Oliver wasn’t Penharrow.
She knew that. Somewhere beneath the scar tissue of fourteen years, she knew that with a clarity that frightened her because it meant she was beginning to trust it, beginning to let herself believe in it, and if she was wrong…
If she was wrong, it would destroy something in her that had no name but that she suspected was the last remaining piece of whoever she’d been before.
A coal shifted in the grate. The fire threw warm amber light across the room, across the unfamiliar beautiful objects, across her own hands folded in her lap, hands that had learned to clean wounds and tend gardens and hold perfectly still.
What does freedom feel like?
She’d asked herself that question a hundred times over the years. Had tried to imagine it, had used it as a torch to carry through the darkest nights. But she’d imagined it wrong. She’d imagined relief. She’d imagined lightness, the particular exhale of a held breath finally released.
She hadn’t imagined this bewildering, shapeless grief.
Because alongside the relief, which was real, which sat in her bones like warmth after cold, there was this. The weight of all the years. The understanding that freedom didn’t erase what had happened, didn’t give her back what was taken, didn’ttransform her overnight into a woman who knew where she belonged and how to stand in a curtsied-at room without looking behind her for the real recipient.
Freedom was not an ending. It was, she was beginning to understand, simply a different beginning.
The question was what to do with it.
She was twenty-one years old.
She had survived the unsurvivable.
She could not read, but she had learned to heal wounds and read weather and navigate by starlight and hold a man’s trust when she’d never been given reason to trust anyone. She was not nothing. She was not simply what Penharrow had made her.
She was also something else. Something underneath all of it that he’d never been able to reach, no matter how hard he’d tried.
Tomorrow she would work out where she fit. Or she wouldn’t, and she’d work it out the day after.
Tonight she was free.
Tonight that was enough.
She curled her feet beneath her in the chair and let the fire warm her face and dry her hair and stayed there watching the flames until sleep finally found her, quiet and uncomplicated, in a room with no bars on the windows.
CHAPTER 12
Megan woke to light.
Not the thin gray light that crept through barred windows at the hunting lodge, apologetic and meagre as if it too had learned not to intrude. This was winter morning light, pale gold and unhurried, falling across white linen and a counterpane of deep blue wool, and for one suspended moment Megan lay entirely still and could not remember where she was.
Then she did.
Saxton Castle. Oliver’s family seat.
She sat up slowly and looked around. The fire had burned low in the night, reduced to glowing coals that still threw enough warmth to keep the chill at bay. The chair where she’d fallen asleep sat empty by the hearth, her borrowed robe draped neatly across its arm.
She was in the bed.
Megan looked at the chair again, then at the bed, then at herself, still wrapped in the ivory robe, untouched, precisely as she had been when she’d curled into that chair and watched the fire and finally, finally let sleep take her.
She hadn’t walked to the bed. She was certain of that.
A vague impression surfaced through the fog of deep exhaustion. Warmth. Strong arms. The particular steadiness of being carried by someone who knew how to carry a person without waking them, moving through darkness with the economy of a man long accustomed to silence and care. She had a dim sense of settling against cool linen, of a blanket drawn up, of a hand that had hovered near her hair and then withdrawn without touching.
He’d carried her to bed.
He’d carried her to bed, and he’d left her there. Untouched. Undemanding. As if it had simply needed doing and so he’d done it and that was the whole of the matter.
