And she was not protection. She was risk wrapped in borrowed wool.
Walter’s voice softened further. “He cannot make such a marriage while his heart is snagged on you.”
Amelia’s breath stopped as the stillroom blurred for one dangerous second.
“Hearts don’t snag,” she said, because denial was a ladder made of straw and she climbed it anyway.
Walter’s eyes saddened. “They do, mistress. On the smallest things. A curl. A laugh. A cup of water set where no one else remembers. A woman looking at a man as if he is everything.”
She looked away too late.
He had seen.
“You know it is snagged,” Walter said. “And I see that you know.”
“No,” she whispered.
Not no, it wasn’t true. No, please do not make me hear this.
Walter picked up his cap again. His hands shook a little now, whether from age or emotion she couldn’t tell.
“He will not pull back,” Walter continued. “Not far enough. He is too far gone, too stubborn, and he would ride into Hell before sending you from a warm roof once he has set you beneath it. If danger came to you, he would step between without thought, and men who do without thought tell the world where they may be wounded.”
Amelia thought of the market. Belmaine’s men. Thomas’s hand at the small of her back.
Laugh if you can. As though I have said something charming.
She had stepped into his arms as if they were safety.
Had everyone seen? Had the men? Had the market? Had the entire stupid thirteenth century turned its head at once and noticed what she had only just begun admitting to herself?
“So it falls to you,” Walter said.
Amelia pressed a hand to the table. The wood was cool beneath her palm.
“To me.”
“Aye.”
“Because I’m the sensible one?”
Walter looked at her for a long moment. “Because you love him.”
She flinched. There it was.
The words she had not let herself say. Not in the hall, not in the loft, not in the still, dark moments after the storm when she could hear Thomas’s voice naming the dead. She had circled it with other words. Want. Need. Affection. Belonging. Disaster.
Walter simply set love in front of her like another tally to be reckoned.
“I don’t?—”
“Mistress.”
One word.
No judgment.
She stopped.