He smiled briefly. “What’s Nora like?”
She shook her head. “I hardly know anymore thanks to the estrangement I mentioned to you before.”
“When she was young, then. Before her misunderstanding of your motives drove you apart.”
She closed her eyes and pictured her sister with her dark blonde curls and her snapping blue eyes that were so like Jane’s own. She thought of her bubbly laugh and her constant chatter.
“Sweet,” she whispered at last. “Witty. God, that child was smart. Is smart. She taught herself to read when she was six.”
“But not you?” he asked.
She started, but then recalled she had told him she had only recently learned to read when he offered to share his book with her. “No. I had too much to do to take time to learn.”
He frowned. “You mean you took all your time protecting her. Protecting your mother.”
She nodded. “But that allowed Nora to be carefree for so much longer. Any sacrifice was worth that.”
“I’m not sure I agree,” he said, stretching a long arm out along the back of the seat beside him. Putting her to mind of when he’d done that in the garden of the inn a couple of days before. “But I’m biased. So how did you learn later?”
She hesitated. “Esme taught me.”
His brow wrinkled and she prayed he wouldn’t ask why. She didn’t want to say or be forced to hide that she had learned to read because he’d written her little notes. Words that were so precious that she wanted them all for herself, that she collected and pored over time and again.
And to her relief, he didn’t ask. He merely nodded. “I have a great deal of respect for that, Jane. Now, if it’s not rude, I’m going to try to sleep a bit, I think. I was kept up by most pleasant activities two nights ago and by preparing for our journey last night.”
“I can entertain myself,” she said.
“We’ll stop along the road in a few hours to break our fast and rest the horses. I’ll be awake before then.”
He slouched down in the carriage, leaned his head against the wall near the window and shut his eyes. She found herself watching him, counting his breaths, noting the shifts as he went from alertness to relaxation to sleep. Seeing how his expression changed when it was calm. She noted it all and collected it in the vault of knowledge she had about this man.
Then she looked outside to the scenery along their route and focused her attention there. Focused on where she was going so she wouldn’t disrupt herself with dreams of what might have been in another life.
It had been a long day of travel and Ripley’s body felt it. After his nap and their break for food, they had read more. It was a way to separate themselves from the deeper conversations they’d had earlier about family and responsibility, but he also enjoyed sharing the book with her. He loved watching her eyes widen with delight at the adventures he recounted.
But now he set the book aside as the late afternoon bled into evening. Darkness was beginning to set in outside, dimming the light from the windows. “We’ll stop for the night soon.”
She nodded. “Yes. I know without a moon it would be too dangerous to continue.”
“When we do…” he said slowly, feeling nervous, almost like a green boy.
She blinked at the halting sentence. “When we do?” she encouraged.
“I—should I ask the innkeeper for one room or two?” he asked. “There is no pressure either way and if you want privacy or you’ve changed your mind about what we shared before, I won’t mention it again.”
She looked down at her hands, clenching and unclenching them in her lap. Her lips had thinned and her cheeks were flushed when she looked up at him.
“I’m not a mincing virgin,” she said at last. “Sex is a physical need, or it always has been, whether I was paid for it or enjoyed it…or both, occasionally. But it was different with you.”
He sucked in a breath. “Oh?”
“It was better.” She met his eyes. “And I won’t lie and try to pretend that it wasn’t. You’d see through me at any rate. You always do. Being with you helps me forget about my fear for a little while. So, if you want to share a room with me, I won’t turn that down.”
A pressure Ripley hadn’t fully realized was pushing down on him lifted the instant she said those beautiful words. A rush of desire and love moved through him instead, washing away reason and restraint. He knew, even as he leaned forward, that was exactly what Brentwood meant when he said Ripley’s love for Jane was dangerous. That it was a weakness he had to be aware of so he wouldn’t be injured by it, or worse.
He knew that and he still pushed it away, cupped her cheeks and kissed her. It hadn’t even been a full day since the last time he’d done that, and yet it felt like a lifetime. Like he’d been parched in a desert and now she was water. She gripped his forearms with a gasping moan and there was no stopping this heat between them now.
He dropped to his knees before her, pressing her back against the carriage wall, cupping her against him with one hand, tracing her jawline with the other. She lifted into him so there was no space, no breath. It was only them and this and the inevitable conclusion to fire meeting oil in such a combustible way.
