Page 32 of Four Promises to Love

“Your reaction to my vision spoke volumes.”

He dragged a hand through his hair, verifying how it had achieved its tousled state.

“Your vision, as you call it, was not the result of communion with spirits,” he said bluntly. “It was the result of your scheming brain and excellent imagination.”

Well. At least he thinks my imagination is excellent.

“Believe what you will. The point is that I trespassed upon your privacy. I am ashamed of my behavior—and sincerely sorry for it.”

He said nothing. The silence was filled by the crackling of burning logs and the thumping of her heart.

“Apology accepted.” He released a breath. “If you’ll accept mine for jumping on you like a lunatic.”

“No harm was done.” She hesitated before giving in to impulse. “While I have not been on the battlefield, I know what it is like to…to be under attack. I know how that experience can shape one’s instincts.”

He raised his eyebrows in silent question.

“I was raised in an orphanage,” she said.

Dread slithered through her insides at the mention of that prison. Outside of the Hawks, she never spoke of her past. The last thing she wanted was to revisit the horrors. Even worse, she might be greeted by pity, which her pride could not abide.

Yet it was recognition, not sympathy, in Owen’s eyes.

“That could not have been easy,” he said gravely.

“It wasn’t.”

Understatement of the century.

“How old were you when you arrived?”

She shrugged. “Young enough that I have no memory of how I came to be there. Apparently, someone left me on the doorstep. I know nothing of my parents. All I had with me was this.”

She tapped her rusty tin pendant with a touch of defiance, watching his reaction.

“You were a babe,” he murmured.

She had been. Young and defenseless, she wouldn’t have survived the dark lessons of the world if not for Iris.

“I adapted quickly. My survival depended upon it.” She looked at him directly. “I imagine you understand.”

She saw the tug-of-war in his stormy gaze. He didn’t like talking about the past any more than she did. Yet he felt that strange pull between them as well…that overwhelming desire to let down one’s guard, if only for a moment.

“I was eighteen when I left for Afghanistan,” he said.

Her eyes widened as the implications plowed into her. Blooming hell, everyone knew about that disastrous retreat from Kabul. It had resulted in the massacre of the British army—some sixteen thousand lives had been lost. Owen had been there…but how?

“I didn’t know there were survivors,” she said slowly. “Other than the physician.”

“William Brydon.”

He said the name that had been on everyone’s lips around a decade ago, even in the rookery where she and Iris had lived after escaping the orphanage. Finn had a vague impression of the doctor riding into the British garrison, battered and barely alive, the sole remnant of a campaign gone horribly wrong.

“He is the most famous survivor.” Owen’s jaw looked chiseled from granite, as harsh as that mountainous terrain was reputed to be. “But not the only one. There were others who were taken captive: British soldiers, sepoys, camp followers. Some of us were recovered in the years that followed—to minimal fanfare, understandably. No one wanted to be reminded of the humiliation. Of the worst military loss in our nation’s history.”

The horrors of what he’d survived and his reception upon returning home caused her eyes to sting. It wasn’t fair; then again, life rarely was. Apparently not even for this man whose existence was far from the easy, privileged one she’d imagined. It was strange to realize that the devastation he’d endured gave them something in common.

She laid a hand on his biceps and found it a quivering arc of steel.