“Next time?” Jack growled, surprised by how hot that made his blood. Did she think he would leave soon?
She didn’t reply as she strode to her wardrobe. He watched her move across the chamber, opening the wooden doors and sorting through her clothes. Her face was angled away from him as she began to undress, tossing her tunic aside.
Jack saw the flash of her tumbling hair, the pale eaves of her shoulders, the dip of her back.
His breath hitched. He averted his eyes, staring down at the dinner tray before him. But he could feel the warmth in his face as he listened to her change.
“You say Ash has sent you here,” Adaira said. “What if he commands you back to the east? What if Mirin and Frae need you? Or Torin and Sidra? The Tamerlaine clan?” She was quiet, but her bare feet padded across the room. Only when she was sitting in the chair directly across from him did Jack look at her again.
She had changed into a white, long-sleeved chemise. The ribbon at its neck was loose, and the fabric looked like it might slip from her shoulder. Jack’s eyes traced her golden half coin, then moved up her neck to meet her gaze. There was sorrow in her. Sorrow and resignation. Jack raked his hand through his damp hair.
“You are not a songbird to be caged,” she said. “As much as I want to keep you with me, the very reason you are here reminds me that others have a claim on you. And how can I compete with something like fire? It would be wrong of me to pull you away from your responsibilities.”
“I think we might be looking at this from the wrong angle,” Jack said, even though he knew that Adaira had been raised to place duty over her heart. At the first glimmer of vulnerability, she would be tempted to fall back to what she had been taught as a laird’s daughter, just as easily as Jack would shelter himself with his music. But neither would he let them retreat to those old, safe places. At least, not before he spoke the words that hovered unspoken between them. “You’re assuming Ash sent me here for the mission and the mission alone. But perhaps he knew that I need you, more than I need air and warmth and light. That if I were to go on living as I had been in the east without you, I would soon be worn down to nothing but dust.”
“Jack,” Adaira whispered. She glanced away, but Jack was watching her intently, and he saw the fear she was trying to smother. Fear she didn’t want him to see.
“Adaira,” he said, leaning closer to her. “Adaira, look at me.”
Her gaze returned to his.
He thought about how drastically her life had changed in the past month. The parents she thought had been hers, the lies that she had been raised beneath. He thought about how she must have felt when the clan she had served and loved no longer wanted her. When all the truths she had believed had crumbled away.
He knew that icy feeling of self-preservation, the instinct to cut away something good for fear of it wounding you later. He knew about having no choice but to protect yourself when you feel like you’re on your own.
“Remember the last time we saw each other?” he began. “We were standing in my mother’s storehouse.”
Adaira narrowed her eyes. “Yes, of course. You think I’d forget it, old menace?”
“No. But let me take you back in time for a moment,” Jack said. “I was hurt by your choice to leave me behind. I couldn’t understand it at first, because all I could feel were my own emotions and feelings, and they were very much tangled up in you and what I hoped could be for us. But I knew you wanted me safe, above all else. You didn’t want me in the west because you feared for my life. And I could understand that, even as my days in the east were miserable without you. I wasn’t living; I was merely taking up air and space. And being separated from you made something very clear to me.”
He paused to pick up the cups of gra. He extended one to Adaira, and she accepted it.
“What became clear to you, Jack?” she asked.
“That this year and a day still belongs to us,” he said. “We still have autumn, winter, and spring. And nothing—no spirits, no lies, no schemes, no culling—can come between us. I am first yours, as you are first mine. Before all others. But if we are going to make this work, we need to be together. We can take our time to become what we want to be. We can take it day by day if you’d like me to remain at your side.”
“Is that what you want, Jack?” she asked. “Do you want to remain here with me?”
“Yes,” he breathed. “But I also want to know that you want it, Adaira. And it should be a decision you make for yourself, not one to spare my feelings.”