Work Text:
By the time Nesta passed Newport, the M4 changed into a single carriageway. A glorified farm track, more like. The sat nav had stopped working properly shortly after that, giving up on offering an estimated arrival time after it kept sliding backwards and changing instead to “Recalculating”, complete with an annoying little spinning wheel.
She’d watched the scenery change from concrete jungle to rural Wales with growing dread. She’d passed hedgerows tall enough to blot out the sky, and more than occasionally, she’d been stuck behind a tractor doing eleven miles an hour. She’d stopped trying to read the road signs with names consisting exclusively of Cwm-something or Pwllh-something. London had a Pret on every corner, and the tube that ran every four minutes rain or shine. Wales, apparently, had sheep. Actual, physical sheep, standing in a field, watching her car crawl past as she was stuck behind yet another tractor, wearing expressions that she had trouble not to interpret as judgemental.
Not for the first time since her move to Wales, she wondered if she truly had needed to take such drastic measures to get away from Tomas. London, after all, was one of the largest cities in Western Europe. Surely, she could’ve been reassigned to somewhere within city limits and still be without risk of walking into him. Apparently, past Nesta hadn’t had the headspace to think of that, and when Cadw had been in need of a field officer, covering casework across the Vale of Glamorgan, she’d jumped the opportunity. Or at least, that’s what her manager had called it. An opportunity. Driving through the countryside, she was wondering if she’d voluntarily gotten demoted in exchange of a better view.
Said view, at present, was another hedge.
She found her turning eventually, which was a gap in the hedge marked by a leaning gatepost and a sign so weathered she had to slow to a crawl to read it: Cuddfan Farm, and beneath that, in fresher paint, PLEASE SHUT THE GATE.
Turning onto the farmyard, it became immediately clear that she wasn’t properly dressed for these dire circumstances. The yard consisted of mud, mostly — a wide, churned expanse of it, glistening in a way that meant she’d ruin her heels the second she got out of the car. She’d worn her best, most expensive pair, along with a pair of grey wool trousers, because when she’d reviewed the file it had said initial site visit, applicant present, and in her head that had translated to something closer to a planning meeting in a farmhouse than whatever this was. There was a rusted trailer, a huge barn with a row of farming machines, and a shed with what looked like animal food. On the opposite side, there was another barn, from which she could hear distinct animal sounds. She could already smell the farm getting into her car, which made her scrunch up her nose. The longer she sat in her car, the more it became clear she was not properly equipped to deal with any of this at all. She got out anyway, because the alternative was reversing miles back down a road with no passing places, and stepped directly into a puddle, sinking deep into the ice cold water.
“Fantastic,” she said, to no one.
Someone answered anyway. “You’ll want to avoid that side, cariad. Bit of a bog.”
The deep rumble of a voice came from the far end of the yard. He sounded faintly amused, his lilting accent ensnaring Nesta for a second. She shook her head and looked up, ready to launch into her scolding about advance warning, but the words got lost somewhere between her throat and her teeth.
Because what she found on the other side of the yard was a man hauling a hay bale off the back of a trailer one-handed, without any visible effort. He was wearing a navy ribbed knit hat, under which long, dark hair was visible, longer than she’d expected. He was dressed in a flannel shirt gone soft and pale at the seams, unbuttoned enough to make it clear he hadn’t dressed for company, topped with a heavy canvas working jacket with a corduroy-lined collar. When their eyes met, she was struck by the unique shade of hazel, and soon she was drowning in the green and gold.
For a long moment, Nesta was speechless. If she was being honest, she’d pictured someone older. The file had said C. Baines, sole proprietor, and her brain had helpfully supplied a man in his sixties with a flat cap and loud, obnoxious opinions about the EU.
Apart from the hat, he was decidedly… not that.
“You’re from the council,” he said. He dropped the bale, straightened, and looked at her properly for the first time. There was a beat, brief and perhaps involuntary, where his gaze did the same slow inventory of her body hers had just did of his, and something in his face caught before he smoothed it back into easy, unbothered charm.
“Cadw,” she corrected, watching him as he strode over. “Not the council. I’m the built heritage officer for this area, Nesta Archeron.” She didn’t offer her hand, on account of the general sense that shaking hands with this man would require more composure than she currently had in stock. “I’m here about the barn.”
“Ah, right.” He wiped his palm on his jeans and offered his regardless, ignoring her initial decision. “Cassian Baines. Figured you might be. You look like someone who’s about to give me a lot of grief about a dilapidated barn.”
“I’ve had no reason to give you grief yet.”
“Yet,” he agreed, his smirk entirely too pleased.
The barn stood near the top of a rise behind the farmhouse, a long grey bulk against the hillside, the roof line swaybacked with age. Nesta felt that particular feeling rising up inside her, knowing the moment she stepped into the barn that this had been worth the drive. Up close it was better and worse than the photographs included in the file. Better, because the cruck frame was original. She could see the great curved oak trusses through gaps in the failing render, black with hundreds of years of woodsmoke and weather, each one cut from a single tree that had been felled and split and raised by hands that had been dust for centuries. Worse, because half the roof had gone, and daylight was coming through the thatch-turned-corrugated-turned-nothing in patches. She could see that the place had been leaking for a while, and she suspected it hadn’t seen any proper care in what was probably years.
She crossed the threshing floor — worn smooth in a long strip from two centuries of boots walking back and forth — doing a quick survey, and found the date stone set into the wall beside the door. She had to crouch to read it, moss furred into the carving. She brushed away some dirt and dust, reading the year of 1587, noticing initials she couldn’t quite place beneath it. Someone’s someone. Four hundred and thirty-nine years old, and now one Cassian Baines wanted to take a digger to it because the roof let in the weather. That simply wouldn’t do.
