“And to see their outlines in the moonlight.”
He nodded, impressed by her calm. After this day’s strife, most women would have shuddered at the idea of remaining in the wilderness. Then, most women would not have been able to kill a man with such skill.
“Come.” Somber, he strode toward the swath of stone. At the flat expanse, he cleared away any foreign debris. “Without a blanket, we will be cold.”
“At least it is not winter.”
“True.” He paused. “And we can use each other’s bodies for warmth.”
“’Tis a possibility.”
The sensual heat in her voice made thoughts of the knights and this day’s confrontation slide away. He walked over to her and stroked her cheek with the pad of his thumb.
“I am going to miss you, Cristina Moffat.” He’d expected a soft smile, a look of tenderness, not for her to try to pull away. He held her against him, suspecting the reason. “You think of your husband.”
She stiffened.
“Your husband is dead, that I cannot change. And I regret that my words made you think of him. It was not my intent.”
“I know.” Her body sagged. “I am tired.”
And troubled, still haunted by memories of her husband. He could tell by the sadness within her eyes when she believed he wasn’t watching. How would it feel for a woman to think of him so, for a woman to long for him, and when the time came, to mourn his passing?
“Cristina, look at me.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she turned.
He stroked his thumb along her moonlit cheek. “Two years have passed since your husband’s death. You cannot live in the past forever. It will steal the time before you and strip away the happiness yet to be found.”
A lesson he’d learned only after his brothers believed him dead. A death he’d allowed them to believe was real. A fitting penance for his attempt to kill his brother’s wife, Nichola, when her only crime was that of being English. If only he could take back that day.
For too long he’d allowed his hatred for the English to taint his life. Through the months as he’d recovered, he’d had time to think, time to regret.
A sad sigh spilled from her mouth. “Do you believe anyone truly finds happiness?”
He thought of his parents, the remembered laughter of his youth. “Aye, but you do not?”
“ No.”
The simple conviction within Cristina’s reply disturbed him more than if it’d held vehemence. Questions of how much her husband had truly loved her resurfaced. The more Patrik learned, the more he was convinced her marriage had been crafted for protection, her tenderness toward Gyles that of appreciation, not love. The thought pleased him.
“Tell me about how you met your husband?”
At Patrik’s question, Emma tensed. “I do not want to speak of him.” An understatement since there was nohim.
“It has been two years since he died.”
Heart pounding, she struggled for words. What should she say? Already she’d made up more than she could keep straight.
He sat on the stone, drew her to sit beside him, and then guided her head against his chest. “I wish to know.”
“If it was only so simple.”
She recalled a beggar on the streets nearby the orphanage in her youth, a man who had one day disappeared. Not disappeared. Murdered. The fact that his body had never been discovered meant one of two things. The killer had been crafty, or most likely, no one cared enough to try to find him.
But she would give the beggar a role in her life, or, at least speak of him as if of someone who had truly mattered. “I met him on the street one day.”
“When you lived in the orphanage?”
