Megan’s eyes filled. She looked away quickly, but not before he saw gratitude, and disbelief, and underneath both of them something newer and more fragile that he didn’t want to name too early and damage.
Across the river, one of Penharrow’s men was shouting, gesturing toward them, but the river was impassable and would be for days. By then they would be long gone.
“We need to move,” Webb said, already gathering the horses with the efficient resignation of a man who has learned not to waste time on situations he cannot change. “They’ll look for another crossing. Look,” he pointed downstream to see Megan’s horse clambering out of the river. “I’ll fetch the gelding.”
Oliver nodded. He got to his feet and offered Megan his hand. She looked at it for a moment, then took it, and he pulled her upright. She swayed slightly and he kept hold of her until she found her balance.
“Can you ride?”
She looked at him. Really looked at him, the way she had in the cave the night before, as though taking stock of something she hadn’t finished deciding about.
“Yes,” she said. “I can ride. You’re a good teacher. Plus fear of falling off helps.”
Webb was back with her horse, and Oliver helped her mount. They were all freezing cold, but they had to move on.
They mounted and pushed deeper into the mountains, leaving Penharrow’s men to their frustrated shouting on the far bank. Oliver didn’t look back.
He was thinking about the moment under the water. The cold and the dark and the current and the thought that had arrived without his permission and settled in him like something that had always been there, just waiting for the right conditions to become visible.
She was not the mission. She had not been the mission forsome time. He understood that now with the same bone-deep certainty with which he understood distances and terrain and the weight of a pistol in his hand.
What he was going to do about it was a problem for a man who had finished being hunted through the mountains of Wales. For now, he rode, and she rode beside him, and the morning light caught in her wet hair, and he did not look at her more than was necessary.
He didn’t entirely succeed.
CHAPTER 9
The storm caught them a day later in the high country.
Oliver had watched the clouds mass on the northern horizon all morning, had pushed them harder trying to find shelter before it hit. But the mountains this high were bare rock and windswept heath, with no trees for cover and no structures in sight.
When the first snowflakes began to fall Megan knew they were in trouble.
“There!” She pointed toward a dark opening in the hillside ahead. “Is that a cave?”
It was. It appeared to be a shallow depression in the rock face, barely deep enough to deserve the name, but it would have to serve. Oliver urged his exhausted horse toward it as the snow began falling in earnest.
They reached the cave just as the storm truly hit. Within minutes, the world beyond their meagre shelter became a white curtain of driving snow, the wind howling like something alive and furious.
Oliver got the horses tethered in the deepest part of the cave. There was no fuel for a fire. Nothing grew at this elevation, andthey’d burned the last of their supplies two nights ago. They would have to rely on body heat alone.
Webb collapsed against the cave wall, his face gray. The river crossing had reopened his wound, but it hadn’t festered, and Megan knew that was the only piece of luck they’d had in days.
“We need to get warm,” she said, already removing her wet cloak. “And food?—”
“There is no food.” Oliver’s voice came out hard. “We have what’s left of the dried meat and that’s all. We’re one day from the nearest village, assuming the storm doesn’t last. If it does?—”
He didn’t finish.
He didn’t need to.
Megan looked at him for a moment, then moved to Webb’s side to check his wound. Behind her she heard Oliver cross to the cave entrance, and she could feel the particular quality of his silence—the kind that turned inward, that started cataloguing failures.
She recognized that silence. She’d lived inside a version of it for years.
“It’s not your fault,” she said, without turning around.
She heard him move. “You can’t know what I’m thinking.”
