Chapter 20: Long Weekend
The scent of toasted bread and strong tea filled the breakfast room, a soft, domestic counterpoint to the lingering memory of sweat and sex that Kerr still carried in his bones. Sunlight, filtered through ancient stained glass, threw fractured jewels of red and blue across the white linen tablecloth. Eleanor Cousland sat poised at the head of the table, her grey hair coiled neatly, her expression one of pleasant concentration as she reviewed a list.
Kerr, across from her, pushed a piece of kipper around his plate. His body hummed with a deep, settled fatigue, the good kind. The kind earned.
Elspeth moved through the periphery, a study in efficient silence. She refilled his mother’s tea cup, the porcelain clinking softly. She placed a fresh rack of toast near his elbow. Her arm brushed his shoulder. A spark, immediate and electric, jolted through the placid morning. He didn’t look up, but he felt her pause, a half-second too long, before she moved away. The ghost of her touch remained.
“...and we simply must have something spectacular for the All Soul’s Feast,” Eleanor was saying, her finger tracing a line on her parchment. “Bryce will be back with Fergus, and Rendon has promised to return with his finest hunters.” She said the name with a slight, unconscious tightening of her lips. The incident in the kitchen was an unspoken shadow in the room. “I was thinking a peacock. Or perhaps a swan. Something with presentation.”
“Exotic,” Kerr murmured, finally taking a bite of the kipper. It tasted like ash. His mind was on the swing of Elspeth’s hips as she walked to the sideboard.
“Exactly,” Eleanor said, brightening. “I’ve sent word to that game merchant in Denerim, the one with the menagerie. He can supply something suitable. But it needs to be fetched, and it needs someone with sense to oversee the transport. I can’t spare any of the guards; the patrols are thin enough with your father away.” She sighed, a delicate sound of managed frustration. “I suppose I’ll have to send one of the senior staff. Perhaps Millie.”
Kerr’s fork stilled. He kept his eyes on his plate. “Send Elspeth.”
The words were out, calm and measured, before he even registered the thought. Across the room, he heard the faint rustle of her apron as she stopped moving.
Eleanor looked up, surprised. “Elspeth? But the kitchen…”
“Is a well-oiled machine she built,” Kerr finished, finally meeting his mother’s gaze. He leaned back in his chair, adopting a tone of casual logic. “It runs on her systems. Her recipes are followed to the letter. The truth is, mother, it would take ten of the others to equal her productivity for a single day. Sending her is the least disruptive choice. The kitchen won’t miss a beat. Send Millie, and you’ll have chaos by supper.”
He let the rationale hang in the sunlit air. It was sound. It was, in fact, brilliant administrative thinking. It also happened to carve out a two-day journey, alone, with Elspeth.
Eleanor’s eyes narrowed slightly, not in suspicion, but in reassessment. She looked from her son to where Elspeth stood, now very still by the hearth. “You’ve given this thought.”
“I try to pay attention,” Kerr said, shrugging one shoulder. He allowed a flicker of a grin, the dutiful son pleased to be of use. “Someone has to, with Father and Fergus gone.”
The flattery, subtle and true, did its work. Eleanor’s face softened. “You’re right. Of course, you’re right. Elspeth, can you manage it? The merchant is in the Lowtown district, by the garnet warehouses. You’ll need to be firm; they’ll try to pawn off sickly birds on a woman.”
Elspeth turned. Her face was a masterpiece of composed servitude. “Yes, my lady. I know the place. I can manage it.”
“But you shouldn’t go alone,” Kerr interjected smoothly, as if the idea had just occurred to him. He took a sip of tea. “Lowtown can be rough. I’ll escort you. I need to check on the shipment of Teyrn’s Brandy from the docks anyway. Kill two birds with one stone.” He didn’t smile at his own pun. “I can ride ahead, secure the birds, and you can follow with the cart. Safer that way.”
The plan unfolded with such effortless, practical grace that Eleanor could only nod in agreement. “Very well. That’s settled then. You’ll leave tomorrow at dawn.”
It was then that Kerr saw it. As his mother turned her attention back to her list, Elspeth’s eyes found his. Just for a second. A crack appeared in her professional mask. The corner of her mouth, usually set in a firm, capable line, twitched. It wasn’t a full smile. It was the barest hint, a fleeting curl of warmth and knowing that arrowed straight to his gut. It was a promise of empty roads, of a shared campfire, of a night without stone walls.
Heat, sudden and insistent, flooded him. The kipper churned in his stomach. The room felt stifling.
He pushed his chair back abruptly, the legs scraping loudly on the flagstones. Both women looked at him.
“Saffron,” he announced, his voice slightly thicker than he intended. “For the… the sauce. For the peacock. Or swan. Whatever it is. I remember we had some. From last season. In the larder. I’ll just… check.”
He was rambling. He didn’t care. The image of that suppressed smile, the fantasy of the journey, coalesced into a single, urgent need.
