Still, she pressed on.
“I have been… difficult,” she continued, her voice careful. “Questioning ye when I should perhaps have trusted more readily. I see now that ye have always meant to keep me safe. I am grateful for that. Truly.”
His hand stilled against her waist.
“If it is what ye wish,” she went on, though the words scraped against something inside her, “I will be more obedient. I will nae make things harder for ye. I?—”
“Iona.”
Her name stopped her. She turned her head further, trying to see his face, but the angle did not allow it. She could only feel the tension that had moved through him.
They rode the rest of the distance in silence.
By the time they reached the gates, the guards had already begun to open them, called to readiness by the sound of approaching horses. The courtyard lay quiet beneath the night, the household long since settled. Only a few lanterns burned along the walls, enough to guide them in.
Frederick dismounted first. He reached up for her at once, lifting her down with a care that made her breath catch. When her feettouched the ground, she steadied herself, though the world still seemed slightly unbalanced beneath her.
Then she looked at him and saw it. He was looking at her as though she had struck him. He was masking heartbreak. The realization unsettled her more than anything that had come before.
“Frederick,” she said softly.
He exhaled once, then stepped closer, the space between them closing beneath the quiet glow of moonlight.
“Do ye truly believe that is what I want?” he asked.
She faltered. “I?—”
“That ye should thank me for doing me duty?” he continued, his voice low but unsteady in a way she had never heard from him before. “That ye should bend yerself into something smaller so I may feel more comfortable in me place as yer husband?”
“I only meant?—”
“I ken what ye meant,” he said, not unkindly. “That is what troubles me.”
Iona’s chest tightened.
“I never wanted ye to feel as though ye owed me anything,” he went on. “Not obedience. Not gratitude. Not silence. I wanted…” He stopped, as though the next words required something of him he could not easily give.
She waited.
“I wanted ye,” he said finally. The simplicity of it undid her. “Nae because it is me duty,” he added. “Nae because it is expected. Because I chose it. And I choose it still. Every time ye speak against me. Every time ye refuse to bend. And when ye stand where others would step back.”
Iona stared at him.
“I love ye,” he said.
The words fell between them with no flourish, no dramatics, no attempt to make them anything but what they were.
True.
Her breath caught.
For a moment, she could not move. Could not think. All the careful distance she had tried to build, all the quiet restraint she had wrapped around her own heart, unraveled at once beneath the weight of it.
“You…loveme?” she repeated.
“Aye.”
Something inside her broke open. “I love ye too,” she said, the words coming without hesitation now, without fear. “I thought… I thought it was only me.”