“This is a grade II building,” she said, straightening, “which I assume you already know the meaning of, or you wouldn’t have applied for consent to demolish it in the first place.”
“I know what it means on the form.” He’d followed her in and now stood with his arms crossed, filling the doorway in a way that put the low afternoon light directly behind him and made it considerably harder to concentrate on cruck trusses. “It means I can’t touch it without asking your lot’s permission, which takes eight months, give or take, and results in a bill I can’t afford, for a building that’s actively falling down on my animals.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t be falling down if it hadn’t been neglected.”
“That’s a very bold assumption, Miss Archeron.”
She decided to ignore him. “You could underpin the north wall, replace the failed trusses in kind, re-roof in slate to match the original courses—”
“I could,” he agreed, cutting her off, “if I had about fifty tot sixty grand lying about, which I don’t, because I’m a farmer. In case you don’t know, we usually don’t have trust funds lying about. What I do have is a barn that’s one bad winter off collapsing on livestock worth more than the building itself. Just my luck that I now also have a very annoying planning officer on my hand, telling me I need a licence to knock down my own decrepit shed.”
“It’s not your shed. It’s a scheduled historic asset that happens to be on land you own. That’s a significant difference.”
“Christ, you really do talk like a walking form.”
“And you talk like an arrogant man who thinks the quickest way through an argument is by steamrolling.” The words came out sharper than she’d planned, but he was getting under her skin with his complete disregard for historic significance. “This barn survived the Civil War. It survived industrial decline, and wat appears to be eighty years of nobody in this valley having two pennies to rub together. Excuse me for not agreeing to tearing it down on grounds of the roof’s a bit rubbish.”
He tightened his jaw, a clear sign that she was getting under his skin too. He stepped in off the threshold, and the barn, which had felt somewhat cavernous a moment ago, suddenly felt very small with just a few inches between them. She averted her eyes, focusing on the swallows going in and out of the broken eaves.
“You want to know what’s actually rubbish, Miss Archeron?” His voice had dropped, and he’d stepped even closer, making it impossible for Nesta to do anything but meet his intense gaze. “Standing in a field at four in the morning during lambing season, watching out for foxes, because the barn I should be using for shelter has got a hole in the roof the size of a car and is at risk of crushing my sheep, or the fact that I had to move my piglets into a makeshift barn actually designated for my equipment because otherwise they’d be too exposed to the elements and die, but I can’t do anything about any of it because of your grade II rating or whatever the fuck you’re going on about. Those things mean nothing to the actual animals I keep alive for a living.”
“That’s not—”
“And you have the nerve to drive out here in your fancy heels,” he said, dropping his gaze, deliberate, unhurried, taking in the shoes and the mud splattered across her trousers, “to tell me about courses of slate, like I haven’t spent every winter of my adult life up on that roof myself, trying to keep it from collapsing with nothing more than baling twine and spite.”
“I drove out here,” she said, and hated that her voice had gone rougher than she meant it to, “because somebody has to stop men like you from tearing down four hundred years of history.”
“Write it up, then,” Cassian challenged. “Whatever section, whatever act. Fine me. See if that fixes the roof before the roof fixes itself onto my pigs.”
“You think this is a joke.”
“I think you driving out here in those ridiculous heels to lecture a man about absolute nonsense is a joke, aye, and I think somewhere under all this—” he gestured at the whole of her, “—you already know I’m right, and it’s making you furious.”
“I don’t know anything of the sort.”
“No?” He’d drifted closer without her noticing he’d moved. She was the one giving ground, she realised, backing towards the old stalls at the far end without meaning to. “Bet you’ve got a system. A little colour-coded folder, alphabetised by district.”
“I have a methodology, which is more than I can say for whatever it is you’re running here—”
“Careful.”
“—without staff and a JCB you clearly can’t wait to put to use for your plan that amounts to knock it down and see what happens.”
“That’s not—” A muscle ticked in his jaw. “You don’t know the first thing about what my plan amounts to. I’ve barely survived the past three winters because I hadn’t had any proper shelter for my stock. You want to talk to me about what things amount to, you can start there.”
Cassian had been prepared for a lot of things when the letter from Cadw came through. He’d been prepared for a delay, a fee, a site visit from some awful grey man in a grey fleece with a clipboard and a lanyard. He had even rehearsed, while fixing the top gate on Tuesday, a whole speech about winters and stock losses and what a roof cost versus what a farm made, and he’d been rather looking forward to delivering it to whichever bureaucratic arse was assigned to his case.
It seemed that he had underestimated Cadw, and had not been prepared for her.
The moment he’d laid eyes on her in those red-soled heels, in his yard, sinking half an inch into that puddle that inched closer to a bog every day, his brain had stopped functioning properly. He knew he was being an idiot, but the second he’d seen the drop-dead gorgeous woman exiting her car already furious with him, grey-blue eyes doing a slow audit of everything he owned and finding it wanting, some doomed hopeful idiot part of him had sat up like the dog hearing the biscuit tin.
Then she’d opened her mouth, and the doomed hopeful idiot part of him had been at war with the rest of him ever since, because she was doing a spectacular job at irritating him to no end.
“—which means the setting of the asset is protected as well as the materials used, and the way it influences the overall view of the area,” she was saying now, pacing the threshing floor. “So even your proposed replacement building would need consent. You do understand you’d be trading one application for a larger one, don’t you?”
