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“Nothing’s gotten under me skin.”
“Ye keep saying that.” Callum leaned against the wall, his arms crossed, thoroughly enjoying himself. “And yet here ye are, looking like a man who hasnae slept, snapping at anyone who so much as glances at ye. I’ve seen ye calmer before a battle, Evander.”
“Callum.”
“Aye, aye, keeping me thoughts to meself.” He didn’t stop smiling. “For now.”
“This conversation is over, Callum.”
He chuckled. “If ye say so, me Laird.”
But he wasn’t entirely wrong.
20
Freya wasn’t sure how she had managed to sleep that night. She had seen the way Evander looked at her before he retired to bed. A part of her had wanted to invite him to remain in the nursery with her, but she had decided it was safer for him to return to the room they were sharing.
If they shared a bed, she didn’t know what would happen. Well, she knew, but it wasn’t something she wanted to even consider.
By morning, the twins had settled into a rhythm of their own devising, which involved a great deal of shrieking, considerably less sleeping than any sensible household ought to allow, and an apparently bottomless appetite for anything within arm’s reach, edible or otherwise, a fact the entire nursery had learned rather painfully over their little time here.
It was adorable. Frustrating, but adorable. She loved having a chance to see the twins start to develop their own personalities. They hadn’t been in her care for long, but Amelia and Archer were thriving more than she ever could have hoped.
“He’ll eat the spoon next,” Freya told Brigid, prying it gently from Archer’s determined grip before he could get the handle past his gums.
At the same time, Amelia eyed her own bowl with deep suspicion, as though the porridge itself had personally wronged her, before flinging a fistful of it onto the floor.
“She has her maither’s temper, that one,” Brigid said fondly, wiping Archer’s chin with the corner of her apron. “Or so I’d guess, having never met the woman. It’s unlikely that she got her faither’s temper. From what I’ve heard, the late Laird was very even-tempered.”
Freya’s eyebrows shot up. “Was he?”
Brigid truly had a way of telling a tale. Freya found herself captivated, unable to do anything but listen. If only she could tell a tale as well as Brigid and Skye could, though Skye was more gifted with the written word.
“Aye, he was,” Brigid replied, with an all-knowing smile. “I ken what ye’re thinking, me Lady. How did the late Laird nae have a temper when he was the Wolf’s older braither?”
Freya ducked her head. She apparently didn’t need to say it because Brigid knew exactly what she had been thinking.
But if the twins didn’t get their temper from their father, then they had to have gotten it from their mother, a woman Freya knew nothing about. Evander hadn’t even known of her existence until he heard news of her death.
Little was known about the woman other than her name. She had come from a well-off family and married Evander’s brother only three years ago. The twins had been a surprise, according to some of the clan members who had personally known the couple, but they had been happy.
Freya laughed. It was, she reflected, entirely too easy to laugh these days in this strange half-formed household of borrowed babies and a husband she still hadn’t decided whether to trust, and entirely too easy to let her mind wander.
It wandered back to Evander’s face in the nursery last night, to the quiet in it, to the way he’d stood there for so long simply watching her, to how she’d foolishly hoped that he might come to their bed after and hadn’t seen him again until now, breakfast already half over and his chair still empty.
She caught herself smiling at nothing, remembering the heat of his mouth against hers.
She told herself it didn’t matter. After all, she had sent him away, in a manner of speaking, when she’d left their argument unfinished and gone back to soothe a crying child.
She wondered, watching Amelia fling another spoonful with grim determination, her chubby fist already reaching for more ammunition, whether his voice would ever be so unguarded with her as it had been that day he’d said good morning and meant it, before she’d thrown a lantern at his head and ruined whatever chance either of them had at an ordinary beginning.
Perhaps that was for the best. Ordinary had never much suited either of them, from what she’d seen so far.
Outside the tent flap—
No, she was no longer in a tent, but a proper room with proper walls, though some part of her hadn’t yet caught up to the change.
Beyond the door, she could hear the ordinary sounds of the castle stirring, hounds and hammers and someone’s voice raised in complaint over a delivery gone missing. It was strange how quickly a place could start to feel less foreign simply because two small, furious, porridge-flinging people needed her in it.
