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Iwanted to go riding after Robin and Tuck. The sun was falling fast. I kept glancing up at the twilit sky. My knee bounced incessantly where I sat on an overturned log at the witch’s cabin.
This part of the forest always seemed supernatural to me. Perhaps it was the ruin—cracked, brittle stone held up by the roots of a massive oak tree. I wondered about the story of this place, and its eerie presence.
Men had lost their minds here. When we arrived during the last cycle of our relocation, a mad hermit had been camping out in the hollow of the tree inside the ruins. We were too unnerved to push him out so the Merry Men could take residence, so we ended up continuing on to the next hideaway.
Funny, how one man had frightened dozens. That was the power of this place. You had to be wary of its call. A lunatic nomad like that had a much closer relationship with the spirits of the ruins than we did.
Though I wasn’t pagan, I didn’t want to run my luck against them. Best let bygones be bygones.
Alan-a-Dale sat across from me, whittling something out of a long tree branch. Taking his mind off our missing star, even as I lost mine like that hermit.
“They should be back by now,” I said, my voice clipped. “It doesn’t take that long to sell linens. We’re close enough to Nottingham that the trek shouldn’t have taken more—”
“You know they weren’t just going to sell silk garments, dear man. Our songbird had her own plans.”
“That’s what I’m worried about. Trouble seems to follow that girl everywhere she goes.”
Alan looked up from the work on his lap, tilting his head. “Like us? Her life won’t become less chaotic by accompanying the Merry Men, old friend. No matter what we think.”
“You think I don’t know that?” I snapped.
He bowed his head to return to his shavings, smartly not responding.
I was growing frustrated as well as restless. My eyes scanned the camp past the huddle of stumps and logs around me and Alan. The landscape spread out in an alluvial shape, sweeping down from the ridge of the ruins. Trees blocked line-of-sight in thick bunches at every corner, though the ruin itself was nestled against a rocky cliff that hung over the foundation of the site.
The strategic layout here allowed us to put our backs to the wall, which could be advantageous to prevent getting surrounded . . . but it also forced our backs against a wall.
I couldn’t think about that right now. The men were lighting fires to start the night, resting, and gathering kindling. Will Scarlet was laboring to busy his mind, shirtless and slamming an axe into logs.
Robin had robbed my mind of all logic and decency. So much had changed since she’d arrived.
I thought I was adamant in my life’s choices—that I could never care for someone like I did Imogen all those years ago. My life had become rather pointless, other than to make sure my people stayed safe. I felt responsible for the Merry Men.
Now I felt responsible for so much more. Robin had infiltrated me like a hooded snake, wrapping tight around my heart and squeezing. She forced me to reconsider my emotions—everything I’d ever done and felt—and made me realize it was possible to love again after Imogen.
The damned girl had imprinted herself on my mind, body, and soul. I was helpless to stop her. She was infuriating with her brattiness, her pretty little smirks, her insatiable appetite for stirring the pot. She was also cunning, beautiful, and stubbornly determined. She was caring, even to people who didn’t deserve her kindness, such as her family.
She was mine. Ours. I was incensed thinking of being apart from her. When I thought of her father, I raged harder. I should have ended that man for how he spoke about his daughter. Yet I couldn’t. It wasn’t my place.
I should have never let Robin leave. Even with Tuck there to protect her, I should have been the sentinel to lay my life down for her. She’d already been through so much—more than any highborn lass I could think of. I couldn’t stand to think of anything going wrong for Robin in Nottingham.
How will her father react to seeing her? Her ailing mother? The townsfolk, especially those who know she’s a wanted woman?
I had told Tuck to get in and get out. Don’t dally in Nottingham. Begrudgingly, I had let them go because I’d made an oath to Robin, and I never broke my oaths.
For the first time since I could remember, I cared for something. For someone. What began as a typical abduction had blossomed into something so much more. Something so real, visceral, and close.
I loved that woman.
With a gasp, my eyes widened. I looked up from the mossy ground to see Alan staring peculiarly at me, as if he could hear my thoughts aloud. My pulse drummed in my veins.
That word had not been on my lips, or in my mind, in ages. Since I was a young man.
I didn’t partake in whoring like other Merry Men, because I didn’t want to taint Imogen’s pristine memory. I wanted her to live forever inside me.
Now, I recognized Robin had taken her place. Somehow, that skinny young thing with the brown shoulder-length hair had stolen me from the one memory I kept sacred.
Robin of Wilford was more of a bandit than I could ever hope to be.