“I’m not even sure you understand,” Cassian muttered, which earned him a glare that he felt all the way to the tips of his toes. “The only thing I understand is that I have a failing structure on my property and the state isn’t letting me do anything about it.”
“The state has deemed this property as historically significant, as this is one of eleven surviving cruck-framed barns of this date in the Vale, and you are its custodian, whether you want to be or not.”
“Custodian.” He leaned back against the wall with his arms crossed, mostly so he could stop himself from gesturing like a lunatic. “Lovely word. Does the custodian get a salary? Materials budget? Or just the honour?”
“There are grant schemes—”
“I’ve read the grant schemes. I can be reimbursed forty per cent of the cost of a roof I can’t afford sixty per cent of, provided I fill in a form long enough to thatch it with.”
He noticed a tiny tightening of her jaw, there and gone, and her eyes intensified on him like she wanted to smite him, and God help him, he’d started playing for it. He started deliberately provoking this beautiful, furious woman standing in his condemned barn, because her being provoked was the best thing he’d seen on his property since the sheepdog trials.
She was going on and on about slate courses, hands moving now, precise little strokes like she was conducting the argument, a strand of hair escaping from that ferocious plait and sticking to her cheek, and she kept blowing it away without breaking stride. It kept falling back into her face, and he was watching that instead of listening. He was sure he was risking his life not listening to her, but he couldn’t stop his mind from wandering. He felt like an absolute disgrace of a man, but he desperately wanted her to stop moaning about this fucking barn. He wanted her to stop moaning about proper, period-accurate materials and instead start moaning about different things, preferably while wrapped around his—
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Every word,” he lied. “Slate. Courses. Truly riveting stuff.”
“You are the single most aggravating applicant I have ever—” she turned on her heel, letting out a frustrated groan, to gesture at the north wall. “—and furthermore, this wall, which you claim is past saving, is a perfectly straightforward underpinning job that any competent—”
Nesta took another step and her heel got caught in a gutter. Her ankle folded, and her centre of gravity moved sideways. Her arms flew out and her clipboard clattered to the ground. Cassian crossed the barn floor faster than he’d moved for anything that wasn’t livestock in years. He caught her out of the air with an arm round her waist and a hand splayed between her shoulder blades, her whole weight swinging into his chest with an impact he felt in his teeth, but didn’t mind in the slightest.
For a brief second, neither of them moved. She was holding on to a fistful of his shirt and her breath was going fast against his collarbone. She smelled of rain and something expensive, and her eyes, this close, were an impossible shade of silver and blue, almost radiant. Cassian’s heart was hammering so fast he was sure she could hear it.
“Careful of the uneven floor,” he said, “Meant to mention.”
“You meant to—” She shoved upright and out of his arms, her chin high, trying to muster up as much dignity as she could. She took one step away from him and her ankle folded again. She made a small, wounded sound, followed by a low hiss, and he immediately wiped every trace of a grin off his face.
“Right, don’t do that.” He was already crouching. “Let me see.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine, you’re white as a sheet. Can you put weight on it?”
“Obviously I can—” He watched her try, setting the foot down with a carefully neutral expression, as if determined to hide any weakness from him, and he watched her hiss through her teeth anyway, sharp, her hand shooting out to brace against the wall.
“Aye. That’s a no, then.”
“It’s a sprain at most, I just need a minute—”
“You need ice and elevation.” He straightened up and considered the logistics. It was a considerable distance to the house, and taking into account the state of the gravel path and the yard, he made a decision. Now he only had to convince her it was the right one. “Car’s no good to you either. You can’t drive with that foot.” He sighed. “Right then.”
“Right what?”
“Put your arm around my neck.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Nesta.” He noticed the small jolt move through her body when he called her by her name. “It’s two hundred yards of boggy mud, gravel and several cattle grids between here and my house. You can hop it on one Louboutin, or you can let me carry you, and only one of those options doesn’t end with a second sprain and a claim against my insurance.”
She glared at him for a long moment. He could see the machinery going behind her eyes, weighing pride against physics. “How do you know these are Louboutins?” she asked.
He blinked, unprepared for that question. “What?”
“You don’t strike me as a man well-versed in fashion.”
“I’m not. I just know the high ones with the fancy red sole. The real question is, why would you wear heels more expensive than my first tractor to an appointment like this, Nesta?”
“Well, normally the places I visit have drives that are paved or well-gravelled!”
“Right, and though I appreciate you thought you needed to dress all fancy, you knew this was a farm, aye?”
“Perhaps I thought I needed to charm a seventy-year-old grouchy farmer, who normally appreciate a bit of decor.”
“Well, I’m not seventy.” Cassian wisely left out the part where he had decidedly fallen for her decor. “Now, are you going to let me carry you, cariad?”
“What does cariad mean?”
“Nesta.”
“Fine. If you tell anyone about this,” she said, “I will make sure you’re filing forms until the end of your days.”
“Understood,” he said gravely, and picked her up in an easy sweep.
She weighed about as much as a spring hogget and was considerably worse at being carried. She was rigid as a fence post for the first fifty yards, arms crossed, determinedly staring at the horizon, but the yard was rough going and eventually, she gave in to gravity and looped her arm round his neck.
The dog lifted its head from the opening of its little house when they passed, assessed the situation, and laid back down with a long-suffering sigh.
