He didn’t owe her an explanation.
Not really.
He didn’t owe her anything.
Her breath held as she awaited his decision. It was his choice, and she wouldn’t attempt to force it, but how she hoped he would keep talking. She wanted to understand this—him—better. To know something true of the man he was now.
“Every time I think about mounting a horse,” he continued, “a feeling comes over me as if I were standing on the edge of a very high cliff, and my body reacts. I go hot, then cold. My heartraces. My chest constricts. My palms grow damp.” He shook his head. “I can’t seem to rid myself of it.”
“So, you no longer ride.”
The starkness in his eyes was all the answer she needed.
“I’m so sorry, Bran.”
What else could one say in the face of all this man had lost?
She wanted to reach out and touch some part of him. To let him know that in sharing this, he no longer labored alone with it.
But she recognized the old compulsion drove this feeling, too. Theneedto touch him.
She resisted.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The feeling Bran had just confessed …
He’d never thought to speak it aloud in his life.
In some dark, faraway part of himself, he’d believed the shame would have surely crushed him.
But here he was—still standing, somehow.
A little worse for wear, truth told, but upright.
What he saw in Artemis’s earnest brown eyes was neither disgust nor judgment nor pity.
It was sympathy.
She might not ever fully understandallhe’d lost in these last two years—and he hoped life never put her in a position where she had to—but he sensed a subtle, yet seismic shift occur between them.
These last several weeks, it had felt like ten-foot-thick granite walls stood between them, making it impossible for them to see or hear one another in any meaningful sense. An implacability imbued with the permanence of eternity.
But now, despite the ponderous weight of those walls, it felt like they’d cracked open.
Now, he and Artemis could hear one another.
They could see one another.
She was Artemis, and he was Bran.
They weren’t representatives of a past they couldn’t change.
They could simply be themselves—two people who once knew each other.
Two people who still did, in some ways.
He grabbed his travel satchel from beneath the driver’s bench. “Mind if I strap this to your mount?”
