“I needed to speak with you.”
He glanced toward her, and the shot of desire almost drove him to his knees. “Though I believe the English are ignorant of our presence, ’tis dangerous to be away from camp.”
“I am not foolish enough to be unarmed.” The slight waver in her voice betrayed her confident stance, and Gwendolyn started to step back.
“Tell me,” Aiden said, damning his growing weakness for her.
“You have avoided me since we departed the king’s camp. Why?”
Pain slashed his gut, and he cursed her question, that he’d made her doubt herself in any manner. For her strength, wit, and fierce determination, she deserved naught but respect. “Given our unwanted marriage, I thought you would find my staying away a welcome reprieve.”
The taut lines of her face softened. “Had I despised you, aye. But I dinna.”
Panic prickled over his skin. What was she saying? Once the Bruce had claimed Scotland, did she want him to return to Latharn Castle? Nay, ’twas naught but his own yearning.
Aiden cleared his throat, wanting to pull her into his arms and, if only for a moment, feel her mouth against his. “I am relieved youdinna hate me.”
“However angry I was with you, I never could. Throughout our time together you have always acted loyally, have done your bestto protect me.”
Too aware of her, of her taste, of how her body felt against his, he exhaled. “We should return to camp.”
“Tell me about your family?”
Heart pounding, hefroze. “What?”
“I was thinking of how littleI know of you.”
His chest tightened beneath thoughts of his family torn from his life, of his guilt for having survived. With cool precision, Aiden removed her hand, not wanting to discuss this time in his life with her. “My past matters little.”
“It matters to me,” she said, the sincerity of her words wrapping around his anguished memories with a strangling hold. “You know about me, my father, my brief marriage. Yet I know naught about you except for your being a Templar.”
His denial to tell her anything about his youth was ingrained, but against all logic he found the thought of sharing his past withher important.
A cool gust of wind laden with the salty tang of the sea whipped past. Leaves rattled in the shrubs, then stilled.
“During my twelfth summer, my family and I were returning to Scotland after a visit to France. En route, a violent storm destroyed the ship.”
“What happened?” she asked, her voiceraw with dread.
A shudder swept him, then another, as his mind lurched back to the screams, the explosions of thunder, and the towering waves battering the bow with merciless force. “Storm-fed winds destroyed the sails, leaving the ship helpless in the tempest’s fury. My father ordered us to remain below, but with the foolish confidence of a lad, I climbed above deck. The cog plunged into the next trough, and a wall of water crashed over the bow, tearing crates free and ripping me off the ladder andover the side.”
“Oh, God!” she gasped.
“Tossed about within the rough seas, by sheer luck I caught the edge of a plank. In the…” His voice began to break, and he looked away, swallowed hard. “In the darkness I clung to the wood, prayed for help, for any sign of life. Hours passed, and with each one, hope that somehow the ship had survived, that my family still lived, faded. Exhausted, numb from the cold, I lostconsciousness.”
Her hand lay on his arm, but, raw with emotion, he did not turn to her. With the grief of his youth exposed and struggling for control, he refused to risk the desire to take her into his arms and accept the comfort offered when it couldlead to naught.
“Your family?” she breathed.
He swallowed hard. “I was the only one aboard who survived. Naught was retrieved of the ship except for fragments of wood strewn along the shore, one plank bearing thevessel’s name.
“I am so sorry.”
Aiden gave into his growing need to touch her and linked his fingers with hers. Another breeze swept past, thick with the scent of the sea. “’Twas along time ago.”
“It was, but I understand the hurt.”
She did, and however dangerous, the tension knotted in his chest eased with the telling.