When he reached the kitchen door, her head was almost, almost leaning against his shoulder, and Cassian kept his eyes front and his mouth shut. He definitely wasn’t going to comment on how carrying a beautiful, injured woman across his own farmyard in the last of the evening light seemed like something straight out of one of those bodice rippers his cousin leaves lying around after a visit.
After entering, Cassian decided he’d install her in the guest bedroom and took the stairs carefully, angling her through the door, which was small and low-beamed. The bed was decked in the good quilt his nan had made, and through the window, he glanced at the darkening hillside. He set her down on the bed like something that had come off a lorry marked FRAGILE, easing her back against the headboard, pulling the spare pillow down to prop the ankle before she could tell him not to.
“There.” He stood back. She looked wildly out of place against his nan’s quilt, and also, somehow, like the room had been waiting for her. He decided to ignore that thought. “Don’t move it. I mean it. I’ve strapped more ankles than any physio in Cardiff — sheep are murder on them — so I’ll have a look when the swelling’s iced down.”
“You’re going to treat my ankle,” she said, “with veterinary methods?”
“I’m going to treat your ankle with frozen peas and over thirty years of common sense first. The veterinary methods come later.” He paused at the door, looking back to grin at her. She had her chin up and her arms crossed, her hair coming down out of the plait entirely now. Her eyes were stormy, as if she was still ready to fight him even flat on her back with her foot on one of his pillows, and the doomed hopeful idiot part of him could not have been more delighted.
“I’ll get the peas,” he said, mostly to himself, and went down to fetch them.
Being immobilized while listening to Cassian’s footsteps fading down the stairs, Nesta realized there was nothing to do but observe.
Propped against the headboard of a stranger’s guest bed with her foot on his pillow, in a room approximately the size of her London apartment, she did her slow assessment. There were low beams overhead, seventeenth century at a guess. There was a chest of drawers with ceramic knobs propped against one of the walls, of which one of the knobs was replaced with a mismatched wooden one, the personal repair somehow weirdly touching. There was a framed black-and-white photograph on a side table, which showed a woman and a dog on a hillside that was recognizably the one visible outside the window. There was a jug on the windowsill holding dried flowers and one large, perfect seed head of wild carrot, and she looked at that for longer than she could account for.
Lastly, she turned her attention to the quilt. She’d been set down on it impossibly gently, and had been too occupied with pain and pride to notice it at first. Brushing her hand along the top, she noticed the way it was hand-pieced, consisting of colourful hexagons, having gone soft as breath through decades of washing. The stitches were small and slightly irregular in the way that meant it was handmade. Someone’s grandmother had made this. His, most likely. Nesta couldn’t quite get her head around having such a precious heirloom and letting mud-covered strangers lie on it, when she had nothing of the sort. The only thing she owned was a cashmere throw she had never once permitted to touch the floor.
Her ankle throbbed. Her trousers were ruined, as were her heels, probably, and her plait was unraveling. She decided to untangle it, letting the long tresses fall down to her waist. Somewhere below, she could hear him moving around his kitchen — a tap, the chunk of a freezer drawer, a low word to something, or someone, or himself, followed by the sounds of a door opening and closing. She was once again wondering if she’d hit her head sometime between her break-up with Tomas and now, because the old Nesta would never, ever, let herself get into a situation that ended with her in a strange farmer’s guest bedroom.
The floorboards creaked, followed by soft, light patters. Nesta startled when something hit the guest room door, which had been ajar. The something shouldered it open, and Nesta had half a second to brace before the thing that came through the gap turned out to be considerably small, white, and airborne.
The lamb hit the bed in one vertical bound she would not have believed the little guy, or girl, capable of, all four black-socked legs landing at once with a bounce that jarred her ankle. She winced, and the lamb simply stood there on the quilt, staring at her with its ears out sideways like handlebars.
“Stay there,” Nesta said softly, but the lamb had other plans. Its tail began to move, and she had never seen anything like it. It didn’t wag so much as rotate, a wild, whirring, propeller-blur of pure joy, its whole hindquarters shimmying with the force of it. The tiny creature advanced up the bed and drove its small hard head into her shoulder, butting her twice, deliberately and firmly, like it was knocking at a door. Then it burrowed in against her chest, a ball of soft wool with a frantic heartbeat and tiny hooves treading her thigh, tail still going like something about to achieve liftoff.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to be up here, little one,” Nesta informed it. Her hands were already in its wool, which was springy, warm, dense and faintly greasy. The lamb tipped its head back and looked at her with rectangular amber eyes and gave a bleat of such unguarded, ridiculous joy that the hard shell that had been around Nesta’s cold, cold heart, that she had maintained and added to for thirty-one years, quietly cracked along its length.
It butted her again, softer now, under the chin. Its nose was velvet and it smelled of hay and milk and warm animal, and somehow, it had decided that she was safe. It wedged itself into the crook of her arm as if that had always been its designated space, and snuggled impossibly close.
“You’re on a quilt probably older than the both of us,” she told it, whispering for some reason, stroking its ears, which were silky soft. “Have you no respect for provenance? Are you that much of an animal?”
The lamb wagged and Nesta cuddled it closer. Nobody was watching her anyway. “I guess you are, aren’t you, sweetie?”
There was, it turned out, someone watching her. She didn’t know how long Cassian had been standing in the doorway, but it had clearly been long enough. He had a bag of frozen peas in one hand and a tea towel in the other. He was also holding her handbag — retrieved, evidently, from her car, which explained the back door. It looked absurd, hooked over one, muscled forearm. Her gaze snagged on it, realizing that he’d shed what he’d worn outside. He was in just the simple, faded flannel with the sleeves shoved up, revealing dark ink starting at his wrist and working its way up and under the fabric, and he had lost his hat, leaving his dark, wavy hair wild and ruined. He was looking at the two of them, her and the lamb tucked against her chest, with an expression he was making no attempt whatsoever to hide.
