Page 21 of The Merciless Laird
Without ceremony or comment he drew a clean slit in the upper canvas, perhaps four inches, and folded the cut edges back and tied them with a strip of leather he appeared to have brought for exactly this purpose.
Fresh air moved through immediately. The smoke thinned. The candle flame stopped guttering and burned straight and steady.
He hadn't come inside. His head was at the opening, enough to see what he was doing, no more.
She watched him check the tied edges, check the angle of the slit, check the position of the candle on the flat stone she'd found to set it on, satisfying himself that it was stable and wouldn't tip.
He did all of it without being asked.
He looked at her then, properly, and she looked back at him, and the candlelight was between them, small and steady.
"Better?" he said.
"Aye." She paused. "Thank ye."
He didn't dismiss it or wave it off the way people did when they wanted to make a kindness feel smaller than it was. He just nodded once, like it was noted, and stayed where he was at the opening.
"Why cannae ye stay in the dark?" he said.
She'd expected something careful. The kind of question wrapped in softness, pre-apologizing for itself, already bracing for her to be upset by it.
He just asked it the way he asked everything, straight and direct, like he wanted the information and saw no reason to dress the asking of it up in anything.
She considered not answering.
She had deflections ready. Light ones, the kind that closed a subject without appearing to, that she'd been using for years with people who asked variations of this question with their eyes even when they weren't asking it with their mouths.
She looked at his face in the gap of the tent opening. At the dark eyes watching her, patient and entirely without the careful softness she'd spent years dreading.
"I hate the darkness," she said. "I always have. It's worse in small spaces."
"Aye." He waited. Not pushing. Just leaving room.
She pulled her knees up slightly.
"And yer men." She chose the next words with care, the way she always did when she was saying something true out loud for the first time to someone she didn't know yet. "I dinnae ken them. Any of them. And I dinnae feel," she paused, "easy around men I dinnae ken. Particularly at night."
She held his gaze. "I'm nae sayin' this tae cause trouble or tae make demands. I'm sayin' it because ye cut a hole in yer tent fer me and ye deserve tae ken why."
She said it the way she'd learned to say difficult things. Flat and plain, no apology around it, no softness offered as a buffer.
She watched his face for the recalibration. The moment people decided she was something fragile that needed managing differently than they'd been managing it before.
She'd watched it happen so many times she could predict it now, the small shift behind the eyes, the adjustment in tone, everything going a little more careful.
He looked at her for a long moment.
"The slit will keep the smoke down," he said. "Keep the candle away from the canvas on the right side, it's closer than it looks." He glanced at the tied-back flap. "I'll leave this open an inch. Ye'll have the firelight."
That was all.
She stared at him. "Ye're nae going tae ask."
"Ask what?"
"Why." She held his gaze. "Why I dinnae feel easy. Why the dark. Everyone asks why."
"Ye told me what I need tae ken," he said. "The why is yers."
