“What? What’s that supposed to mean?” Did her nostrils just flare like firebrands?
His earlier impression of her was wrong. She was beautiful and brave, challenging him like a lioness. “So what if I am?” she demanded.
“You’re the reason I’m here.”
“What? How am I the reason you’re here?” she asked, then laughed. “You almost had me feeling sympathy for you, but you’re really crazy.”
“Her blood most likely runs through your veins.”
“Sure,” she mocked—but after an instant of stunned surprise, as if she knew he was correct.
Why wasn’t she asking him to whose blood he was referring?
“So, am I to be punished for someone else’s sin?” she put to him, her mocking smile, gone.
He nodded, looking into her eyes. “Yes. You’re all I have.”
She appeared to have stopped breathing. He wanted to draw closer to her.
“Do my words affect you so?” he asked softly.
Her gaze fastened to his as if she meant something other than what she answered. “No, they don’t affect me. Why would they?”
He let her question fade into the sea mist. This was the chance he’d been waiting six hundred years for. He should be thinking about how he could kill her instead of wondering if she could truly feel sympathy for him.
“Can I ask you a question?”
He set his sharp gaze on her then nodded.
“Why do you believe that if Graven Fortress falls apart, you will finally have peace?”
“If it falls, I will cease to exist,” he assured her. “I’m part of Graven and it’s part of me.”
“It’s mine too,” she told him.
“What do you mean by that?”
“It was left to me after my…my…um…genealogy was provided and it was proven that—” Her sentence was interrupted by a man stepping through the entryway.
“Miss Montgomery. There’s a large parcel from the trust being delivered in the courtyard. Your signature is required.”
“Oh, of course.” She smiled and Oliver looked away. It took him a moment of fighting with himself about whether or not he thought a Montgomery was pleasing to his eye. The more he looked and examined her face, the more he thought itwas a compelling masterpiece of dozens of wonderfully open emotions.
He wanted to pull her hair down again and watch it spill around her—and then strangle her with it. He couldn’t forget. He wouldn’t let himself forget.
When she left the battlements, he clenched his teeth in an effort not to move his feet to go after her. Why did he want to follow her? He couldn’t truly hurt her. He couldn’t frighten her. Curses, it seemed whatever he said to her only incited her anger. She wanted to restore the fortress, keep him going mayhap for another six hundred years. He groaned. He had to stop her. No matter what it took.
He thought about going to the courtyard and almost instantly appeared there. But Miss Montgomery wasn’t there. With all the heartbeats roaming about, it took him another ten minutes to find her. She was in his library. He felt his anger rise. This had been his favorite room out of the seventy-three rooms in the fortress. Why did she choose his library in which to loiter?
And why was there a wooden crate in the middle of the floor?
She glanced up at him from her place on her knees before the box. The exhilaration of being seen after six hundred years overwhelmed him and he almost smiled at her before he caught himself.
“What are you doing in here and what is that box?”
She didn’t answer him and he wondered if she couldn’t hear him. He began to repeat himself when she shoved a small crowbar into the crate and pulled the top off. She peered inside and then reached in.
Oliver waited, bending to see the item she pulled out. He was unimpressed when she revealed another box. This one was exquisitely crafted in polished mahogany with brass hardware. She lifted out of the crate and stood to her feet with the suppleness of a cat to lay the box on the nearest table.
