He looked over at her. “Did you just threaten your lord with clotpole?”
“I said it was available. You decided it applied.”
A laugh almost took him again.
They stood beside a wet hedge on a cold road with a borrowed mule, half a loaf of bread, and a market’s worth of danger behind them, and it was easier than anything Thomas could remember. Amelia asked if the cross meant people still came to pray there, and he told her yes, when the need struck them.
A near hand-hold happened over the last apple. It was absurd. She reached for it at the same moment he did. Their fingers met on the cloth. Neither moved.
Thomas looked down at her hand beneath his, small, ink-marked, a little rougher now than it had been when she arrived because Ashcombe had begun making claims on her skin as well as everything else. Her fingers flexed once beneath his.
He could have taken her hand.
No one was there. No market, no Belmaine’s men, no Walter’s stiff-backed disapproval, no household listening behind cups. Only the road, animals, wind, and the dead man’s cross.
He could have taken it. Instead he pulled away and picked up the apple by its stem.
“You may have it,” he said.
Her eyes dropped, then lifted again. “Gallant.”
“It is only an apple.”
“Of course.”
The ease thinned.
He felt it happen and did not know how to stop it without making matters worse.
They mounted again. The road home climbed gently through fields and hedges, the pack mule slower now. Amelia’s arms came around him once more, but the laughter from the morning did not return so quickly.
Thomas had done that. Good, he told himself.
Better. The word tasted like ashes.
As Ashcombe’s tower came into view, square against the pale afternoon sky, Amelia spoke quietly.
“Thank you.”
He knew what she meant and wished he did not.
“For what?”
“For covering for me. Again.”
The gates stood ahead, open to the yard. Smoke rose from the hall roof. A boy ran along the wall walk and vanished. The castle looked poor, patched, stubborn, and too much like home.
Amelia’s arms tightened around him just slightly.
“In the market,” she said. “With Belmaine’s men. And the charm woman. And all of it.”
Thomas should have said,You are welcome.
He should have said,Take more care.
He should have said nothing at all.
Instead he felt the memory of her in his arms, the almost-kiss in the square, her fingers curling into his on the road, her laughter behind his shoulder, and panic rose like a shield slammed into place.