“You’re thinking this is your fault.” She adjusted the bandage on Webb’s shoulder and then stood and turned to face Oliver. “That you should have planned better. Should have anticipated every problem.”
He said nothing. But his expression confirmed it.
“Even if you’d known all of it,” she said, “you still would have come for me. You still would have gone after Penharrow.” She paused. “You’ve kept us alive for nearly a week against impossible odds.”
“We might not survive this storm.”
“We might not. But we will fight.” She held his gaze. “Not letting Penharrow win is sufficient motivation.”
Something shifted in his face. Not quite a smile, but an easing.
“We should try to sleep,” he said. “The storm might blow itself out by morning. The horses will be fine at the back here. They’re hungry but I don’t have any feed.”
They huddled together in the back of the cave, all three of them, in a close circle for warmth, Webb between them. It was unavoidably intimate. Megan was pressed against Oliver’s side with Webb’s weight against her other shoulder, and the heat of Oliver’s body was the only thing standing between her and the cold that had been working its way into her bones for hours.
She was aware of him with an attention she didn’t want.
She knew how to be wary of men, had learned it young, and it had served her, and she had been particularly careful to learn the wariness that mattered most, the wariness of kindness. Penharrow had been kind, at first. The stable hand who had reported her first escape attempt to him had been kind too, until he wasn’t. She’d learned that the kind ones were worth fearing most, because they made you trust things you shouldn’t, made you soft in places that couldn’t afford to be soft.
She had held herself tightly closed for fourteen years. It had kept her alive.
Pressed against Oliver’s side in the dark, she was aware of a loosening she didn’t know what to do with. It had nothing to do with desire, or not primarily. It was something more fundamental than that. It was the reluctant, cellular recognition that she felt safer here than she had felt in any closed room for as long as she could remember. That her body, which had learned to remain vigilant even in sleep, had slowly made a separate assessment of its own.
She didn’t trust it. She was aware of not trusting it. But she could feel the loosening happening anyway, incremental and unwilling, like ice in early spring that doesn’t want to melt but can’t help it.
The storm raged on.
Hours passed. Oliver drifted. Megan lay awake and listened to the wind and tried not to think about the fact that she was getting warmer.
When Oliver woke, his eyes found hers in the dark with a directness she’d come to recognize as simply the way he looked at things. No performance in it. No reading her expression for what she wanted to see there.
“Tell me about James,” she said quietly.
She wasn’t sure why she asked it. Partly distraction. Partly because she’d been thinking about the way he sometimes went somewhere distant when James’s name came up, and she’d found herself wanting to understand that distance. Wanting to know what it looked like when a person lost someone they cared about.
Oliver was quiet for a moment. Then he pulled her slightly closer, purely practical, and she let him, and he began.
“We met at Eton. I was the heir to a dukedom, expected to be arrogant and insufferable. James was the third son of a baron, expected to go into the church or the military. We should have had nothing in common.”
“But you did.”
“We both hated the pretense. The posturing.” He paused, and she felt the quality of it, not performed reluctance, but genuine remembering. “James once told me he could see through my mask to the person underneath. The boy whose parents had just died, who was being raised by an uncle who saw him as the heir to a title before anything else.” His voice was steady and quiet, and she felt the cost of that steadiness. “James was the only person who ever knew the real me. Not the Marquess. Not the cavalry officer. Just Oliver.”
“And now he’s gone.”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you’re doing this? Pure revenge?”
The question came out more direct than she intended. But she’d learned, in this last week, that directness was one of the things he responded to genuinely. That it met a quality in him.
“It started that way,” he admitted. “I wanted Penharrow dead for what he did to James. I thought I could use you to destroy him.” She felt him hold still, giving her the honesty of that without dressing it up. “But it’s not about that anymore.”
“Then what is it about?”
He was quiet for a moment. Choosing words rather than reaching for the nearest ones.
“You,” he said. “It’s about you. A woman who was stolen as a child and survived things that should have broken her. Who tends a wounded man and crosses a freezing river and never once complains about the cold or the hunger or the danger.” Another pause. “I understood, somewhere in the middle of all this, that some things are worth fighting for past the point where revenge has anything to do with it.”
