She turned away from him and looked at the garden wall. Old stone, patched and settled, with small plants she didn’t know the names of growing in the cracks. She had been learning the names of things, slowly, since she’d arrived. The footmen and the housemaids and the cook who left pastry scraps for the kitchen cat. The shape of the rooms and the way the light moved through the windows in the afternoon. All these small, careful measurements of a world she was trying to learn to trust.
“I don’t know how to be a wife,” she said. Her voice came out very quiet, and she hadn’t quite meant it to be a confession, but it was. “I don’t know how to be—” She stopped. “I know how to survive. I know how to endure and how to plan and how to make myself small enough to pass through whatever space is available without drawing attention. But being someone’s wife—being your wife—I don’t know what that means when the someone is a man who—” She pressed her lips together. “When the someone is you.”
She heard him move. Not toward her, just a shift of weight, the small sound of a man steadying himself.
“You’d learn,” he said. “We’d both learn. I don’t know how to be a husband. I’m not—” He stopped, and when he spoke again there was something rougher in it, less composed. “I’m not asking you to perform a role, Megan. I’m not asking you to be a particular kind of thing or to manage yourself into a shape that suits me. I’ve seen you in circumstances that would have broken most people and I have watched you, every singleday, choose to be exactly who you are. I am asking because I want you. Not a wife in the abstract. You. Just as you are now.”
She closed her eyes.
Fourteen years of being held captive by a man who had never once asked. Fourteen years of being told she was precious, treasured, his special girl, his?—
This was different. She would never be free if she married, but would that be so bad when it was Oliver. A part of her longed to have made the choice but as usual a choice was being thrust upon her.
All because of Penharrow. Would she ever escape him?
“It’s your reputation,” she said. It was almost a last attempt. Not quite a genuine objection, and she suspected he knew it. “If it came out. If anyone discovered?—”
“Then I would stand beside my wife and explain, to anyone who wished to know, that she survived an extraordinary ordeal through extraordinary means, and that she came through it with more grace and more courage than I have ever seen in a person in my life.” He paused. “And then I would probably hit whoever was being unpleasant about it, because I have always had a poor temper in defense of the people I love.”
She turned back around.
He was looking at her in that direct way of his, the way that had startled her when she first encountered it, because she had so rarely been looked at rather than assessed. Just looked at. Like she was a person and not a problem to be managed or an object to be arranged.
Perhaps this was a choice after all.
This terrified her in a way that fourteen years of captivity somehow hadn’t, because those years had required only survival, only endurance, only the flat forward motion of continuing to breathe. This required something else entirely. Something she had no practiced skill for. The particularvulnerability of wanting something, of reaching toward it, of saying yes, I will trust this. I will trust you.
She had not said that to anyone since she was seven years old.
“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was very steady. It surprised her. “I don’t know how to do this, Oliver. I mean that honestly. I’m not—I’m not saying no. I’m telling you truthfully that I don’t know how.”
He nodded, slowly, and some of the tension went out of his shoulders. “Neither do I,” he said. “Entirely. I’ve been a soldier and a marquess and fairly recently a kidnapper, none of which are excellent preparation for taking a wife.” The corner of his mouth moved. “But I’d rather learn it with you than not try at all. I’d rather not lose you. I want you in my life.”
She looked at him for a long moment. The garden was still around them, the bees and the lavender and the roses waiting to bloom, all of it suspended in the mild spring air.
“Ask me again,” she said. “Tomorrow. Or the next day. Ask me when I’ve—” She exhaled. “When I’ve had time to understand that it’s real.”
“However long you need.”
She sighed. “I’m not being realistic, am I? That is not how injunctions work. I don’t have the luxury of time.”
“No.” His voice was dry. “But it’s how people work. And you matter considerably more to me than the timeline.” He held her gaze. “I’ll ask you again tomorrow. I hope that is enough time.”
She nodded once and turned back to her roses. Her hands were perfectly steady. Her heart was not, but she had always been better at managing visible things than invisible ones.
She heard him move toward the gate. Stop.
“Megan.”
She looked back at him.
“For what it’s worth,” he said. “Whatever you decide. You are not going back to him. That much is already settled. He doesn’tknow you’re here. He thinks you’re at Saxton Castle. We do have a little more time to figure something out. I want you to have a choice too, but I also want you to pick me because I love you. I don’t expect you to say it back, but I hope a marriage to me is not such a hideous idea.”
He left her with that. She stood in the garden in the mild spring air, with her hands still dirty from the earth and her heart doing something she had no name for, and she thought about choices.
She had never had choices.
She thought she might need a little longer to understand how to make one.