He looked impossibly soft and struck, his expression so open and undefended that it robbed her of her breath. He looked like a man watching the thing he didn’t know he’d been hoping for, unexpectedly dumped in his guest bedroom. It lasted a full second before he caught himself and rebuilt the cocky grin. Nesta’s pulse was suddenly pounding in her ears, her mouth slightly dry. He was so stupidly handsome, both soft and cocky.
“Traitor,” Cassian said to the lamb, moving closer to the bed. “Great way to thank me for taking care of you, oen bach.”
“Why is there livestock in your house?” Nesta asked, ignoring the way Cassian slipping back into Welsh turned her insides molten. The lamb meanwhile attempted to burrow inside her blouse.
“That’s Bean. Cade lamb — bottle-reared, because her mam wouldn’t have her.” He set her handbag on the chest of drawers, and stood over the pair of them with his hands on his hips, surveying. “She was in her little pen in the bathroom when I went out. She’s managed to escape, apparently. That’s new information for both of us.”
Bean, hearing her name or sensing the shift in the room, detached from Nesta’s chest, took two bounces down the quilt, and shoved her head against Cassian’s stomach. He caught her absently, one big hand cradling the whole of her skull, thumb rubbing her poll, and lifted her one-armed off the bed, setting her on the floor. “Get down, you menace, she’s injured,” he scolded gently. Nesta had to look at the dried flowers for a moment.
“Right.” The bed dipped as he sat by her feet. “Peas.”
He wrapped the frozen bag in the tea towel, and closed his hand around her calf, lifting her leg to slide another pillow beneath it. His skin was warm and calloused, and she felt a current going up the back of her knee at the contact. He was careful and annoyingly good at this, cradling her heel in his palm, turning the ankle a degree to look at the swelling with a frown of real assessment. She tried to hide her wince, but he noticed it anyway.
“Bit of a golf ball coming up on the outside. That’s the ligament, not the bone, most likely. Frozen peas first, and I’ll strap it after.” He glanced up. “This’ll be cold.”
“I gathered that from the word frozen—” He laid the compress against the joint and the cold hit sharp and painful. She hissed, her hand fisting in the quilt and her whole leg flinching against his grip.
He didn’t let go, his hand firm, steadying her heel, holding the compress in place with even pressure. His head whipped up at the sound, his expression apologetic.
“Sorry. Sorry, love — worst of it’s the first minute, I promise, breathe through it—”
“I am breathing—” Inwardly, her mind was mush from him calling her ‘love’.
“You’re doing well, cariad,” he said, a smirk pulling at his lips.
She continued counting her breaths and the cold banked down from bite to ache to a deep numb throb. She let go of he quilt, and she became aware that he had shifted up the bed to steady her, his thumb moving in small, absent, probably unconscious circles along the arch of her foot. He had leaned in slightly, and his face was now very close to hers. Close enough to properly study him. The flush across his cheekbones, put there by the wind, probably. The stubble coming through dark along his jaw, and a few threads of early grey in his hair she hadn’t clocked in the barn. His long lashes, which were frankly wasted on him. His eyes, which were fixed on her mouth.
The house ticked around them. In the hallway, Bean’s hooves clicked on the wood, clearly walking away from the bedroom. Outside, the sky had gone fully dark, the hillside vanished into it, and the lamp on the chest of drawers had them trapped inside its small warm cocoon, softening them both.
“You’ve—” His voice had dropped and roughened, and he cleared his throat, barely. His free hand came up. “Hold still.”
He tucked an escaped strand of hair back behind her ear, his hand rough and warm and enormous. He lingered there, his fingertips grazing her temple, and then, slowly, deliberately, watching her the entire time for the first flicker of a no, he traced the shell of her ear. Just that. The curve of it, top to lobe, with one calloused fingertip, feather-light, and the sensation went through her like a struck tuning fork — down her neck, down her spine, out to the ends of her, every nerve fired up. She exhaled slowly, caught in the depths of his hazel eyes. His fingertip came to rest at the hinge of her jaw, and his thumb brushed her cheekbone, once.
“Nesta.” He sounded as wrecked as she felt. “I’m going to need you to say something.”
“You’re,” she started, and her voice came out just as ruinous, “compromising the objectivity of my site report.”
“Aye,” he said, “Or at least I’m hoping to,” and closed the distance.
The first touch of his lips against hers was so gentle, it melted her entirely. A soft, warm press, impossibly careful, while his hand cradled her jaw like she was precious to him. She could feel his restraint, felt him holding himself back as to not be too intense. His lips were softer than everything else about him had suggested. He tasted faintly of tea, mint, and something uniquely him. He kissed her once, and drew back a breath’s width, his forehead not quite touching hers, his exhale unsteady against her lips, giving her the space to end it.
She fisted her hand in his flannel and hauled him back instead.
The sound he made against her mouth — a low, relieved, deep groan, like he’d been cracked open — undid whatever gentleness either of them had been holding onto. The kiss deepened, turning hungry in the space of a heartbeat. His hand slid from her jaw into her hair, cradling the back of her head, angling her exactly where he wanted her while he coaxed her lips to part. His mouth opened over hers, and she met him with a small, furious sound of her own, tongue and teeth, kissing him the way she’d argued with him. He groaned again, deeper, pressing impossibly closer. She could feel his heartbeat pounding against her chest, its hammering pace matching hers.
