“Marry me.”
Such bold words he spoke.
But one must be bold in love.
That was the truth.
A hard truth he’d learned the hard way.
Her eyebrows crinkled.
Though he’d ignored the first signal that something wasoff, he couldn’t ignore this one.
She pulled back, separating from him and arranging herself in a cross-legged seat on the rumpled coverlet.
Yet anotheroffsignal.
No, no, no.
How could anything be wrong?
“There is …” She hesitated, as if she were very deliberately assembling the right words to speak. “There is something I must tell you.”
They weren’t the right words.
They were wrong, wrong,wrong.
But she looked determined to speak yet more of those wrong words—and he had no choice but to let her. “What is it, Artemis?” he asked. “You can tell me anything.”
Doubt shone openly in her eyes, and his stomach twisted itself into a knot.
“There is a reason I believed you took Mother’s money and fled.”
Trenches dug into Bran’s forehead. He wasn’t prepared for the direction this conversation was insisting on taking. “I didn’t flee, Artemis.” He kept his voice carefully controlled and measured. “I joined the army.”
She nodded. “Yes, I know, Bran. You didn’t flee. You became a war hero.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
She looked as if she was only holding herself back from taking his hand. “But youare, Bran. You sacrificed so much for our country—almost your life.” Those last words emerged on a sob.
He bridged the distance and took her hand in his. “Artemis, what is this all about?”
She shook her head and swallowed, collecting herself. “There is something you didn’t know all those years ago.”
A feeling gathered in Bran’s gut.
A feeling he’d learned never to ignore.
“And you still don’t know.”
Silent, he waited.
“Ten years ago, there was …” She looked both as if she couldn’t speak the next words and couldn’tnotspeak them. “Bran, we …”
“Artemis,” he said, gently, even as the knot tightened in his gut. “What are you not saying?”
She inhaled a shaky breath. “We … we made a child,” she said in a near whisper, unshed tears pooling in her eyes.
