another pause.