That was what drove her into the corridor. She fled him not because the kiss had meant too little but because it had meant far too much.
Chapter twenty
Reginald stood on the battlements long after the door had shut behind Aingeal, his hands braced on the cold stone rail.
He could still feel her. Not only the fierce answer of her mouth beneath his, though that lived in him like fire banked deep under ash. Not only the way she had come to him with none of the startled uncertainty of the first kiss, as if jealousy and hurt and wanting had all broken loose together and found him waiting.
What stayed with him most was the recoil.
She wanted him. He knew that now beyond denial. But there had been something else in the way she had torn herself back, in the look on her face when she fled.
She was not afraid of him. And because he knew it, because he had answered her with equal force instead of mercy, he could no longer pretend that what lay between them was only desire.
She was bound to him now. Not by promise. Not by vow. Not even by the marriage bargain they had once meant to escape.
By feeling.
Reginald straightened slowly and pressed one hand to the back of his neck as if the motion might ease the knot drawn tight there.
Aingeal no longer merely watched him. No longer merely distrusted him, argued with him, worked beside him, kissed him once, and called it weakness. She was invested now. Wounded already. He had heard it in her voice.
You have made leaving unbearable.
The words had struck harder than any accusation of deceit. He had made himself matter. Little by little, not by design but no less thoroughly for that, he had worked his way into her life. He had stood beside her in council, on the battlements, among her people, until the castle had begun quietly shaping itself around his presence. He had answered her, challenged her, steadied her, wanted her, kissed her twice.
And all the while, the truest thing about him remained buried beneath a dead man’s name and a crime he had spent years calling duty.
He shut his eyes briefly. Canterbury rose at once. The cathedral air, cold and vast. The silence before violence. Becket’s face as he stood and did not flee, making martyrdom of simple refusal.
Reginald had carried that day like a sealed relic. A wound wrapped too tightly to heal and too stubbornly to rot. Yet in recent days, the wrappings had begun to fail.
Étaín had named Canterbury in the chapel. Aingeal had demanded truth on the wall. And before either of those moments, with blood drying on his arm and Aingeal’s hands binding the wound, he had nearly told her of it of his own accord.
Why?
He had asked himself that already and found only fragments. But now, standing alone in the dark with her mouth still burning on his, the question returned and would not be set aside.
He did not want her forgiveness. The shape of it felt wrong inside him, too pure, too simple for the rough and fractured thing he actually was.
He wanted her understanding.
The realization had once seemed almost noble when it first came to him. Now it looked barer and more selfish. He wanted her to know what he was before it was too late. To know he had not ridden to Canterbury hungry for blood. That he had believed himself a loyal man acting in the heat of rightful service. That he had heard the king’s rage and mistaken it for command because he had been shaped all his life to answer kings.
But beneath even that wish lay a more bitter truth.
He wanted her to understand enough not to turn from him. He wanted her to see the man he had been and still choose the man he was trying, too late perhaps, to become. That was the hope of a coward as much as a lover.
He swore under his breath and snatched up a split harness strap from the worktable near the stair, only to cast it down a moment later. His hands had no patience for useless labor tonight.
He left the battlements, crossing toward the outer wall.
Night had hardened while he stood above. Wind off the marsh cut through wool. Torches bent in their irons. Only a few thin stars showed between the clouds.
Go.
Go now, before she asks you to stay. Before Étaín speaks. Before truth takes shape and costs more than it must. It was the only way he could come away clean.
But even as the thought formed despite his resistance, another rose to answer it. He would not leave Aingeal behind. He would not leave the life he had begun, against all wisdom, to want with every part of himself.