He caught her lower lip between his teeth, worried it gently, and soothed it with his tongue. She couldn’t stop the whimper that escaped her. His answering exhale was ragged, her name falling soft and sweet from his lips. She’d opened the two top buttons of his flannel and pressed her palms flat against the warm skin of his chest, feeling the hard muscle and thundering pulse. He shuddered like a struck bell, and shifted closer, one knee braced between her spread legs on the mattress, looming over her, careful even in the heat of it to keep his weight off her leg. He tipped her head back further and kissed her until the room went soft at the edges, until her toes curled against the quilt and the only sounds in the small lamp-lit circle were their mingling breaths, their soft moans and wet catch of their mouths.
When he finally broke for air it was only far enough to speak against her mouth, his voice gravelly. “This is a terrible idea.”
“Agreed,” Nesta said, cupping his cheek, rough with stubble, and pulling him back to her.
She got three glorious seconds of him kissing her once more before he caught her wrists, pinning them gently to the pillow beside her head. He held himself an inch out of reach while she made a sound of genuine outrage. His eyes were nearly black and his breathing was wrecked, and he was smiling, the insufferable man, thumb stroking the hammering pulse in her wrist.
“You’ve a sprained ankle.”
“Yes, my ankle, not my—”
“And you’re my case manager.”
“Then I’ll recuse myself,” she snapped. “First thing come Monday. In writing. With footnotes. Is there anything else, or would you like to convene a committee?”
He laughed — a helpless, punched-out sound, like she’d knocked it loose — and dropped his forehead to hers. “God, you’re impossible. Has anyone ever told you that? You are the single most impossibly stubborn woman I have ever—”
“Yes,” she said. “Frequently. Now, are you going to fuck me or are you all talk?”
Something changed in his face. The hesitation just… burned off, all at once, and what was left underneath looked at her in a way that made her deeply grateful she was already lying down.
“I believe I was already in the process, cariad,” he said, low.
“I’m lying on a quilt which I suspect your grandmother made by hand, and if you think I’m letting you ruin an irreplaceable piece of Welsh domestic craft, you have badly misjudged what kind of woman you’ve got your hands on.”
She was met with silence as he stared at her. She stared back, noticing how his eyes strayed to her kiss-swollen lips, before moving back up to meet her gaze. He moved her then. He snaked one arm under her knees and the other around her back, carrying her across a dark landing while his mouth did filthy, distracting things to her throat and the side of her neck. She was vaguely aware that they entered another room, and the next thing she knew she was laid down in the middle of his large bed.
He stripped her button by button with his mouth following the path of his hands. He refused to be rushed, even as she swore at him and pulled his hair. All she got was a hum of appreciation and not one second of acceleration. He unhooked her bra with deft fingers and immediately replaced it with his mouth on her breast, hot and open, sucking her nipple to an aching peak while he rolled the other between his thumb and forefinger. She moaned, the sound obscene in the quiet bedroom, and he groaned lowly against her sensitive skin, like her coming apart was undoing him just as equally. He worked her over until she was arching into his mouth and pretty sure she’d soaked through her underwear. She was past caring.
Her trousers came off with surprising care, mindful of her sensitive ankle when he eased the fabric past the swelling and pressed a soft kiss to the inside of her knee. He dragged her underwear down with his teeth bared in a grin, unhurried, letting the cool air of the room hit her where she was wet and wanting, and then he knelt back between her thighs and looked.
He took his time taking in all of her, infuriatingly smug. One hand dragged up her shin, his gaze moving over her bare and flushed and glistening, and she lifted her chin and let him look, refusing to let him win whatever game it was they were playing.
“Well?” she said. “Does it meet standards?”
“Exceeds them.” Gravel, all the way down now. “I think I’m listing the whole thing. Requesting a preservation order. Nobody touches this—” his thumb dragged up through her in one slow, devastating pass that punched the breath out of her, “—but me.”
“That is not remotely how the legislation—”
His mouth landed on the inside of her thigh, open and hot and climbing higher, and all thoughts left her brain at the same time a low moan escaped her.
He licked into her like a man breaking a fast. No preamble, no teasing first pass, but just the flat of his tongue dragged up the whole length of her, slow and filthy, groaning at the taste of her like she was something worth savouring, and when Nesta’s hips bucked clean off the bed, they met the bar of his forearm coming down. A dropped gate. Immovable.
“Stay still,” he rumbled against her. “I’ve got you.”
He ate her thoroughly. There was no other word for it. Long, greedy strokes of his tongue and then tight, focused circles over her clit; two thick fingers working into her where she was soaked and clenching, curling forward, finding the spot that made her vision spark and then staying there, stroking relentlessly while his mouth sealed over her and sucked. She could be loud, she discovered, with her hands fisted in his hair and her thighs shaking around his ears, grinding against his face as much as the pressure of his arm allowed. For the first time ever, it felt perfect. When she pulled his hair, greedy and demanding, he lifted his head. She nearly whited out from the loss alone.
“Bratting me won’t make me go faster, sweetheart. In fact, it had the opposite effect my whole life. Ask my mam.”
“Do not mention your mother while your face is wet with—”
He lowered his head back and laughed against her. The vibration nearly ended her, and he felt it, the smug bastard. He stayed still for a breath, letting the tide subside before he restarted, his mouth and fingers working in tandem, his rhythm ruthless now, groaning encouragement into her — that’s it, ride it, come on my tongue, there’s my girl. It took her mere moments to do exactly that, coming on his tongue hard enough that the room lost its shape, clenching around his fingers in waves while he worked her through it, unhurriedly licking her clean until she twitched away oversensitive and he pressed one last kiss to her inner thigh like a signature.
