Thomas looked back at the flame. “You grieve like someone who’s lost everything.”
Her throat closed.
“Thomas.”
“Here is what I know.” He said it plainly, like a soldier laying out ground before a fight. “You’ve nowhere to go. No kin that you admit to. The nuns would take one look at your ability to do sums, your strange words, and that hair, and call you worse than a faery.”
“My hair has done nothing to deserve this slander.”
“It draws notice.”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s hair.”
“It’s red and copper with hints of gold and the curls don’t wish to stay put.”
He gave her a look.
She might have smiled if her heart hadn’t been sitting somewhere near her knees.
Thomas drew a breath. “I’ve a castle that’s falling down around me, a barn fuller than it would’ve been without you, a steward’s chair sitting empty, and too few souls I can trust at my back.”
He took a breath.
“Stay,” he said.
Amelia went very still.
“Be under my roof and my protection, and no man here will touch you or question you while you’re mine to guard. I’ll not ask if you’ve run from a cruel husband or household as long as you do not lie to me.”
She stared at him.
He shifted, scowling at the lantern as if it had failed him somehow.
“It’s a poor offer,” he said. “A cold castle that comes with a lord with a target on his back.”
A laugh came out of her, surprised and entirely against her will.
“And a hole in the roof,” she said.
“And a hole in the roof,” he agreed gravely.
The laugh faded. The ache didn’t.
Amelia looked at him, this enormous, grieving, gruff man crouched in a dusty tower, offering her the only thing he had. A place to stand. He said it as if it were nothing. As if it wasn’t, just then, the entire world.
She thought of her apartment back home, neat and quiet and organized within an inch of its life. The calendar app that remembered her birthday. The empty place beside her name on Bree’s wedding card. The life she’d made so safe that nothing in it could surprise her, or touch her, or ask too much.
Except now the impossible had happened, and here, in the dark, someone was asking.
She looked down at her bare toes, which were filthy, chilly, and possibly never going to forgive her for no more lovely pedicures with pretty colors.
“Okay,” Amelia said as her voice cracked straight down the middle. “Okay. I’ll stay.”
Something in his face changed. Not much. But the hard line of his mouth eased, and the breath he let out sounded as if he’d been holding it too long.
“Aye,” he said. “Good.”
“Was that relief?”