Sitting up in bed, Alissende sought his form within the shadows of the abbey chamber. The moon was nearly full tonight, and it cast a muted glow through the modest room’s single window. He was not here.
She slid off the pallet they’d been given use of as a bed and went to look out onto the garden adjacent to the building where they were housed; it was filled with medicinal flowers that every abbey and monastery in England cultivated, and the moon was so bright that it bathed the grounds in pearly elegance. Its glow blanketed glossy green leaves and spiky flowers, as if an artist’s brush had stroked their surface with cool blues and silvery glimmers.
And then she saw him.
He was leaning against the stone wall at the corner, next to a wattle fence that had been propped there as an arbor. He’d pulled on his breeches, but he hadn’t bothered to tie his shirt, and it gaped, showing his bare chest, even with his arms crossed as they were. Pulling on a wrapper, Alissende went out to him.
He glanced up as she approached, and her breath caught anew at how handsome he was. But he wore that pensive expression that made her yearn to take his face in her hands and kiss away the dark thoughts and memories that seemed to lurk in his eyes.
“I’m sorry if I disturbed your sleep by getting up,” Damien murmured, when she reached his side.
“Nay, it was not you,” she said. “I was awakened by a dream.”
He looked away, giving a short nod. “The night and I have come to an uneasy truce on that score…sometimes she lets me sleep, and others I am forced to allow her full sway over my thoughts until daylight.”
“She won the battle tonight, it seems,” Alissende offered.
Damien’s sensual mouth quirked into a half smile.
“Is the thought of the upcoming tournament making you restless, then?”
He glanced to her for an instant; the look carried a sharpness she had not seen there earlier, and his voice, when he answered after a pause, held an edge of bitterness. “Not so much the tournament itself, perhaps, but what will come with it. The people I will need face. And the talk…”
His words trailed off, but Alissende knew exactly what he meant, and it sent an arrow of guilt lancing through her. They’d both known that their return to court would be difficult, but she could not deny that Damien would bear the brunt of it. It was he who had served as fodder for the gossips more oft than not in the subsequent years, for it was he who had been rejected after proving himself champion of that long-ago tournament—he who had been a simple knight deemed not worthy of her love before all the lords and ladies of England’s powerful nobility.
“I am sorry for what you may face at Odiham,” she said quietly.Because of me.That added phrase lingered in her mind, but she gave it no voice.
“Do not be, for there is naught to be done about it. All will be well once I have my turn in the lists.”
That hard edge still shaded his voice, and Alissende winced inwardly, knowing that what he’d said wasn’t completely true. Therewassomething she could do about this. Something she had resisted from the moment he’d walked back into her life. She could tell him the truth about why she had sown the seeds of their destruction five years ago. It would mean confessing what she had hoped would never come to light…something that was excruciating to admit even to herself. But she needed to do it now; it was unfair to let him continue to bear the additional burden of that falsehood atop all else.
Glancing at him, Alissende broke the quiet as she murmured, “Damien, I—there is something I wish to tell you. We only spoke once about what happened that day at the tournament those many years ago…and what I told you then was not the truth.” Her words came out barely above a whisper, and her throat hurt, but she forced herself to go on. “It is to my own blame that I have not spoken to you of this sooner, but now for both our sakes I need to tell you the fullness of what really happened, and I am asking you to listen.”
He did not move. He didn’t even seem to breathe. The silence stretched between them, and she thought that perhaps when he stirred at last, it would be to step around her and go back inside without uttering a sound, leaving her to stand there alone.
But he didn’t. He only lowered his arms and continued to look at her, his gaze wounded, as if he could not believe that she had said this to him—that she was daring to raise it again now, and after all this time.
“There is no need to explain anything, Alissende,” he said finally. “It is in the past and there is naught to be gained from it.”
“I know it cannot change anything, Damien. But I hope that it might make what is to come a little easier for you to bear.”
She swallowed against the dryness, the aching in her throat, searching his face with her gaze. “Will you not listen? Please?”
His look of anguish was almost unbearable to see; the muscle in his jaw twitched, and she thought that he might say something more. But in the end he gave her only a single, curt nod, and with his willingness, a sense of calm filled her. It gave her strength to do what she should have done—to say what she should have said to him—five years ago.
“When I turned my back on you after the tournament that day, Damien, it had naught to do with your lower status or my feelings for you having changed in any way,” she said quietly. “Those were the reasons I gave then, in my sire’s arms tent, because I thought I could make you believe them. And because it was easier for me than admitting the truth of what was at work inside me.”
Her fingers laced tightly into the fabric of her dressing gown, though she never moved her gaze from his as she continued, “In reality, I was simply too weak to do what my heart yearned for, out of fear of what could happen—because of whathadhappened already, in what seemed a terrible lesson and a warning to me.”
Damien frowned. “I do not understand.”
“My rejection stemmed not from you or my feelings for you but from something involving your brother, Alexander, and my friend, Lady Margaret.”
He crossed his arms over his chest again, the gesture revealing his irritation. “That is difficult to accept, Alissende. Shortly after the scandal broke with Alex and Margaret, you and I spoke of it, several times. We planned the moment when I would claim you after the tournament forthat very reason,lady, to ensure that none, including your sire, could fault us for lacking the courage to declare what we felt for each other, as my brother and Margaret had done.”
“But there was more to it, Damien,” Alissende countered, shaking her head. “You did not know all.”
“What else could there be?” Damien asked harshly. “Alex fell in love with a woman above his birth, just as I did. He pursued their love in secret, just as we were constrained to do. Except that before my brother found bravery enough to declare his love in an honorable way, Lady Margaret’s sire caught him with her, at which point Alex was given the choice of entering the Templar Brotherhood or remaining in England to face the kind of living hell only a blooded earl can bring down upon the head of a common knight who had ruined his daughter.”
