“Then let’s at least be stupid in the right direction. What could possibly go wrong? Five days through the mountains with a woman who can’t ride and a shoulder wound.”
“When you put it that way.”
“Complete madness.” But Webb was smiling. “Reminds me of that night in Badajoz when you decided to take on an entire French patrol with only the two of us.”
“We survived.”
“Barely. And we were younger then.”
“We’re not that old.”
“Speak for yourself, my lord.” Webb shifted his shoulder again. “But yes. We’ve survived worse. We’ll survive this too.”
“Get some sleep,” Oliver said. “I’ll take first watch.”
“Wake me in four hours.”
“I will.”
Webb stretched out on the cot, pulled his blanket close, and was asleep within minutes, the way soldiers learn to sleep quickly, completely, without ceremony.
Oliver remained where he was.
He should have been reviewing the route. Calculating distances, thinking through contingencies, identifying the variables he hadn’t yet accounted for. That was how he’d always approached a mission, with the systematic clarity of a man who’d learned, at considerable cost, that emotions not managed in advance became liabilities under pressure.
He looked at the door.
Then, without quite meaning to, at Megan.
She lay on the cot close to the fire, one hand loosely curled beneath her cheek, her breathing slow and even. The firelight moved across her face, warming it, and for a moment she looked entirely peaceful in a way she hadn’t once while she was awake, that careful watchfulness entirely gone.
Oliver made himself look at the door again.
He was assessing the latch, the gap beneath it where the wind pushed through, running the numbers on how long the wood would hold against a determined assault, when his eyes moved back to her.
He noticed it the third time, the way she’d drawn her knees up slightly, the way her fingers had relaxed, the small involuntary trust of a body that had finally, for a few hours at least, stopped anticipating pain.
He’d been watching her.
The recognition was unwelcome. He made a deliberate effort to fix his attention on the fire, on the logistics of tomorrow, on Webb’s wounded shoulder and what pace it would allow them to set. These were the things that required his attention. These were the things that would keep them alive.
His gaze crossed to her again.
He was a soldier. He’d held dying men. He’d made decisions in the field that had sent people to their deaths, and he’d carried those decisions afterwards with something that wasn’t exactly peace but was at least a kind of manageable weight. He’d been in Spain for three years and never once lost his ability to think. Not once. Even at Badajoz, even at Salamanca, even in the worst of it, there had always been some part of his mind that remained apart and cold and functional, the part that calculated odds and managed resources and knew, always, what the mission required.
He was watching her sleep.
Not out of desire, or not only. It was something simpler and more alarming than that. It was the feeling that came over him when he tried to fix his attention on the door, or the fire, or the route north, and found that some part of him refused. The same pull every time. The same interruption to his concentration. Every time he meant to think about something else, there she was, at the edge of his attention, drawing it back.
She stirred slightly. Her lips moved around something in Welsh he couldn’t catch.
He’d been about to stand, to cross to her. He caught himself and stayed where he was.
That disturbed him most. Not the looking. The impulse that went with it, the instinct that said go to her, keep her from whatever she’s dreaming, as though that were his to do.
He had been in dangerous situations before. He had always known, with precision, what his priorities were and how to hold to them when everything else was noise. That was not something he’d thought of as a skill. It had simply been how he worked. The mission. The men. Everything else in its correct place.
She was not in her correct place.
