Page 76 of Homeless

“Do not talk to me of matching. I know perfectly well what you thought of me! Too little family, too much tongue, too quick to laugh, too ready to think myself your equal.”

He shook his head. “I thought none of those things. God help me, I wish I had.”

The answer came so quickly that it split her anger open. “What, then? Since confession appears to agree with you, go on!”

His hand tightened on the post. “I thought you saw too much. I thought you laughed where I was weakest. I thought if you once knew how completely you could disorder me, you would make sport of it.”

She snorted. “Sport? You were rude to me! You disliked me.”

“Is that what you thought?” His voice had acquired a tremor.

“You certainly disliked being at a disadvantage. Especially with me.”

He came round the corner of the bed then, his face darkening as he approached. “I was vain enough to resent it.” He was close enough now that she could see the darkening of his pupils, the slight flutter of his breathing.

“It improves the history very little.” She drank, draining the dregs. The wine ran rough over her tongue. Darcy watched her mouth when she lowered the skin as if she had just taken the last sips of water from a man dying of thirst. She saw the flare in his eyes and hated the answering heat in her skin. She tossed the empty wineskin at his feet.

“This has nothing to do with the past,” he said. “You are angry because we have to go through Burgos. Because you have been told ‘no’ to the impulsive, foolish things you want to do.”

“I am angry because I am exhausted, and because I have not had a proper meal in weeks, and because I am stuck with the single most frustrating, disagreeable, tyrannical —”

“Tyrannical! Because I will not let you kill yourself or be stolen and abused by barbarous deserters and desperados, I am tyrannical! Have I not done everything in my power to protect you, to purchase you whatever comforts I can, to make no demands of you that were not explicitly agreed upon before this sham of a marriage ever happened?”

She crossed her arms. “Because you have become necessary. Because I meant to endure your company for perhaps a fortnight, and it has been over a month with no end in sight, and every day gives you some new claim upon my life. Because you keep saying ‘we,’ as if the word itself could make the lie respectable, and because I am starting to believe it.”

He faltered. “You… You say it, too.”

She balled her fists and stamped her foot, hoping he would notice that rather than the fact that her eyes were starting to sting and swell again. “You contradict me, arrange me, expect me to be rational when what I truly want is to scream, and you call it being ‘prudent.’ If I say ‘we,’ it is because every time I try to make a plan without you, I find you are already in it!”

She saw his throat move when he swallowed. She saw the loosened line of his collar where the day had worn through. She saw his hand clenching, strong, and calloused, and far too familiar. Weeks of travel had taught her who he was in all his forms. She could have hated him more easily if she had not known how he looked tired, or angry, or silent on the point of saying something that pained him.

His gaze dropped to her mouth. Stayed there. Lifted again.

He said her name under his breath, as if he were making one last attempt at reason.

She ought to have answered with a jest. She ought to have turned away and refused to speak to him for the rest of the night. Instead, she said, “Do not.”

His eyes did not leave hers, and his voice had dropped to a tone she had never heard. “You said that earlier, and I kept away. I have tried to keep clear of you all evening, because I knew if I did not, I would do or say something I could not take back.”

“All evening? How flattering. You find yourself unable to snub me or argue with me, so you threaten to seduce me instead?”

“If I meant to seduce you, I should have chosen a method less dependent on your desire to insult me.”

“You flatter yourself that I —”

She broke off because, while saying it, she had put one finger straight against the middle of his chest to make the point land. He looked down at it, then back at her, and closed his hand gently round her wrist.

Her breath stopped short. “Take your hand away.”

He drew her a little nearer by the wrist he held. “You are the one who laid hands first.”

She ought to have pulled free. Instead, she let him keep her there, close enough to smell the wine on his breath and the salt on his skin. “You are insufferable.”

“So I am told.”

“And vain. The only person who matters to you is you.”

His eyes blackened. “That is a lie, and you know it. You make every kindness out as some self-serving act, and resent whenever someone tries to save you from yourself.”