She had come to occupy the same territory in his thinking as Webb did, that small and essential category of people whose safety was not a strategic consideration but a non-negotiable fact. Except that wasn’t right either, because with Webb the feeling was the calm of long familiarity, and this was not calm or familiar. This was something else. Something that had arrived without his consent and declined to be assigned a manageable position.
She stirred again, resettling, and her hand opened and closed once against the blanket before stilling.
She’d chosen to trust him. In that lodge, with every reason not to, she’d looked at him and decided he was something different from what experience had taught her to expect. Hedidn’t know what he’d done to earn that. He wasn’t sure he had earned it, or whether she’d been desperate enough to trust anything that offered itself.
But she was here. She’d crossed that river. She’d climbed on that horse.
Webb was right that he’d gone stupid over her. What Webb hadn’t said, what Oliver was only beginning to understand sitting here in the cold with the wind at the door, was that it wasn’t the ordinary stupidity of attraction. He’d felt attraction before. Attraction was manageable. You noted it and set it aside and it diminished with distance and time.
This was something else.
This was the thought, arriving without warning and refusing to leave,I cannot leave her.Not as a mission parameter. Not as a strategic calculation about testimony and justice for James. As a simple, stark, prior fact. As something that had already been decided somewhere underneath his reasoning, before his reasoning had caught up with it.
He was compromised.
He sat with that word and let it settle. It was the right word. He was a soldier who had allowed a variable to become something it had no business being. He had crossed that river for her. He had saidwe all reach Shrewsbury together or we all fail togetherand he’d meant it, not tactically, not as a calculation about odds, but because the alternative, the alternative of her alone in those mountains or back in Penharrow’s hands, was something he could not make himself contemplate.
That was not how a man in his position ought to think. He knew that. He’d told Webb that their first priority was keeping her alive long enough to have choices, and he’d meant it to sound like professional detachment, but it had been something else, and Webb knew it, and Oliver knew it, and now it was three in the morning and he was watching her sleep instead of planning their route and the evidence was fairly conclusive.
She murmured something again. Not distressed. Just dreaming.
He looked at the door. Held his attention there by an act of will, counted the seconds. Estimated the depth of the latch. Listened to the wind.
Looked back at her.
All right, then.
He was not going to resolve this tonight. He wasn’t going to reason his way back to the clean, mission-oriented clarity he’d arrived in Wales with, because whatever had happened in the last two days had made that clarity unavailable to him. He could note that fact and manage around it, or he could sit here fighting it at the cost of the rest, and he was going to need the rest.
The fire shifted. A log settled with a soft collapse of ash.
He would get her to Shrewsbury. He would see her safe. He would do his job. What happened after that, what he did with this impossible, inconvenient, apparently non-negotiable thing that had lodged itself in his chest, was a problem for a man who had slept.
Outside, the wind howled through the hills, and somewhere in that darkness Penharrow’s men were searching.
Oliver settled back in his chair determined to keep his eyes on the door.
He did not entirely succeed.
CHAPTER 7
On their third day, the rain had turned to sleet by the time they finally stopped near dusk. Travelling in darkness across rough terrain slowed everything. The horses couldn’t be pushed, and the mountains didn’t care about urgency.
Oliver’s horse stumbled for the third time in as many minutes and he made the call. “There,” Webb said ahead of him, his voice rough with pain. He pointed toward a darker shadow against the mountainside. “Cave, maybe. Or another hut.”
It proved to be both. A stone structure built into the rock face itself, larger and more substantial than the shepherd’s hut they’d left behind. The roof was solid mountain, the walls thick, and most importantly it was empty.
Oliver dismounted first, then helped Megan down. She swayed when her feet touched the ground, and he caught her elbow to steady her. Even through the sodden fabric of her cloak he could feel her trembling, whether from cold or exhaustion or something beyond both, he couldn’t tell.
“Can you stand?”
“Yes.” Her voice was thin, unconvincing.
He kept his hand on her arm a moment longer, then released her and moved to help Webb dismount. The former sergeant’s face was gray beneath the dirt and rain, his jaw set against pain. The shoulder wound had bled through the makeshift bandage Megan had applied earlier, a dark stain spreading across his coat.
“Inside,” Oliver ordered. “Both of you. I’ll see to the horses.”
For once, Megan didn’t argue. She moved toward the shelter with Webb leaning slightly on her shoulder, an odd sight, this slight woman supporting a solidly built soldier. But she managed it, her spine straight despite her obvious exhaustion.
