“All right,” she said.
The fire breathed and settled. The moonlight moved across the floor in its slow, indifferent way. Somewhere in the castle something creaked, the old stone making its adjustments to the cold, the way it had been doing for three hundred years.
She was still awake when his breathing finally deepened and evened into sleep. She lay still beside him in the dark, this man who had pulled her out of the wreckage of her life with no promise of reward, who had told her the truth even when the truth was difficult, who had crossed a room tonight and looked at her with hunger and honesty in equal measure and made her feel like a person choosing rather than a person surviving.
Whatever happened next, she would carry this. Whatever London became, whatever the lawyers said, whatever shape her life eventually took when all of this was finally behind her.
She would carry this night.
She pressed her fingers against his chest so she could feel his heartbeat, and stayed there until she had to return to her room.
She pulled on her robe and took one last look at this magnificent man and thought how lucky she was to share this small part of herself with him.
CHAPTER 15
The uneventful journey to London had taken three days, shorter than Oliver had expected. Webb was well healed; it appeared Megan’s ministrations to his shoulder were excellent and Webb’s main problem had been hunger. He was now well fed and clean and his shoulder almost back to normal.
The ruse of Megan still being at the castle worked. This morning he would begin his quest to bring down Penharrow.
The morning room at Saxton House caught the winter sun better than any room Oliver had encountered in a London townhouse, which he’d always suspected was entirely deliberate. His grandmother had chosen her chambers accordingly when she came to stay, commandeering the south-facing room with its tall windows and cream silk wallpaper with the ease of a woman who had been making such decisions for sixty years and had never once apologized for any of them.
He found them there when he came down at half past ten.
Megan sat beside his grandmother’s chair, her back straight, a length of wool in her hands that she appeared to be untangling with the focused patience of someone who had never in her lifehad anyone hand her a task they thought she might fail at. His grandmother was watching her with an expression Oliver recognized and mildly dreaded—sharp attention, barely suppressed satisfaction, the particular gleam of a woman who had found something interesting.
“Ah,” his grandmother said. “There he is. We were just discussing you.”
Megan looked up and something moved across her face that was not quite a smile. She had, in the two days since their arrival in London, developed a talent for expressions that were entirely correct and simultaneously said something else entirely. This one, if Oliver was reading it right, saidI was not going to survive much longer without reinforcements.
“Grandmother,” he said, because one had to start somewhere. “I see you’ve put Megan to work.”
“I’ve done nothing of the sort. She offered.” His grandmother waved a dismissive hand. “She has excellent hands for it, which is more than I can say for the girl Hastings usually sends me. That one tangles everything worse than she found it. Sit down, Oliver. You’re blocking the light.”
He sat, because there was no point arguing with a woman who had been outmaneuvering the male members of his family since before his father was born. Megan handed the untangled wool across to his grandmother without being asked, having apparently already learned the particular rhythm of her expectations, and his grandmother accepted it with a small approving nod.
“I was telling Megan,” his grandmother continued, clicking her needle with the practiced ease of long habit, “about the summer when you were twelve and convinced James to help you catch what you were certain was a pike in the Saxton lake.”
Oliver closed his eyes briefly. “You don’t need to tell that one.”
“The pike was, of course, a very large piece of driftwood.”His grandmother’s eyes were bright. “They spent the better part of an afternoon in a rowing boat attempting to haul it in. Cook was told to prepare it for dinner.”
“Cook knew perfectly well it was wood,” Oliver said.
“Cook did not say so, because Cook has more sense than to deny a twelve-year-old boy his dignity.” His grandmother glanced at Megan. “He came in for dinner with his sleeves still damp and announced he’d thrown it back because it was too small. James, to his eternal credit, maintained the fiction without flinching. I have always thought that moment said a great deal about James’s character.”
“I miss him. I shall always miss him.”
Megan was biting her lip. It was a thing she did, Oliver had noticed, when she was trying very hard not to smile in a way that might be considered impertinent. He could not decide whether it was endearing or quietly devastating. He had decided, sometime in the last forty-eight hours, that he would not be making further decisions on that particular subject until after he had dealt with Penharrow.
“It was a large piece of driftwood,” he said, with dignity. “It behaved very convincingly.”
This did not help. Megan’s composure cracked, briefly and beautifully, and she pressed her fingers to her mouth, and his grandmother watched the exchange with the expression of someone who had just confirmed a premise she’d been testing since yesterday.
Oliver stood.
“I have an appointment with Carmichael,” he said. “This morning. I should go.”
“You don’t have an appointment until noon,” his grandmother said placidly, without looking up from her embroidery. “Hastings told me your calendar.”
