His gaze on her warmed. He couldn’t help it. “No one has ever sought to help me.”
“I wish I could have helped, Lord Harwich.”
“Oliver,” he corrected with traces of his smile still intact. Then, “What if I was falling and you were there instead of Eleanor?”
Her eyes widened. “You mean from…?”
He nodded, knowing she meant the wall but didn’t want to say.
“I wouldn’t have let you fall,” she said quietly.
He felt a foolishly merry grin trying to break out of his face. After a half dozen centuries of not feeling happy in any way, he fought the unfamiliar emotion. “I must tell you, Miss Montgomery—”
“Maggie,” she corrected.
Studying her as nonchalantly as he could, he thought of flowers swaying in the sun.
“Magnolia, actually,” she murmured, breaking the spell she cast over him.
His treasonous grin ignored every alarm in his head and in his heart and shone full force on her. “Magnolia,” he intoned on an almost silent breath. “I think you are more of a sunflower.”
He noted that deepening blush across her cheeks, a sign of the life flowing within her. He’d felt it when he’d gone through her.
She smiled shyly and tucked her untamed locks behind her ear again. “I told you my mother was a monster.” Her hushed burst of laughter went through him like flames, filling him with life. “Who names their child Magnolia?”
“I think it’s beautiful,” he remarked, staring at her.
“You are nothing like I expected.”
“For a Montgomery,” she guessed out loud.
He nodded. “You’re nothing like her.”
“That’s a good thing,” she reasoned with a quirk of her brow. “But how do you know what I’m like?”
Yes, it was soon, he admitted inwardly. He found it disturbing that he would put aside this woman’s bloodline and let her into the place only one woman had gone before her.
“I have eyes that see and ears that hear,” he told her. “I think if you were going to kill me, you wouldn’t plan it. It would be more of an act of passion.”
She tossed him a short mocking laugh. “You’re wrong,” she challenged, softening her voice. “I would never kill you, even if I could. I wouldn’t do it.”
Nothing like Eleanor’s blood. She was completely innocent. He could never cause her harm. In fact, he hadn’t thought of revenge all day.
She was quiet long enough for him to wonder if she was upset.
“Oliver?” she said in her dulcet voice.
“Yes?”
“I wanted to tell you this sooner, but I’m not sure what it was. Seeing it all before my eyes…I told myself it was a dream. And I told you the same.”
“The dream you had before you woke up? Where I was in danger and you couldn’t help me?”
“Yes,” she breathed out. When she inhaled again, she appeared as if breathing was painful. He wanted to go to her, hold her, offer her comfort from whatever made it so difficult for her to breathe properly.
“I touched the gauntlet and…something happened.”
“What? What are you saying?”
