“I’m furious with you,” she said.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do.” She frowned, even now unable to resist his pull. She captured his gaze. “I mean it in this moment. What I’ll say in the next, I cannot be sure.”
He smiled, rueful. “You were always fearless about telling the truth.”
“And you have always embraced deception.”
“No,” he replied. desperate. “Not always. I told you the truth about what I suffered.”
Is that why it’s too late for you and your love?
Yes.
She turned away. His suffering outsized her anger, but still—“When, exactly,didyou return?”
His sigh raked her skin.
“December,” he replied.
December.December?
“If you had come home directly, none of this—” She struggled to contain her voice. “You could have prevented Anthony from—”
“I could not have come,” he interrupted. “Itoldyou—when Hurtheven delivered me to the Admiralty, I was immediately court-martialed. But it wasn’t just that. The Admiralty gave me a mission to complete before they’d set me free.”
She’d heard only one word.Hurtheven.
“I see,” she said quietly.
He sent her a doubtful glance. “What do you see?”
Her eyes flashed. “Again, you had the opportunity to choose me—to choose your son. And again, you choseHurtheven.”
“No.” His throat moved as he swallowed. “It was the scar on my ankle. The man said his name and then I remembered him.”
“Of course you remembered him first,” she said bitterly. “You made time to have him witness your will, but you could not make time to meet your son.”
“I was protecting you,” he replied. “That’swhyI amended my will. That’s why I went to war in the first place. Would you have rather our son be a bastard?”
“Still, you cannot see.”
He ran his hand through his hair. “That’s not what I meant. Believe me, if I could do things differently, I would.”
Would he?
Right now, he believed he would.
Surrender.
The slow melting to the iron-pointed arrows that were her only defense. Because if she succumbed and he left again, she’d have nothing to keep her from being bludgeoned to pieces by grief.
She turned away and filled a small basin with water from the tub. She wet her towel and scrubbed the towel with soap until small bubbles foamed between the woven threads. With hand aloft she returned to Chev.
“These past weeks, you’ve watched me struggle with the truth I both hoped for and feared. You saw me drowning and you never threw me a line.”
Her anger was a dinghy against the tidal wave of emotion in his eyes.
