“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you trying to hide it?”

“Not hiding anything, ai ren .”

“And sounding guilty, to boot.”

Mal sighs. There’s very little he can keep from his wife, and he wonders, yet again, why he would ever try. Except maybe this once. “I …” He looks up.

Freya is standing at the bottom of the ladder, her arms crossed, and it appears as if … yes, her foot is tapping. “Well?”

“I just … it was … there was …” He feels like he’s tripping over the words, so just comes out with it, bringing the item into the light. “I wanted an ice cream.”

She nods slowly, her eyes fixed on the cone in his hand. “So I see. A double scoop, too.”

“There’s more,” he adds before she can comment further. “In the freezer, for everyone. After dinner. I got it from the parlour outside Eavesdown.”

“Really.”

“But I just …” He stops.

Her gaze follows a drop of liquid white as it slides down the wafer and onto the base of his thumb. She involuntarily licks her bottom lip, very fast, but Mal notices. His groin tightens even as his breath hitches, and he has a mental image of cold ice cream being painted down a flame hot tattoo …

“You couldn’t wait?” she asks, her eyes moving to his face.

“I thought, you know, me being captain and all …” He pauses. “’Sides, it made me think of home.”

“Home?”

“Shadow.”

Freya uncrosses her arms, instead letting her hands hang at her side. Her expression softens. “Your mother?”

He nods. “It was a treat,” he explains. “I wasn’t that much older than Ethan, but on high days and holidays my Ma’d make sure we had a cone from Dickerson’s in town. Maybe two, three times a year. A’course, what with earning money for chores after school and the like, I soon got to the age I could buy my own, but somehow it never tasted the same.”

“It doesn’t.”

“No.” Not just vanilla, he knows, but flavoured by the past.

“We had an ice cream maker at home in the kitchen,” Freya admits, perhaps a little ruefully. “Brigitte would ha