Eleanor blinked, confused by his sudden culinary concern. “I’m sure Cook knows where…”
But he was already moving, striding out of the breakfast room and into the dim, cool hallway that led to the kitchen’s heart. His boots echoed on the stone, a rapid tattoo. He didn’t look back.
The kitchen was empty, the staff busy in the scullery or the yard. The great hearth simmered. He walked straight past the long table, through the arched doorway, and into the cold, shadowy expanse of the larder.
The air was a shock, crisp and smelling of earth, cured meat, and the faint, sweet decay of winter roots. Shelves laden with sacks of flour, wheels of cheese, and hanging haunches of meat rose into the gloom. He stopped in the center, breathing hard, listening.
A moment later, the soft swish of skirts. She appeared in the doorway, backlit by the kitchen fire, her figure a silhouette. She didn’t speak. She just stepped inside, letting the heavy oak door swing shut behind her with a soft, definitive thud.
The darkness was near-total, pierced only by slim blades of light from high, narrow vents.
“Saffron,” she said, her voice dry. “Really.”
He was on her in two steps. No preamble. No sweet words. His hands found her hips, spun her around gently but firmly to face the shelves. He pressed his body against her back, his arousal already rigid against the curve of her buttocks through their layers of clothing.
“You smiled,” he growled into the space between her neck and her white cap. He nuzzled the cap aside, his lips finding her weathered skin. He tasted salt and lavender.
She braced her hands against a sack of grain, her head dropping forward. “Did not.”
“You did. I saw it.” One hand slid from her hip, around to the front of her skirts, delving through the fabric. He found the junction of her thighs, pressed the heel of his hand against her. She was already warm. A shudder ran through her.
“Two days,” he muttered, his fingers working, finding her entrance, slick and ready. Their coupling hours before had left her sensitive, receptive. “Two days on the road. Alone.”
“Aye,” she gasped, pushing back against his hand. Her professionalism was ashes.
His other hand fumbled with the ties of his breeches, then hers. Fabric rustled, pooled around their ankles in the cool dark. He guided himself to her, notching the broad head of his cock at her entrance. He was overwhelmingly large there, especially like this, unprepared. She took a sharp, inward breath.
He pushed.
It was a slow, inexorable invasion. A tight, breathtaking stretch that made her cry out, a sharp, stifled sound absorbed by the hanging sides of beef. He filled her utterly, a claiming as sure as his hand on Howe’s face. This was different, though. This was worship. This was necessity.
He set a pace that was brutal in its efficiency. Deep, driving strokes that rocked her whole body forward against the grain sack. Each thrust was a punctuation mark on his earlier words: mine, ours, away, free. The shelves rattled softly with their rhythm. A dusting of flour sifted down from above, ghostly in the vent light.
Her sounds were choked, desperate things. “Kerr. Yes. There.”
He obeyed, angling his hips, hitting the spot that made her legs tremble. One of his hands clutched her hip, holding her in place. The other slid around her waist, up under her simple bodice, to cup a small, firm breast. He pinched her nipple, rolling it between his fingers, and she came with a silent, shattering violence, her inner muscles clenching around him in rhythmic waves.
It tipped him over the edge. He drove into her one last, deep time, burying himself to the hilt, and spilled with a guttural groan muffled against her covered hair. His release was hot, copious, a flooding surrender that seemed to drain the tension from the very core of him.
They stayed like that, locked together, panting in the dark, cold air. The smell of sex joined the smells of earth and salt.
Slowly, reality seeped back in. The grain sack under her hands. The distant clatter of pots from the kitchen. His mother, waiting.
He softened, slipped out of her. They rearranged their clothes with hurried, practical hands. In the near-darkness, he saw her turn, her face pale and serious. She reached up, her fingers gently tracing his cheekbone, the line of his jaw. Her thumb brushed his bottom lip.
“Tomorrow. At dawn,” she whispered, her voice raw.
He captured her hand, kissed her palm. “At dawn.”
Then he turned and left the larder, emerging back into the world of light and order. He walked calmly to a high shelf, picked up a small, expensive jar of saffron threads he knew was there all along, and carried it back to the breakfast room.
Eleanor was still at the table. She looked up as he entered. “Find it?”
Kerr placed the tiny jar beside her teacup. “Right where I thought it was.”
He sat down, picked up his cold fork, and took a bite of the kipper. It tasted perfect.
The rest of the day stretched, an interminable desert of minutes. Kerr performed his duties with mechanical precision, inspecting the watch, settling a petty dispute between two grooms, nodding through a conversation with the blacksmith about nagging discrepancies in the quarterly iron ledger. His mind was a locked room with a single, vivid image playing on a loop: the open road, a campfire’s ring of light, and Elspeth’s face in the glow, free from the castle’s watchful shadows.
Dawn was still a quilt of deep navy and charcoal when he slipped through the silent upper corridors. His bag was already on his horse in the stables. His body hummed with a quiet, electric anticipation, a feeling he hadn’t experienced since boyhood, before the weight of the Cousland name had fully settled on his shoulders.
