of relief when the screen door creaked.
Taking a step away from the wall, she found her joints were stiff. As a third mark, she hadn’t had that issue with prolonged periods of immobility. In the future, she would stretch every once in a while to maintain flexibility.
Niall looked at her as he entered, then his gaze covered the rest of the cabin. His expression suggested he’d expected to see evidence of something that wasn’t there. She suppressed the desire to ask him what.
“I cut up some of the meat for sandwiches. Would you like me to make you one?”
“Ye can make me two or three. I’ve covered twenty miles of this bloody mountain. A couple beers would be bonny as well.”
The band around her chest loosened, telling her how much she’d dreaded the crushing weight of his refusal to let her do anything for him. As he put away the items he’d taken with him, she moved to put together his dinner.
By the time she had the plate ready, he was at the table with two large plastic cases he’d brought from the back bedroom. As she put his meal in front of him with the cold beer, he nodded toward the containers. “Evan keeps a lot o’ slides, but these are a shambles. He wants them organized into some useful system.”
“I’d be happy to do that.” In fact, she would be delighted to seize them and get working on them immediately, but instead Niall gestured to the kitchen.
“You look peely-wally, lass. Make yourself a sandwich as well and come eat with me. In the chair next to me,” he added. “Nice as ye feel on my lap, I’m sweaty as a winded horse. I’ll shower off outside after something’s between my gut and backbone.”
He was right. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast. After preparing a sandwich, she came and sat next to him as ordered. The kitchen table wasn’t large, and his legs were long. When she would have eaten sideways in her chair, so as not to encroach on his space, he grunted and reached beneath the table. Curving his fingers around her nearer thigh, he directed her to put her feet on his boot. She was barefoot, so her toes curled into the animal hide and laces. In that state of casual intimacy, they ate their lunch.
Mindful of Evan’s order to treat Niall as she treated him, she wouldn’t speak until Niall asked her to do so, but she wished he would talk. She’d been in her head for too long. No matter how much she tried to keep clear of it, Stephen’s torment, how much her life had altered, the fact that she could die at any moment . . . they closed in on her when things became too silent, too still.
“Tell me about your first kiss.”
She looked up, startled. The Scot’s brown eyes twinkled at her. “Was he a scrawny seven-year-old, besotted with your red hair?”
“Would you tell me about the first time Master kissed you?”
Niall looked surprised by the question, and she was surprised she’d asked it. But she was thinking about the book she’d been reading, the way the heroine had yearned for that very first kiss. Alanna had been kissed by servants when they were entertaining vampires, but it was usually a perfunctory stop before their mouths were put to good use elsewhere. In the romance, that amazing first kiss had taken two and a half pages to write. And it was only the first of many kisses the hero had given the heroine.
“No,” Niall said. “But I’ll tell you about my first kiss. If ye tell me yours.”
He gave her one of his wicked looks, but she thought it was a distraction. Why wouldn’t he want to talk about the first time Evan had kissed him? Surely almost dying on the battlefield would have been a more painful memory, yet he’d told her about that. “Will you at least tell me when he first kissed you?”
He gave her an exaggerated sigh, a mock frown. “Women. About two decades or so after we met.”
She blinked, not sure if he was serious, but it appeared he was. It also appeared he was waiting for her answer.
“My first kiss, outside of training practice, came from Lord Stephen.”
“Oh.” She’d given him a handful of thick, kettle-cooked potato chips, and he pushed several onto her plate. “You practiced kissing in training?”
“Yes. Though I came to Stephen pure, we were required to have extensive training in sexual