Chapter 9: Salt and Scorn
The grey morning light found them still separate on the vast expanse of mattress, but facing one another. Kate woke first, the slow awareness of warmth and the scent of him coming before the memory of why. Her eyes opened to find him sleeping, the stern lines of his face softened. In sleep, he looked younger. The weight of his crown was elsewhere.
She watched the steady rise and fall of his chest for a long moment, a strange, quiet ache in her own. Then she slipped from the bed, the stone floor like ice again after the shared warmth. She gathered her blanket and left, closing the heavy door with a soft click.
By the time they met in the great hall for a tense, silent breakfast under the watchful eyes of his father’s steward, the unspoken night between them hung in the air like mist. James ate methodically, his eyes on a report. Kate picked at oatcakes, the memory of his laughter in the dark feeling like a dream.
“The air in here is stale,” he said abruptly, pushing his chair back. The sound scraped loudly. “You’ve never seen the coast proper. Not in daylight. Come.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a command, but his eyes flicked to hers, holding something that wasn’t authority. A challenge, maybe. An offer.
She followed him out through the postern gate, the wind immediately whipping her hair loose from its pins. It wasn’t raining, but the sky was the color of bruised slate, and the air tasted of salt and impending weather. The path down to the shore was narrow, treacherous, a zigzag of slick stone and crumbling steps hewn into the cliff face.
“This is your famed Scottish hospitality?” she called over the wind, her hand braced against the cold rock. “A fatal descent before noon?”
“It builds character,” he shot back, not turning. He moved with a sure-footed ease she envied. “And if you fall, the treaty is void. Saves us all a great deal of trouble.”
“Charming.”
The roar of the sea grew as they descended, a constant, thunderous presence. It was nothing like the tame beaches of the south. This was a raw, chewing violence. The shore was a mess of black rock and foaming surge, the water a cold, mineral green. To their left, the broken teeth of an old watchtower clung to a headland.
“Mermaid’s Cove,” James said, gesturing toward a crevice in the cliffs where water swirled and frothed. “Legend says they’d sing sailors onto the rocks. Nonsense, of course. The rocks do the work well enough on their own.”
He led her onto a wider shelf of wet stone, slick with emerald kelp. The wind was fiercer here, unfiltered. It stole her breath. She focused on her footing, on the intimidating, magnificent sprawl of the angry sea.
He was pointing out a formation, explaining some bit of border history, his words half-lost to the gale. He took a step backward, still speaking, his boot coming down on a swollen bladder of kelp.
It happened in a blink. His foot shot out from under him. There was a sharp, graceless scramble, a curse bitten off by the wind. He crashed into her, his weight sudden and solid.
The world upended.
The cold was an absolute, stunning theft. It stole the air from her lungs, the thought from her mind. The green water closed over her head, shockingly heavy, the roar suddenly muted and blurry. Her gown, now leaden, tangled around her legs. She kicked, panic firing her limbs, and broke the surface with a gasp that was half a scream.
The water was only waist-deep, but it felt arctic. She staggered, coughing, her hair plastered to her face. James was beside her, similarly drenched, pushing his copper hair back from his eyes. He looked at her—see-through linen clinging, mouth open in shock, shivering violently—and he laughed.
It wasn’t the short, surprised laugh from the night before. This was full, unrestrained, a roar of genuine mirth that rivaled the wind. It echoed off the cliff face, a sound of pure, unexpected joy.
“You—” she sputtered, the cold making her teeth chatter. “You absolute clod!”
He just laughed harder, bracing his hands on his knees, shoulders shaking.
Rage, hot and brilliant, cut through the cold. She lunged. Not at him, but for the thick leather of his belt. Her frozen fingers fumbled, then grabbed. With a strength born of utter indignation, she yanked down with all her weight.
His laughter cut off in a surprised shout as he went under. The water swallowed him completely.
He surfaced a second later, spluttering. The laughter was gone from his face, replaced by wide-eyed shock. They were inches apart now, the frantic waves pushing them together. Her heart was hammering, her breath coming in ragged clouds. The cold was forgotten, burned away by the fire in her blood. His eyes, a dark, brown this close, searched her face. He wasn’t angry. He was… arrested.
The world narrowed to the space between them. The crash of the surf, the keening wind—it all faded to a dull rumble. She could see the droplets caught in his eyelashes, the faint scar cutting through his brow. His breath mingled with hers, warm in the frozen air. Her hand was still clenched on his belt, her knuckles white. His hands came up, not to push her away, but to settle on her hips, steadying them both against the pull of the sea. The touch burned through the soaked layers of her gown.
Something shifted. Cracked open. The tension wasn’t about the fall or the dunking anymore. It was about the shared breath, the vise-like grip on his belt, the solid pressure of his hands. Her fear of the storm, his confession in the dark—it all gathered here, in this freezing, surging water.
A voice, sharp and alarmed, cut through the moment from further up the shore.
“Your Highness!”
One of James’s men, a young guardsman named Ewan, stood on the rocks, his face pale. “By all that’s holy, are you trying to die? Get out! Now! You’ll both catch lung fever and then where will the kingdoms be?”
The spell shattered. James blinked, the intensity in his eyes shuttering behind a more familiar, guarded opacity. He dropped his hands from her hips as if scalded. The practical, political reality rushed back in with the icy water.
“He’s right,” James said, his voice rough. He turned and began slogging toward the shore, the movement awkward in the heavy water.
Kate followed, the sudden absence of his touch leaving her feeling strangely hollow and exposed. The cold returned, a deep, bone-gnawing ache. She climbed onto the rock, her body trembling uncontrollably, her dripping clothes dragging at her every step.
Ewan rushed forward, stripping off his own thick wool cloak. “For the Princess,” he urged, thrusting it at James, his eyes wide with anxiety over the diplomatic catastrophe of a dead English bride.
James took it without a word. He turned and wrapped the coarse, blessedly dry garment around Kate’s shoulders. His hands were swift, efficient, barely touching her. But as he pulled the cloak closed at her throat, his fingers lingered for a fraction of a second against her skin. His eyes met hers, a silent, turbulent exchange passing between them before he stepped back.
“To the castle,” James ordered, his prince’s voice fully restored. “And not a word of this to my father.”
They walked back up the cliff path, a silent, dripping procession. The wind cut through her wet clothes, but under the borrowed cloak, a different kind of heat simmered. She could still feel the phantom grip of his hands on her hips, the shocking warmth of his laughter, the terrifying closeness of his face in the water.
It was more dangerous than any storm. It was a riptide, pulling her under, and she had no idea how to swim against it. Ahead of her, James’s shoulders were rigid, his posture that of a man marching to a sentencing. Not to a wedding. To something else entirely.
Ewan hurried behind them, muttering about foolish nobles and the fragility of treaties. But Kate barely heard him. All she heard was the echo of that laugh, and the deafening, unanswered question hanging in the salt-thick air between her and the prince. The question of what, exactly, had almost happened in the freezing shallows, and what would happen now that they were staggering back into the gilded cage of duty, trailing seawater and something perilously new.