When they were done, Simon packed the food and drink back in the canvas bag. “Time to rest,” he said soothingly. “We’ve had a rather tiring day.”
She smiled humorlessly at his understatement. Very English.
“Can you stand to be touched, or would you prefer to take a blanket and roll into a ball well away from me?” he asked, his voice calm. “I understand that you might not want to be close to a man.”
The question jarred her from her daze. “How can you even bear the thought of touching me?” Her voice cracked. “After what I did!”
“Come here,ma petite,” he said softly as he extended a hand toward her. “Let us face the night together.”
Desperate for the comfort he offered, she took Simon’s hand and stretched out beside him. The golden straw under the blanket rustled in a friendly welcome. Simon drew the other blanket over them and pulled her close.
She was cold, so cold, but his warm body and embrace began thawing the ice in her heart. “I didn’t mean to do it,” she whispered. “But he was like Gürkan. A similar size and build and a cruel, evil soul.”
Simon gently touched the bruise on her cheek where the sergeant had struck her for no particular reason other than to demonstrate that he was powerful and she was helpless. “He was a brute,ma petite. Did he injure you in any other way?”
Guessing what he didn’t want to ask, she said, “He didn’t rape me. There wasn’t time for that. He wanted . . . other things first.”
Simon winced. She sighed and said half to herself, “Though I’d rather regretted that I didn’t have the opportunity to kill Gürkan myself, I never truly imagined myself capable of being so vicious. But I was.”
“His behavior put you into a killing rage, like an ancient berserker warrior in a battle fury,” Simon said matter-of-factly. “The rage boiled over and you lost all control.”
That was what her anger had felt like, she realized. It had been an uncontrollable force that boiled up in her body like molten lava and made her want to annihilate her enemy. As she did.
Simon’s explanation didn’t take away her horror at her behavior, but it was an explanation that helped her make sense of what she had done. She began weeping silently into his shoulder while his warm hand stroked down her back.
When she’d spent all her tears and had no more, she asked, “How do you understand this so well?”
After a long silence, he said heavily, “I experienced something very like what you did. The experience was . . . shattering. I wasn’t sorry for the result, but I loathed myself for how I had done it. How vicious and uncontrolled I’d been.”
“What happened?” she whispered, wanting to know, not sure she had the right to ask when she could feel his pain.
He drew a rough breath. “It was on the Peninsula. I came upon a deserter who had just raped and murdered two young children. A brother and sister.”
“Oh, no!” Suzanne gasped with horror, her nails biting into her palm as she imagined how he must have felt to discover such evil.
“Their bodies were still warm, but it was too late. They were already gone. I had a bayonet and a rage that knew no bounds.” Simon drew a ragged breath. “I cannot regret ridding the world of a monster, but I did regret becoming a monster myself.”
“I’m sorry, so sorry,” she whispered, able to envision a scene that must have been similar to the one she had created earlier this day. Then, because she needed to know, she asked, “Have you ever done anything like that again?”
“No.” His arm had tightened around her shoulders, and she sensed the effort he made to relax. “I am a soldier. I’ve killed sometimes when it was needful, but never again with that annihilating rage. Once was enough.”
“Oh, yes!” she said so fervently that Simon laughed a little.
“I doubt you’ll ever do such a thing again,ma chérie. A lifetime of rage was burning through you. Some men need killing and Fabron was one of them,” Simon said. “He is now part of your past, as is Gürkan. Don’t let them live on in your mind and torment you.”
“That’s good advice, though it will take time for me to drive them from my thoughts.” She cuddled under Simon’s warm arm and rested her head on his shoulder as she began to relax. She had survived the horror of slavery and Gürkan, and she would survive this. She had behaved savagely, but she vowed not to let that one act poison her life.No wallowing.
“I thought I was done with war, yet here it is on our doorstep again,” Simon said. “I will continue to do unofficial exploration work for Wellington because it must be done, but I’ll do it alone in the future.”
She cringed inwardly. “I caused too much trouble.” “No, but today I realized that when you’re with me, I’m too concerned for your safety,” he explained. “That clouded my judgment and slowed my reactions. Dangerous.”
“If you’d been alone, would you have been able to fight your way free of three hostile French soldiers?”
“Nothing is sure in such a situation,” he replied, “but I’ve escaped similar situations unscathed.”
“I’m sorry I was a liability,” she said in a small voice. “I thought I was helping.”
“Your presence was necessary on this trip to thenotaire. There was no way to predict that we’d run into drunken soldiers hungry for violence. What you did to distract Sergeant Fabron was brilliant even though it played out in unexpected ways,” Simon said thoughtfully. “At the end of the day, what matters is that we both escaped relatively undamaged.” His arm tightened around her. “But on purely military scouting trips, I’m better off alone.”