He paused outside her door, the one he’d left just hours before. A pale thread of light escaped from under it. He didn’t knock. He simply lifted the latch and went inside, closing it behind him with a soft click.
Her small room was neat as a pin, the bed already made, a worn travel satchel open on the chair. Elspeth stood by the narrow window, gazing out at the barely-there lightening of the eastern sky. She wore a practical wool dress and a thick shawl. She turned at the sound, and the sight of her there, prepared to leave with him, sent a jolt straight to his core.
“You’re early,” she said, her voice still husky with sleep. A smile, genuine and unreserved, broke across her face.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he replied, leaning against the door. He let his bag drop to the floor. “Came to help you pack.”
Her eyebrow arched. She looked from his empty hands to the nearly-full satchel on the chair. She made a soft, knowing sound in the back of her throat. “Did you now? And what, precisely, did you come to pack, my lord? My smallclothes? My spare apron?” She took a step toward him, the smile turning wicked. “Or is it my stomach further into my chest you’re wanting to arrange?”
He chuckled, a low, warm sound in the quiet room. “Maybe.”
“Insatiable,” she whispered, closing the distance between them. She reached up and placed her palms flat against his chest. The early morning chill was on her fingers. “Didn’t you just fuck me senseless in the larder? Against the grain sacks? I could still taste you hours later.”
“Was that a complaint?” He covered her hands with his own, squeezing.
He covered her hands with his own, squeezing. He could feel the fragile bird-like bones beneath her skin, the life humming there.
“Hardly a complaint,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspirator’s whisper. Her eyes locked on his, that familiar, knowing gleam turning molten. “But you’re looking at me like you did yesterday by the grain sacks.”
“And how’s that?” he murmured, leaning down so his forehead almost touched hers.
Her smile was all teeth and want. “Like you’re seeing straight through my dress, young man. And when you look at me like that,” she breathed, her words fanning his lips, “you’d best just fuck the breath clean out of me. Because I can’t think of little else.”
He didn’t need more invitation than that.
His clothes were off in seconds, a messy heap on her floor. Hers followed, a swift tangle of wool and linen. Then her hands were on him, not shy or careful, but possessing. She stroked the full, rigid length of him with a calloused palm that knew every inch. She bent, her mouth hot and skilled, swallowing him until he groaned at the ceiling. Her tongue swirled, her lips tightened, and one hand cupped his balls, fondling the heavy weight of them with a rough tenderness that made his thighs tremble.
“Enough,” he gritted out, the word strained. He pulled her up, his hands spanning her narrow waist. Her arms looped around his neck, her body a willing, pliant weight. He lifted her effortlessly, as he had a thousand times before, and lowered her onto him with a slow, excruciating care that made her whimper into his shoulder.
She took him inch by impossible inch, her body stretching, accepting, until she was fully seated, her legs wrapped around his hips. She buried her face against his neck, her breathing ragged.
He held there, letting her adjust, letting the sheer fullness of him claim her. Then he began to move.
His pace was a slow, deep roll at first. She matched him, her hips finding a counter-rhythm against his. The only sound was their shared breath, the slick slide of their joining, and the faint creak of the floorboards under his shifting feet. He gradually increased the force, each thrust pushing a soft “uh” from her lips.
He walked them toward the bed, never breaking their connection, never pulling out. When the backs of her knees hit the mattress, he followed her down.
He laid her on her back, the worn quilt cool beneath her. He settled between her thighs, his weight braced on his elbows. Now his hips moved differently, a deliberate, driving cadence like he was riding his favorite horse across open ground. Slow and melodic, deep and unrelenting.
She shattered quietly at first, a series of shudders that rippled through her, her eyes staring wide at nothing. Then a second wave crashed over her almost instantly, wringing a guttural, raw sound from her throat. Her heels dug into the small of his back, urging him deeper even as she convulsed.
After, he turned her onto her stomach. She raised her hips instinctively, breathless, her eyes screwed shut, presenting herself to him. He knelt behind her, placing his feet flat on the bed in front of her hips, a stance that gave him perfect, devastating leverage.
He went to work.
This was different. This was ownership. Each thrust was a claim, a punctuation mark on every hidden look, every secret touch of years. The sound was obscene, wet and rhythmic. She came again, loud and hard, her cry muffled by the bedding as her body bowed.
It broke his control. He fucked her then with a single-minded fury, his hands gripping her hips, his own release building like a storm surge. He came with a deep, ragged shout, pumping into her, his body locking as he spent himself in heavy, urgent pulses.
He collapsed beside her, spent. The room smelled of sex and her lavender and their sweat. Dawn was now a proper grey light at the window.
After a long moment, her hand found his on the rumpled sheet. Her fingers were slack, tired. “We’ll never make it to Denerim,” she whispered, a thread of laughter in her ruined voice.
“We will,” he said, turning his head to look at her profile. “We’ll just be late.”