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“Aye.” She sighed. “Would you rather discuss the proximity of the ceiling?”

Christ. He wouldn’t. Anything was better.

“Touché,” he muttered. “Very well. My turn to ask questions.”

“You want to know if I keep a mistress?”

He laughed at the idea. “Of course not.” His brow puckered as the implication struck him.

“My Lord,” he said. “Is that how it is? That’s why you didn’t marry Malcolm?”

His world tipped on its axis, but he righted it manfully. It was with stoicism and a clenched jaw that he conceded.

“I see. You prefer women.”

“Not precisely,” she echoed his words. Her brow was arched, he knew it.

“I didn’t marry Malcolm, because it wasn’t the right thing,” she said. “It wasn’t right for either of us. Nothing to do with his being a man. Though I have kissed a few lasses in a few haylofts.”

She was speaking brashly, but he detected a hint of diffidence in her voice. Nervous. She was nervous, uncertain of his reaction.

“Lasses appeal to you?” He proceeded cautiously.

“It’s not lasses or lads that appeal to me. A person appeals to me. Does that make sense?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I’ve never thought of appeal that way. It’s more categorical. I’m a man, and women entice me.” His brain kept turning it over. Thinking through categories provided a convenient shorthand. But the categories weren’t so defined or so simple.

“Do you feel like Corry?” he asked.

No one on Dearnrigg seemed even to remember that the young blacksmith had once answered to a different name. James had met Corry and Isobel as two mischievous little girls, both in muddy dresses, dimpled cheeks scratched up by brambles. They couldn’t have been more than eight when Corry started wearing breeches, first when he helped his father in the shop, then all the time. He’d grown slowly into the man that he was today.

“I don’t presume to know how Corry feels, not fully,” said Isobel. “When we talk about it, though . . . it’s different. I wouldn’t mind dressing in breeches, for the convenience, but I don’t itch in a skirt. I think of myself as a lass, a rather queer lass as lasses go. In my imagination, I’m never the princess.”

“You’re the dragon slayer.”

She sighed. “Really, I’d be the dragon, if I could choose. Mythical and magic, neither wholly this nor wholly that.”

“Everything,” he said, too intensely. Isobel appealed to him, not because she fit into a particular mold, because she didn’t.

“Everything meets in you.” He couldn’t stop, didn’t even want to stop.

“Courage and comeliness,” he said. “Wit and whimsy and derring-do and pig-headed stubbornness.”

“Too complimentary.” Her laugh was unsteady.

“Not the last bit,” he pointed out.

“Even so. You’re scaring me again. You do think we’re going to die.”

He was turning toward her, inch by inch. “I’m not saying it because I think we’re going to die. I’m saying it because I think we’re going to live.”

He reached out blindly, fingers pushing through her hair. He felt her earlobe, dropped his hand down to her throat. Her pulse fluttered. He wanted to trap it, hold it, guard it forever.

She swallowed. “We engaged in amorous congress, me and Malcolm. It was my idea. I wanted to see if I’d like it.” Her throat moved again. “Are you shocked?”

He leaned over her. She’d kissed other women. She wasn’t a virgin. She’d lain with Malcolm Crawford. Was he shocked? Jealous? Painfully aroused?

“Shocked is the least of it,” he said. “You’ve been shocking me for decades.” He paused. “Did you like it?”