Page 53 of Hazard a Guest
She stilled, tilting her chin up just a touch to acknowledge him. “Who says I’m worried?”
“You do,” he answered with a chuckle, running his fingers down the length of her arm.
She tried and failed to stifle a yawn, her tangled limbs preventing any interception of the thing, and immediately he yawned too, catching the indulgence of it like he was sharing her very breath.
She pressed her face into the pillow, willing herself to be brave, and then rolled onto her back. She didn’t pull away. She didn’twantto pull away. She just wanted to see him.
And there he was, still naked, still rumpled, but awake and smiling lazily at her through the errant curls on his forehead.
“Good morning,” he said softly, and she felt her heart break.
“Morning,” she managed to say back, feeling an absurd little spark of bashfulness rising in her cheeks. “Hello.”
“Hello,” he answered immediately and grinned, dimples popping into his cheeks.
It made her grin too, an absurd, face-aching grin that she immediately buried into his shoulder. “Put those dimples away,” she begged. “It’s too early.”
He caught her and ran his fingers over her tangled curls with a contented little sigh, shaking his head against the crown of her hair. “If I go get us breakfast,” he said softly, “do you promise not to move from this spot?”
“Of course not,” she answered without leaving her nook, her voice muffled by the warmth of his skin. “I’m going to poke through all your things while you’re gone.”
“Ah,” he said with a shake of his head. “Two dockets in, you’ll flee and I’ll never find you again.”
She laughed, her sleep-heavy limbs protesting amusement at this early hour. “Tea, please,” she said as he regretfully began to pull away, “with—”
“With cold milk,” he finished, as though it were long-ago-memorized scripture. “I know.”
She fell back against the pillows to watch him, her heart giving long, languid thumps against her breast.
He had hung up his tails with the careful precision of a washwoman, each piece carefully folded at the creases over the hangers. He pulled soft buckskin trousers from his wardrobe and a loose shirt, each thing partitioned carefully and neatly into exactly the place he expected it to be.
Privately, she imagined he might stop wanting her if he ever saw the state of her own wardrobe.
“What?” he asked, noticing her expression.
“Nothing,” she said happily. “You’re perfect.”
He kissed her once more before vanishing through the door, in search of their repast.
She considered being well-behaved and staying right in this bed like a good girl, but shehadwarned him that she wanted to pry, and so after counting to ten, she threw her legs over the edge of the bed and pushed herself to stand, her bare feet sinking into the plush rug with a little cushion of luxury.
She snatched up the silken pajama shirt he’d discarded the night before and tugged it over her head. The buttons were still undone at the top, sagging down past her heart, but it did stop the shivering.
She padded across the room, rolling the cuffs up over her hands, and took it upon herself to stoke up the warming coals in the little heating furnace in the corner. She smiled at their still half-full cups of wine facing off against one another on top of the chest of drawers.
She knew that if she opened any of those drawers, she’d find nothing but military precision, smallclothes folded into perfect rectangles, likely organized by color and size.
The heat flared a little and she withdrew the poker, sighing in gratitude as she soaked it up. She turned toward the little table where she’d taught him to roll dice and went there next, wanting to throw the windows open, wanting to see if those highbranches still had a few stubborn leaves on them, trying to cling through the whole of winter.
She got to the curtains, she filled her palms with them, but she froze, her eyes falling on the table at her waist. At what sat on the table, right in the center, where the dice had been.
For a long moment, she did not breathe. Her heart did not beat. Her body did not move.
Surely, it couldn’t be. Surely not.
She blinked first because blinking was easiest. She forced herself to pull on the curtains and invite the light in. The light would clarify things, she told herself. The light would prove that she had imagined it.
But no. Here was the light and here was the rushwork cross, the very same one her mother had given her that Imbolc, the one that had been lost forever. The one she’d accepted was gone, frayed at the northern point, like that direction had asked the most of it.
