“You spoke of trust,” she said. “Does it extend only to believing I am not a schemer? Or do you mean to … open other doors?”
He held her gaze for a long, searching moment. Then he reached beneath his shirt, fingers closing around something on a cord. When he drew it out, the small metal object that hung there caught the faint starlight. A key. He closed his hand around it for a second, as if reluctant to let it see the air, then stepped closer and took her hand. The key was cool and surprisingly heavy when he laid it in her palm.
“This,” he said, voice low, “is the key to the locked wing at Wexford. I took it from my desk before I left. I have worn it since, like some relic.”
She stared at it.
“I told you,” he went on, “that my father’s rooms are there. His books. His clothes. The things he left behind. My mother says there is a diary. I have not had the courage to look. It is … the part of my life I am most ashamed of. The part in which I failed him. Or believe I did.”
She closed her fingers reflexively around the key. The edges bit into her skin.
“I thought,” he said, “if I kept that wing sealed, I could keep those years sealed with it. That if I shut the door, the boy who disappointed him would stay on the other side.”
“And now?” she asked.
“Now,” he said, “I would rather you see it. All of it. Read what you wish. Look at what you wish. Judge me, if you must, on the whole of what I have been. Not just the tidy pieces I chose to show you.”
Her throat burned.
“You would give me this,” she said. “Knowing … what it costs you.”
“Yes,” he said simply.
She looked up at him. The inn light spilled faintly through the cracks around the common room shutters; the rest of the yard was lit only by stars. His face was in half shadow, but she could see the openness there, the vulnerability that made his usual armor of sarcasm and control look suddenly thin.
“This is more than trust,” she said, because she could not keep the tremor from her voice otherwise. “This is … you are offering me the worst of yourself, as well as the best.”
“If we are to make any sort of life,” he said quietly, “I cannot keep parts of myself in locked rooms and expect you to live content in the corridors.”
“And what do you expect in return?” she asked.
He smiled faintly. “I am already getting it. You are still here.”
Her fingers tightened around the key.
Slowly, deliberately, she slipped the cord back over his head, letting the cool metal rest briefly against his throat. His breath hitched almost imperceptibly at the contact.
“Keep it safe until we are home,” she said. “Then we will open that door together.”
He swallowed. “Together,” he repeated.
She rose onto her toes before she could talk herself out of it. He was not so very much taller. She could feel the warmth of him, the steady solidity. For a heartbeat they hovered, the spacebetween them charged. Then he closed it. The kiss was not perfect.
Their noses bumped, she tasted a trace of ale and smoke. His hand came up, hesitated, then settled at her waist with the cautious certainty of a man who had spent his life guiding ships rather than women. She curled her fingers in the lapel of his coat, drawing him closer.
Heat flared, then gentled. The world narrowed again to his mouth on hers, the rasp of his stubble against her skin, the way his breath caught when she parted her lips in invitation and he answered. When they broke apart, the night seemed altered.
Chapter 24
Smoke had a memory. Even two weeks after the fire, Isla could smell it as they crested the last rise. Not the sharp, living scent of a hearth, but something older, clinging, sunk into stone and soil.
“Strathmore,” she breathed.
Beside her on the trap seat, Edward followed the line of her gaze.
The castle rose from the brow of the hill as it always had, grey walls shouldering against the sky, turrets punching through low cloud. The south-facing front, with its broad sweep of windows and battlements, looked almost untouched at a distance. It was the east wing that broke the illusion.
Charred stone gaped black where a solid wall should have been. Roof beams jutted like broken ribs. One of the smaller towers was simply gone, the ragged stump of it blackened and twisted, as if some giant hand had ripped it away. Isla’s hands tightened on the reins until the leather creaked.