She surfaced with an arm flung over her eyes.
“I don’t think I can move,” she managed, sounding breathless.
“Condolences.” His voice was wrecked, his mouth and chin shining with her. He wiped it on the back of his hand like a farmhand at lunch, which should not have been hot but was the hottest thing she’d ever seen.
She propped up on her elbows to watch him strip. She felt greedy, staring as the flannel went and the ink was revealed, curling around his shoulder, and when the jeans and boxers went, the sight of him made her mouth actually water. Thick and heavy, flushed dark and already leaking at the tip, and he gave himself one slow, rough stroke while he watched her, the muscles in his stomach jumping under it, utterly shameless.
“See something you like, sweetheart?”
“Come here,” she said, hoarse. “And I’ll let you know after some thorough investigation.”
He laughed softly. He rolled the condom on and came over her slowly, braced on his forearms, the blunt head of him dragging through her folds, notching against her, and stopped. He pressed his forehead to hers, trembling with the effort of holding himself back. Checking, because he was apparently incapable of not checking.
“Ankle?”
“Doesn’t exist.”
“Nesta.”
“If you stop now I will fail every application you ever file. I will condition your grant funding. I will—”
“Impossible woman,” he murmured, and pushed inside her in one long, inexorable roll of his hips that opened her up around him inch by inch and emptied her lungs entirely. The stretch of him was just this side of too much, her body yielding and clutching and yielding again until he was fully inside her and they were both shaking. He drank the moan straight from her mouth like it belonged to him. He held still, kissing her, giving her a moment she hadn’t asked for.
So she clenched around him. Deliberately. Just to feel the whole huge frame of him shudder.
“Nesta,” he groaned, wrecked, and ground into her, slow and filthy and punishing, showing her exactly what he could do to her, and Nesta smiled at the ceiling, feeling nothing but utter bliss.
Then he folded her in half. He hooked her good leg behind the knee and pressed it up to her chest, while he lifted her bad leg and settled it over his shoulder where nothing in the world could knock it, pressing a kiss against her sensitive skin. Then he leaned down onto his forearms, brought his weight down onto her, and the sensation deepened, her knees nearly at her ears. The angle made him go impossibly deep — so deep her breath caught on every stroke and he reached places she’d never before—
Nesta let out a sound she had never made in her life.
“There it is,” he breathed, inches from her face, and started to move. He fucked her deep and rolling and unhurried, every stroke dragging over that spot inside her and ending in a grind against her clit, every one wringing out a gasp, a moan, wrecking her so thoroughly she could think of nothing else. Folded under him she could do nothing but take it — pinned open, split wide, immobilised more completely than any hand on her wrists could manage. The wet, obscene sound of him moving in her filled the room along with the headboard keeping time against a four-hundred-year-old wall. She realized he was a talker, and his mouth was at her ear the whole time, low and filthy in two languages, praising her, teasing her. Look at you — taking every inch of me — so tight, so wet, gorgeous girl.
She raked her nails down his back and gave him cheek anyway, in gasps, because she couldn’t let him win that easily. “That — all you’ve got — farmer—”
His rhythm turned ruthless. She felt him grin against her throat.
“Still impossible.”
“Still — slow—”
“Christ, your mouth—” and he hauled her hips higher and drove into her hard enough to punch the air from her lungs, again and again. His pace was merciless, deep pounding strokes that had her babbling — his name and yes and don’t stop and other things she’d deny under oath — while his hand slid between their bodies and his fingers found her clit, slick and swollen, circling exactly in rhythm, making the wire in her starting to sing.
“Cassian — I’m—”
“I know. I can feel you.” He lowered his forehead to hers, his eyes on her the entire time. “Squeezing me so tight — that’s it, love, don’t fight it. Come for me. Now.”
She broke. Her cry scaled up and shattered, her whole body seizing around him, clamping down in waves with nowhere to arch and nowhere to spend it, all of it driven back through her endlessly, while he fucked her through every last pulse of it. He was half a breath behind her, her name breaking apart against her throat, his hips slamming once, twice, grinding deep as he came with a groan she felt in her bones, one hand fisted in the sheets and the other cradling her to him even in ruin.
Even in ruin, he was thinking of her.
They stayed like that, breaths slowly returning to normal. His weight kept her anchored, making her feel safe. Her good leg slid down around his waist and he gently lowered the bad one from his shoulder.
“Well,” he said eventually, into her neck. “That concludes the site visit.”
She laughed, couldn’t help it. “Decision to follow.” Her voice was in tatters. “There’s a statutory consultation period.”
“How long’s that, then?”
“Minimum? The rest of the night.”
His laugh moved through both of them. He softened and withdrew with care. She hissed at the drag of him, oversensitive, and he gentled her with a hand splayed warm on her stomach. He quickly dealt with cleaning up and came back before the bed had cooled. He took care of her, unhurried and thorough, while she protested on principle and was ignored all the way through. He positioned her with her back against the furnace of his chest, pulling the duvet over the both of them, one heavy arm coming over her waist, pulling her impossibly closer.
“I’ll still be tearing down the barn,” he murmured into her hair, already half gone.
“Still stopping you,” she whispered, already halfway asleep.
A loud, high-pitched sound roused her from sleep.
