She nodded. “I see.”
Silence again.
She faced the window, holding her arms as a cold sensation of filthiness slinked through her. She was damaged. Irrevocably damaged. The incontrollable need to bury the truth, hide this secret, brought a blur of moisture to her eyes.
Then her heart pumped faster.
If she and her uncle had guarded this secret so well, kept it for so many years, why had she ever told Tom McGwen? She turned back around, looked at him.
He stood straight and rigid, eyes trained on hers, with an expression she could not decipher. Something about his face pulled at her, softened her. The pleasing shape of his eyes, with their dark red lashes and gleaming assuredness. The lines in his forehead. The sun-blush of his cheeks. The full, easy smoothness of his unmoving lips.
The lips she had given herself to in a different life.
Despite her fears.
Despite the alley.
The words rushed out of her before she could stop them, “I must have trusted you very much.” To tell him such things about herself. To believe he would not alter the way he looked at her. Or leak the truth. Or find another village lass—one who had not been soiled and robbed of her precious purity.
Tom’s nod was slow, a little sad, when he whispered back, “Ye did.”
She did not return to Penrose Abbey. The reins were loose in her hands. She was aimless, listless, as her distance from both the cottage and abbey stretched wider.
She was not certain she would ever go back.
To either.
Sunlight—and shame—warmed her face as the horse discovered a small cart path in the field. She followed the trail. When it met with a grassy arched bridge, she dismounted and wandered to the middle.I cannot do it.She sat, legs dangling over the stone edge as the brown creek water rushed and splashed beneath her.I cannot.
She was not strong enough to marry Lord Cunningham.
And she was not strong enough to tell him she couldn’t. Was she?
Tom’s story colored again in her mind. She imagined it so well. As if she’d opened a book, read over the pages, and watched through words as someone else endured agony. Lord Cunningham had a right to know. If she were to be his bride, he must be privy to her secrets as surely as Tom was.
That bothered her.
That she had told Tom so much.
That whoever she was before had …
She tried to slam shut the imaginary book, but scenes rushed through her with flashing vividness. Her kissing him and laughing at the same time. Her holding his face. Feeling his jaw, his soft beard, while her nose brushed his. Then her doing the one thing she wanted to do now—crying, but not alone. Pressed close to him, swallowed in the arms that looked so strong, certain that nothing in the world could penetrate his strength and hurt her. Had it really been such a way? Had he truly made her safe? And happy?
In anger, she grabbed a fistful of grass. She slung it into the creek.Kerplunk.
The memories weren’t real.
Mere fragments of her imagination.
In many ways, she was grateful she was no longer the girl who remembered the alley. The one who had nightmares haunting her soul. But another part—the smallest part of her—envied the Meg Foxcroft who had Tom McGwen to love.
Brushing at her clothes, Meg stood and remounted her horse. She turned back to Penrose Abbey, her heart alternating between each mile, not certain if she would reject Lord Cunningham when she returned or accept him.
By the time she made it through the gates, she was determined.
This had nothing to do with Tom.
The decision was for herself, because she could not entrap herself in marriage when so many questions still prowled through her. She would tell him tonight. At the dinner table. After his third glass of wine and only when he prodded—
