“I heard something in the hall,” he said, moving farther into the room. “Did someone come in here?”
“No.”
He checked behind the draperies and under the bed. He obviously didn’t think her word was enough. When he approached her near the fireplace, she folded her arms below her chest and glared at him.
“Did you think I was hiding someone?” she demanded.
He slid the dagger back into his belt. “I could not be certain you were answering of your own free will.”
She relented with a sigh, but continued to eye him warily. “I suppose I can understand that. Thank you for your diligence.”
She waited for him to leave, but instead he studied the room, especially the cushions heaped before the fire.
“Your bedchamber is…frilly,” he finally said.
She didn’t take it as a compliment. “And you’ve never been in a woman’s chamber before?”
He arched a brow. “I didn’t say that.”
“Oh, of course not.” She raised both hands. “How dare I encroach upon your manliness.”
Gareth scowled. “By the saints, what are you talking about?”
“Nothing understandable, obviously.” She slumped into a chair before the fire. “Never mind. A good evening to you.”
He didn’t leave. They were alone in her bedchamber, in the silence of the night. She should force him out the door—but she didn’t. She had behaved like this before, and it had brought her nothing but trouble, yet once again she couldn’t stop herself. She sat with her eyes half-closed and let herself feel the dangerous thrill of not knowing what he would do next.
He sat down in the chair beside her, and Margery held her breath. She noticed the width of his legs, the muscles that sloped and curved. As he stared into the fire, she studied his lips and the curve of his cheek. His blond hair fell forward, and she felt the urge to tuck it back.
Gareth felt like a fool. There had been no intruder, no reason for him to burst in on Margery. There was nothing he wanted to say to her. So why had he sat down?
It could only be his physical attraction to her. Yes, she was beautiful, with long dark hair that tumbled about her shoulders. She looked smaller, frailer in her thin nightclothes.
But all this blossoming femininity hid a spoiled heart. She and her family expected the world to bow to their demands. They used people for their own ends, just like Margery now used her beauty to keep his attention. She must know what she looked like sitting there in the firelit shadows, soft and sleepy.
He heard her sigh. She pulled her legs up beneath her and propped her chin on her hand. It had been a long time since he’d been alone with a woman. And she wore so little. The bed suddenly seemed large and conspicuous, and it was a struggle not to glance at it.
These thoughts had to stop. He tried to remember his first night away from Wellespring Castle, the cold rain that had soaked his garments and ruined his food, how desolate he’d felt. But it was all so long ago. He was a man now, and thoughts of Margery called to him.
“So…” she said in too bright a voice. “When you’re not working, what do you do with yourself?”
“Do?” he said thickly. “I train.”
“But ’tis the same as working. Have you no interests that don’t include”—she hesitated—“hurting people?”
He frowned at her. “That is how I survive, and that is what you hired me for. I do not have time for poetry or painting pictures. Without my sword-fighting skills, I would have been dead long ago. But I imagine a woman can’t understand that.”
She gripped the chair arms, and her eyes flashed at him. “Some women can. My sister by marriage is an excellent swordswoman.”
“I do not believe you.”
“So now I’m a liar, besides a silly fool?” she demanded.
Surely she couldn’t expect him to trust her, and he knew she was already lying to him about something in her past. “All right then, which brother is she married to?”
“James.”
“That pompous?—”