It took Nesta several seconds to fully wake, and remember where she was. There was a heavy arm trapping her, engulfing her, and she was warm all the way through. A broad chest was at her back, breathing slowly, and her whole body pleasantly ached in ways she’d never felt before. Except for her ankle, which throbbed gently.
Something, somewhere, was bleating.
She turned her head. Cassian slept like a felled tree. His face was slack, his thick, dark lashes still against the tanned skin of his cheek, and his hair was everywhere. One hand curled loose against her stomach as if even unconscious he’d refused to let her go, and he didn’t so much as stir at the sound.
The bleating came again, the sound indignant and somehow close.
Nesta carefully extracted herself from under Cassian’s arm and stole his flannel off the floor. It hung to her thighs and smelled of him. She buttoned two buttons to preserve some dignity and went to investigate.
Went was generous. She hopped, mostly, keeping one hand on the wall and her bad foot held aloft, following the sound down the landing to a bathroom door standing ajar and glowing faintly, impossibly, orange.
She pushed it open to find Bean in the bathtub, small and white, with her little black socks, sitting up in a nest of old towels with a heat lamp clipped to the shower rail and a hot water bottle gone lukewarm beside it. When she saw her she scrambled her front hooves up onto the tub’s edge and bleated directly at her with full, hungry fury, ears flat.
“You have got to be joking,” Nesta said.
The lamb did not care for her tone. She bleated again, louder, wobbling on the enamel, clearly about five seconds away from going over the edge headfirst, and Nesta crossed the floor in two hops. She got down onto the floor just before Bean leapt, bad ankle stuck out sideways, arms out just as the lamb toppled over, straight into them.
“Alright.” Bean burrowed into her chest, continuing to bleat. “Alright, I’ve got you. Stop shouting.”
Bean looked up at her at that, and butted her small hard head under her chin, once, twice.
“You’re very small, Beanie baby,” she whispered. “Why are you in the bathtub? Are you hungry?” The lamb started wagging her tail, and she tucked her closer, cheek coming down to rest on Bean’s soft head. “Don’t look at me like that,” she said, when the lamb moved its head away and stared at her.
The lamb licked her chin. Nesta laughed softly. “Fine, you’re a perfect baby. Tell no one.”
“Bit late for that.”
She looked up. Cassian was leaning in the doorway in nothing but joggers, arms crossed, hair sticking up in every direction. He had clearly been standing there for some time. He wasn’t bothering to hide his expression, looking soft, as if finding a woman in his shirt on his bathroom floor with a lamb in her arms had undone him completely.
“There’s a lamb,” Nesta said, with as much composure she could muster, “in your bath.”
“Only place I can keep Bean relatively warm.” He came in and crouched beside them, running a knuckle along the lamb’s spine. “She’s a poor baby, one of three. Mam had milk for two and no patience for the third. I found her half-frozen in the ditch by the top field on Tuesday, more dead than alive. Bathroom’s the warmest in the house.” He sent a dry glance her way. “On account of the barn having a hole in the roof. You may have heard.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Bean had started insistently rooting at her collarbone, head-butting in small determined jabs. “Why does she keep attacking me?”
“She’s not attacking you, she thinks you’re breakfast. Head-butting’s what they do to the udder. It gets the milk going. I’ll be right back.” He rose and disappeared briefly into the dark. When he returned, he had produced a bottle from somewhere. He settled down on the floor beside them, shoulder to her shoulder. “Well, she’s showing you she’s hungry and she’s showing you her affection. You can hold her while I give her this, cariad. Just mind your fingers.”
He leaned across her and offered the lamb the bottle, and Bean lunged, latching with a violence entirely disproportionate to her size. She began to drain the bottle in great greedy pulls, her eyes rolling back in shameless ecstasy. Cassian held the bottle at exactly the right angle with two fingers and watched her feed with quiet, absolute attention. He’d probably done this six times in the last twenty-four hours, and still he didn’t make it seem like a chore.
“There she is,” he murmured to Bean, low and absurdly gentle. “There’s my girl. No rush, is it. I’ve got you.”
Nesta looked at him. At the enormous hands cradling the small bottle and his wild hair, wrecked by her own fists only hours earlier. She stared at this man who had argued her to a standstill in a barn, folded her in half in his bed, and was now sitting on the cold tile beside her.
Bean finished the bottle with a wet pop and immediately fell asleep in Nesta’s arms — total collapse, boneless, drunk on milk, chin hooked over Nesta’s forearm. Cassian set the empty bottle down, finally looking at her properly. The watery morning made his eyes shine green and gold.
“So,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll want to get back to the city, file your report.” He paused. “Ankle’s no good for driving, mind. Be a day or two before it settles. Maybe three.”
“Maybe three,” Nesta agreed.
“There’s the follow-up visit to think of as well, I believe. It’s a very complex case.”
“Extremely complex. The footnotes alone could take a week.”
“A week.” He nodded slowly, almost gravely. His hand had come up while he said it, tucking a strand of her own messy hair back behind her ear, fingertip tracing the shell of it again, just to watch her breath catch, the absolute bastard. “And you’d be needing somewhere local. It’s a terrible drive after all, this time of year.”
“That is a factor, yes,“ she agreed. Her voice was slightly breathless again. “For the record, this changes nothing about the barn. I’m still stopping you.”
“Nesta.” He leaned in over the sleeping lamb between them and kissed her, soft and unhurried, tasting of nothing but himself, and pulled back just far enough to grin. “I’d be devastated if you weren’t. Just say you stay, and I won’t complain ever again.”
Nesta kissed him back, and that was that.
“I’m staying.”