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No closer. No closer or she would break. Break for good.
Her eyes closed, fighting against his words, for she knew exactly what he meant. His last words so full of significance it stole every thought from her head.
She still loved him. She always would.
She couldn’t argue against it, but she couldn’t embrace it either.
Her look pinned him. “But you—you became the man I always knew you would be. Rune said you were angry—brutally angry for years—but even that I cannot imagine in you.”
His right cheek lifted, slightly pained. “Rune talked about me?”
“He did. Limitedly.”
His head turned to the right, his look on the willow next to him. “He knew me in a different time. And anything he told you was true. But the anger went away.”
“When?”
His gaze centered on her. “The night Morton died.”
All air left her lungs. “His death set you free?”
“No. His death shackled the weight of the world to me.” He paused, his chest lifting in a deep sigh. “But the anger—the anger abandoned me that night. That night that he told me about how he’d destroyed me—us—to hide his own ruin. He was barely conscious for the amount of whisky in his brain, a courtesan with an open top lounged about his leg, and betting markers kept slipping through his fingers, five, ten at a time.”
His hand lifted, his finger running along the back of his neck. “It was a scene I’d lived through with him too many times to count in the last months. And I realized as he told me the story—sitting there in the sorry state he was in—that I couldn’t even be angry at him. Couldn’t be angry at the world—at anything anymore.”
Her head snapped backward. “You couldn’t?”
“No. I realized he had done me a favor by ruining me—telling the world I was a bastard. For if he hadn’t—I would have become just like him. I would have run about, idle, looking for the next great adventure, the next great thrill and that would have driven us apart.”
“Wes—”
“No, it’s true. I recognize now how immature I was, how easily I could have turned to Morton’s life. But at this point, I’ve had all the adventure, all the thrills one man should rightly have in his life. Life on theFirehawkgave me all the riches, all the drama that I ever would have wanted to handle.”
“And now?”
“Now all I want is peace. All I want is you, Laney.”
Her heart missed a beat, skipping hard in her chest. “It’s not that easy, Wes.”
“Why not?”
Her eyes closed, unable to look at him. She needed to rip open the rawest of the wounds. “What you said to me.”
“When?”
“On that night—that night everything fell apart.”
His eyebrows lifted, his jaw setting hard. “You don’t want me because I’m illegitimate?”
“Don’t be an idiot—the blood that pumps through your veins is the same as it was before you told me that fact. Your parents made a mistake by not marrying before you were born and then admitting to it. They should have known what could happen, that leaked secrets only destroy. They should have kept their secret. That was their mistake—not yours.” Her right arm flipped out from her waist. “To the world—to the blasted law of the land—your blood is tainted. But not to me—never to me. It never mattered. I still loved you. I was never going to leave you.”
“Then what was it? What did I say to you that night?”
Her head tilted forward, her eyes narrowing. “Do you even remember? For I have thought of little else all these years.”
His hands lifted in unison with his shoulders. “I had gone mad that night—had soaked in brandy for hours before I saw you. Everything had just been taken from me.”
“Yes, but you still found a way to sneer at my lanky limbs. My size. Still found a way to admit I was never anything more than my dowry. A burden to bear. Rubbish.” Bile hit her tongue as she uttered out loud the words that had haunted her for so long. His words.
