Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
The dining hall is long, and the ceiling is high and beamed. There are tapestries on the walls—proper tapestries—the kind I have seen in museums and art history books, full of hunting scenes and mountain scenes with stags and women in long blue dresses and men with hounds. The walls between the tapestries are hung with paintings; more landscapes, the bay, the loch, the mountains in different seasons. There is no overhead light, and the room is only lit by a long iron candelabra running down the center of a long oak table, by sconces on the walls with candles burning in them, and by a fire in a stone hearth at the far end of the room.
The table could seat twenty. He has set two places at one end, close together, with a small linen runner between them and proper cutlery and crystal glasses and a bottle of red wine open and breathing in a decanter.
“Holy shit.” I breathe.
“Too much?”
“It looks like Medieval Times up in here.”
He laughs, low and pleased.
“Aye. The castle has a sense of itself, doesn’t it?”
He pulls out a chair for me and I sit, and he sits across from me, not at the head.
The dinner, I discover, is fish. A whole salmon from the loch, baked with butter and lemon and herbs from the garden, the skin crisped over the flesh. There is bread, his bread, and a small dish of greens from the garden dressed in oil, and the wine. It’s a simple meal that somehow suits the grandness of the room, like I can imagine his ancestors eating this same meal centuries ago.
He serves me first. He fillets the fish on my plate with the same careful, old-fashioned competence he does everything, the bones lifted out clean in one motion. He cuts me a slice of bread and pours my wine.
Then he does the same for himself but he doesn’t dig in right away. Instead, he sits, waits, and watches me.
Despite his rapt attention and the fact that I know I don’t look great shoving food in my mouth, I eat, hungrier than I thought I was. The fish is delicate and clean and tastes of the loch I suppose, of the cold water that brought it up and the herbs from the garden and the slow careful preparation. The bread is the bread of yesterday while the wine is red from Spain.
He eats too, albeit slowly. The small careful bites of a man who isn’t as interested in the food as he is interested in the woman eating the food.
Either way, he’s still a damn good cook.
We do not say much as we eat and that’s for the best, since I don’t want fish flaking out of my mouth. Anyway, the silence isn’t awkward. It’s become a comfortable thing between us, even though I know we both have a lot on our mind, at least with regards to tonight.
I finish my fish. I finish my wine. He refills my glass and it’s not long before I finish that too. My head goes warm from the rioja. The candles and fire add to the heat, to the haze of the evening. The tapestries are watching us in the candlelight, the women in their long blue dresses eyeing me with disinterest.
He sets his cutlery down.
“Have you had enough?” he asks.
“Of the dinner?”
He nods.
“Yes. Thank you. That was amazing, but I’m quite full.”
A long beat. He turns the stem of his wine glass between his fingers.
“Iris.”
“Yeah?”
“Will you come upstairs with me?”
I stare at him, swallowing hard.
His face is very still, waiting patiently for my answer.
There was always only one answer.
“Yes.”
Chapter
Seventeen
Alasdair looks at me for a long moment, the candlelight flickering on the sculpted planes of his face, before he stands and offers his hand.
I stare at his palm for a moment, wondering what will change forever if I take it. Because if I take it, there is no going back. I am going upstairs to be ruined by this man.
And I’ve never wanted to be ruined like this before.
I put my hand in his and it suddenly feels like I’m entering into something I’ll never properly come out of, like a physical but still binding contract.
He brings me up out of the chair, being extra careful with me, and does not let go of my hand. He leads me out of the dining hall and up the stone spiral staircase. With the stone walls circling us, I have a strange sense of being back in time. It’s not hard to imagine what it was like back then, not in this place.
The corridor at the top level is dim. The candles in the sconces are lit, every single one of them, the flames small and steady. The light moves on the stone as we pass, making shadows dance.