“Let them. No one has ever breached the keep in our history. I shall ensure the staff know the risks and don’t venture past the castle gate.”
“I hope you understand what you’re doing?”
The Duke looked briefly affronted. Then he nodded once, inthe manner of a sovereign granting terms, and walked back the way he’d apparently come.
Oliver stood in the doorway and stared at the empty corridor for a moment.
“At some point,” Megan said, from behind him, “this is going to be funny.”
“When?”
“I’ll let you know.”
CHAPTER 14
She waited until the castle was fully, deeply quiet.
Not the surface quiet of a house where people had gone to their rooms, but the real quiet, that settled into old stone after midnight, when the fires had burned down to coals and the final footstep on the last stair had long since faded. She sat on the edge of her bed in the borrowed night-robe and counted her own heartbeats and told herself, twice, that she wouldn’t do this.
Then she got up and went, anyway.
Oliver’s room was two corridors from hers; she’d noted it without meaning to in the way she’d spent fourteen years noting exits and distances and the position of every person who had power over her. Old habit. She moved through the dark without a candle because the moonlight through the high windows was enough, and because she didn’t want a candle. A candle meant intention. A candle meant she couldn’t tell herself, if she lost her nerve in the corridor and turned back, that she’d merely been restless.
She would not turn back.
She knocked twice, quietly.
The pause on the other side was brief. Then the door opened, and Oliver was there in shirtsleeves and breeches, his feet bare, his hair disordered in the way it never was during daylight hours, and the candlelight from within the room fell across him in a way that made it very difficult to remember any of the careful things she had planned to say.
He looked at her. His expression moved through surprise, then a rapid, controlled assessment, and then something quieter and more careful that settled in his eyes and stayed there.
“Megan.” His voice was low, steady. Not unwelcoming. Not anything she could easily categorize. “Is something wrong?”
“No.” She held his gaze. “May I come in?”
Another pause. Shorter this time. He stepped back from the door.
The room was warmer than the corridor, the fire still alive enough to throw a low, amber light across the floorboards and the rumpled evidence of a man who had been lying awake rather than sleeping. His boots were by the chair. A book was open face down on the nightstand. She noted all of it and then looked back at him, because looking at the room was avoidance, and she had not come all the way down two dark corridors in order to practice avoidance.
“I want to ask you something,” she said. “And I’d like you to hear all of it before you answer.”
Oliver leaned against the wall beside the door, arms crossed, watching her with that particular quality of attention he gave to things he was taking seriously. “All right.”
She had rehearsed this. She had sat on the edge of her bed for the better part of an hour rehearsing it, moving the words around, discarding the ones that were too naked and the ones that were too composed and the ones that sounded like something she’d constructed to protect herself. What she’d arrived at in the end was simply the truth, unvarnished, because anything else felt like an insult to both of them.
“We leave tomorrow,” she said. “And everything that happens after that—London, the lawyers, the inquiry—I don’t know what any of it will look like. I don’t know how long it takes. I don’t know where I am in it, what I become, where I go when it’s finished.” She kept her voice even. “I have learned, these last weeks, not to assume that what I want will still be available to me at some future point when things are more settled. Things are never settled. There is only now, or there is nothing.”
Oliver said nothing. He was very still.
“I want to stay with you tonight,” Megan said. “I want…” She stopped. Began again. “I am not here out of gratitude. I want you to know that clearly, before anything else, because I know that’s the thing you’d wonder. I am not here because you saved me and I feel I owe you something. I am here because for the first time in my adult life I want something for myself, freely, without any calculation of what it costs or who it serves or whether I will be punished for it afterward.” She looked at him steadily. “I want you. That is the whole of it. And I wanted you to know that I chose this. That I’m choosing you, Oliver. That this is mine to give.”
The silence that followed was very full.
Oliver uncrossed his arms. He didn’t move toward her, not yet, but something in the careful architecture of his posture shifted, opened, in a way she hadn’t seen from him before.
“You don’t have to—” he began.
“I know I don’t have to. I said I’m choosing to. Those are different things and you understand the difference or I wouldn’t be standing here.”
