He thought about the window. About the moment before the innkeeper had entered, the way she’d stood, the particular quality of stillness that had not been uncertainty. He was trained in reading terrain. He knew the difference between ground that was impassable and ground that had not yet been crossed. She had been deciding.
He thought about what it would have meant if the innkeeper hadn’t come. If the door had stayed closed another thirty seconds.
He sat with that thought and did not allow himself to follow it all the way to its end, because that was not a useful exercise for a man alone in a room with a loaded pistol and a clear duty of care.
He thought instead about London. About the estate near Shrewsbury that was now half a day away, and after that the road south, and at the end of it, testimony and magistrates and the careful, grinding work of making something irrefutable out of everything they’d accumulated. He thought about what that would look like for her. The arrival in a city she’d never seen, the rooms, the solicitors, the slow institutional progress of justice.
He thought about what happened after.
He’d told her she was free. He’d said it at the lodge, andagain in the cave, and he’d meant it, had meant it at the time with the straightforward intention of a man who understood an obligation. He would see her safe, see her provided for, and then she would have choices. Scotland, she’d said once. Somewhere far enough north. She had an idea of a family she might find, a life she might build from the ruins of what Penharrow had taken.
He should want that for her. He did want it. The wanting existed alongside something else, and the something else had been growing since the river, since the cave, since she’d threaded her fingers through his in the dark and he’d understood, bone-deep, that it was voluntary, that she’d chosen it, that she chose most things about him with full knowledge of what she was doing and what it cost her.
He looked at her sleeping in his bed.
He could let her go. He had the mechanics of it. He’d say the right things, he’d arrange the right provisions, he’d stand in whatever doorway she was leaving through, and he would not make it harder than it already was. He was capable of that. He had been capable of harder things.
What he could not make himself believe was that it would be costless. That was what he had not admitted until now, sitting in this chair in a Welsh inn with Penharrow’s men outside and dawn still hours away. Letting her go was going to cost him something, and the something did not have a clean name. It was not the loss of a plan or the dissolution of a useful alliance. It was not even the particular ache of wanting a person you cannot have.
It was the loss ofher. The specific and irreplaceable weight of her presence, the way the room had a different quality when she was in it, the way he’d known she was deciding at that window without being able to articulate how he’d known. He would lose that. He would stand in a doorway and watch her walk away from him, and then he would go back to beingwhoever he’d been before Wales, except that he would be less, now, because he would know the difference.
He knew it was no, and he knew it had always been no, and the knowledge sat in him like a stone.
He looked at the window. The street below was quiet. Somewhere to the east, a very faint gray was beginning to suggest itself at the edge of the sky.
He looked back at her.
He would not tell her. That was the decision, arrived at without drama in this chair in the small hours. She had spent fourteen years with a man who believed his wanting her was sufficient claim. Oliver would not be a smaller version of the same thing. He had promised her freedom, and freedom was what she would have, regardless of what it cost him. He would never ask her to stay with him. Never.
He sat back. He watched the street.
The fire burned lower. Her breathing didn’t change.
He kept his post until morning.
CHAPTER 11
Oliver didn’t know how long he sat guard, but he was feeling the pull of sleep too when there was the old army signal knock on the door. Webb. He let Webb in. The man’s face showed relief the minute he saw Megan on the bed. “I thought she’d gone.”
“No. She came here to sleep.”
“She trusts you,” his batman replied. “That will make things easier.” Webb looked at him. “You need sleep. I’ll stand guard now. Get some rest.” With that he moved into the hall. And propped himself against the wall.
Oliver closed the door and looked at the chair and then longingly at the bed. He did need sleep.
“There is room for you. I know you won’t hurt me,” said a soft voice.
But did he trust himself? Hell, he was so tired he doubted he’d be any threat to any woman. He lay down next to her and she snuggled into his side and promptly fell back asleep.
Oliver lay there for a moment, luxuriating in the softness and warmth of her. Yet, it was this offer of trust that stirred him the most.
After everything she’d been through, that she could trust him was a miracle. He would do anything to ensure he deserved her trust. Even with the temptation of Venus lying next to him.
She stirred, laying her arm across his chest, so her hand lay over his heart. He drew a deep breath. His heart beat strong and loud in his chest. What was it about this woman that affected him so? She was a nobody. A woman who couldn’t read or write, but suddenly he was thinking he wanted to keep her in his life. But how? How on earth could he keep her trust and keep her. Making her his mistress was akin to what Penharrow did. He’d offered her freedom and by God he’d keep that promise.
His eyes finally drifted close and he sank into dreams of a woman with fair hair and the greenest eyes lying next to him in a meadow with children with the same-colored eyes playing around him.
Thank goodness dreams were free because this could never happen in real life.
