He looked back.
“You don’t have to marry one of his daughters to save this place.”
He nearly smiled.
“You have a plan?”
“Not yet.”
“Then that is not comforting.”
“It will be.”
“Saints preserve me from your confidence.”
“There it is.”
“What?”
“You almost sounded like yourself again.”
He looked away toward the wall, where the men had begun moving stones once more, and tried very hard not to feel the warmth of her standing beside him.
“Go inside,” he said.
She obeyed, though she did it in the manner of a woman granting a favor rather than taking an order. At the top of the steps she paused and looked back.
“If Sir Roger Belmaine comes here again, I’m accidentally spilling something on him.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Mead. Ink. A chamber pot. I’m flexible.”
Despite himself, Thomas felt the corner of his mouth move.
Amelia saw it.
The look of triumph on her face was entirely too dangerous.
“Go,” he said.
She vanished into the hall.
Thomas stood in the yard a while longer, the sun warm on his shoulders and the stink of Belmaine’s visit lingering like spoiled meat.
He did not, he told himself, care a whit how Belmaine had looked at her.
He found, as he turned toward the wall and the work waiting there, that he was gripping his sword hilt hard enough to whiten his knuckles. Finger by finger, he made himself let go.
AMELIA
Amelia went looking for the sword not because she was brave, but because Sir Roger Belmaine had looked at Ashcombe as if the castle was already his, then looked down on Thomas as if he were some difficulty to be managed, and to top it all off, had looked at her as if she were a cow he was thinking of buying at auction.
All day long she’d tried to tell herself it was nothing. Men looked, they smiled, they even said helpful things with knives tucked in their sleeves.
None of that was new, not really. In her own century they usually wore tailored suits, had overly white teeth, waxed bodies, colored hair, and called it networking.
But Ashcombe wasn’t a hotel ballroom, and Belmaine wasn’t some handsy donor with too much cologne and a wife pretending not to notice.