He’d allowed her to press a sharpened knife to his throat and still he held some part of himself apart. Nowshetrembled. He’d come halfway across the bridge between them.
What if halfway was as far as he could go?
“I am not the same,” he said.
She placed the final pins on the bed stand. Holding his gaze, she removed the knives and sheathes from her thighs.
“I asked you before who you were. And though I know you are my husband,”—the essence of what she understood to be love—“I will ask you again, who are you, really?”
He swallowed. “I am not fully yours.”
Chev.DearChev. “Nothing of you ismine.Just as nothing of me isyours.” She smoothed the back of her hand down his cheek. “People are not possessions. And marriage is but an agreement to face the world together—a pact to search for theours.You promised”—mortifyingly, her voice shook—“we’d invent a new world.”
“Nothing could be better in this world than when two minds, husband and wife, are united in harmony and spirit, they bring grief to their enemies and happiness to their friends,” he quoted.
She sniffed and then nodded.
“Not my own words, I’m afraid.”
“They belong to Homer. The Odyssey.”
“Yes.” He knelt down, placing his forehead against her knees.
His damp hair fell around her thighs. Emotion rushed into her throat, clogging against a thickened knot that thieved her breath.
His shoulders shook with a sob.
“Stop,” she whispered.
He gripped the back of her calf. And threw his injured arm next to her thigh. He turned his head to the side, struggling to staunch his tears.
She touched his face.
One moment he was Chev. The next a stranger.
His grip simultaneously kept her close and pushed her away.
She ran her finger over the scar on his wrist. He flinched.
What had happened to her husband was deeper than the physical scars he bore.
Too deep to heal?
She refused the thought.
Disloyal at best. Moot, in any case.
She’d hadn’t given up on him when he was lost. She certainly would not give up now.
“Cheverley,” she whispered.
He glanced up, face stilled, harsh and jagged, his gaze, still raw with the kind of hunger that had driven humans to hunt animals that could devour them whole. If any other man had looked at Penelope with an equal amount of proprietorial desire, she would have sunk a dagger into his throat.
She loosened the string at her throat, and the fabric fell away from her shoulders, catching between her body and the bed.
How much of him had the pirate robbed?
And, to reclaim her husband, how much was she willing to risk?
