The edge of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something more serious than a smile.
“I’m going to ask you something,” he said quietly. “And I want you to answer honestly, because we’ve managed honesty with each other so far, and I don’t want to lose that now of all times.”
“Ask.”
“Are you afraid that I’ll turn you away?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. And because she had just said she’d come here for honesty, replied, “Yes.”
“Why?”
The word landed the way it always did when he used it, simply, without pressure, with that complete attention that made evasion feel not just pointless but somehow beside the point of who she wanted to be.
“Because I am not…” She stopped. Began again, more slowly. “Penharrow used me. For years. And I know that what happened in that house was not my fault and not my choice and not a reflection of my worth. I know that, here.” She touched her temple. “But the rest of me knows something different, some nights. It seemed possible that you might look at me and see…” She lifted her chin. “Used goods. There’s no more elegant way to say it than that.”
Oliver moved.
He crossed the room to her in three strides, and he stopped close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, could see the exact expression in his eyes, which was not pity and not performance and not the particular careful gentleness of a man managing a fragile thing.
It was hunger. Clean and direct and barely contained, and the effort of containing it was visible in the set of his jaw and the tension in his hands, which had not touched her.
“Listen to me,” he said, low and entirely serious. “I want you more than I want my next breath. I have wanted you since you stood in a window barred lodge and looked at me like you’d tear my throat out if I was another one of his men. I want you in ways I have spent the last two weeks constructing very elaborate arguments with myself about, because you had been through enough without me adding to it.” He held her gaze without any wavering at all. “There is nothing in me that seeswhat you have just described. There is no version of you, no history of you, nothing that was done to you that changes what I see when I look at you. Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” she said. Her voice was slightly less steady than she would have liked.
“Good.” He still hadn’t touched her. “I have one more question for you, and then I’m done asking questions.”
She nodded.
“Is this what you want? Not what you think you should want, not what gratitude suggests, not what the fact of us leaving tomorrow makes you feel you’d regret missing. What you actually want.”
She reached up and put her hand against his jaw. Felt the slight roughness of it, the warmth of his skin, the way his breath changed fractionally at the contact.
“Yes,” she said. “Oliver. Yes.”
He kissed her.
Not the way a man kisses a woman he’s uncertain of, cautious and restrained and waiting to be stopped. Not anything tentative. He kissed her like a man who had been waiting with great discipline for permission to do exactly this and had intended to do it properly the moment it was granted. One hand came up to cup her face, the other finding the small of her back and drew her in, and Megan forgot, briefly and completely, every composed thing she had told herself about managing this sensibly.
She kissed him back.
She kissed him back with everything she’d carefully contained in polished corridors and borrowed dresses and formal dining rooms for the past day, everything she’d contained for longer than that, across frozen rivers and mountain passes and nights in shepherd’s huts when she’d listened to him breathe in the dark and told herself firmly that wanting wasnot the same as having and some things were not available to her.
He was available to her.
He was kissing her with a hand in her hair and his forehead coming down to rest against hers when they finally broke apart, both of them breathing unevenly, and she felt him looking at her in the particular way he had, cataloguing, assessing, making certain.
“Still all right?” he said.
“Still all right,” she managed. “Don’t stop.”
He didn’t stop.
He was gentle in a way that had nothing to do with fragility. She understood the difference, had been handled with the false gentleness of a man who treated breakable things carefully because they were his to break, and this was nothing like that. Oliver was gentle in the way he did everything, with full attention, with intelligence, with a quality of care that was entirely about her and not at all about himself. He noticed things. She hadn’t expected him to notice so much. The slight catch of her breath when his hands moved to her shoulders, the way she went still for one moment when the robe slipped, the difference between still and afraid, because he tracked those things and adjusted for them without making her feel tracked or adjusted for.
“You can tell me,” he said, against her hair. “If anything…”
“I know,” she said. “I know I can.”
