“Surely, it matters little what I say,” she replied in a disinterested voice. “I have no reputation left to lose.”
“And after all the effort I have taken to safeguard your morals.”
The heat of his gaze flared through her as warm as the air she breathed, as enticing as the scent of apple blossoms and cloves still lingering in her hair, like the scent she had smelled on him, as seductive as the dancing firelight.
Her disinterest in him was a lie. And he knew it.
Strangely, he was the first to look away as he reached for the carafe. “Has the fight gone out of you, Rose?”
She would not be much of an adversary if it had. Yet, perhaps it had gone out of her. She wondered absently what he was drinking, watching as he settled back into the chair and peered at her over the rim of the cup.
Deciding she would not dignify his action with curiosity, she looked away. “I would like to say something,” she said.
She supposed it was her mood that was giving her a lofty feeling of detachment, as if she were floating above Roselyn Lancaster as a mere onlooker, indifferent to her emotional agonies. Her future no longer mattered. She would survive. She might be helpless now, but she would not always be so. The man sitting opposite her with the firelight on his face was equally unimportant to her. Except that he had done her a service and he should know.
“That night at the cemetery when you said my name ...you were the first person since I was a child who had ever spoken my full name aloud. You freed me,” she said. “I no longer live in fear of discovery, of what will happen should my father find me. I no longer fear what people will say when they know the truth. The worst has happened. Someone has discovered the truth and I have survived.”
She folded her hands in her lap. “But no matter what has transpired between us, our acquaintance will end soon, and I will be most content to go.”
His was a relaxed pose but she could feel the tension inside him. “Indeed.”
She narrowed her eyes. “At the very least, the ring you stole from me is valuable. Mayhap you can trade usbothfor your brother.”
“Mayhap I will keep both you and the ring, and send Hereford to the devil where he belongs. I could, you know.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Why would I keep you? Or why would I kill him?”
“Why would you keep the ring?”
He laughed. “Ah, the deeper, more insightful question.” His pause was infinitesimal. “Because it is something of yours, I suppose. And you want it back.”
She felt the minutest hint of irritation and something else.
“However ... I am not as black hearted as ’twould seem,” he said quietly, his fingers absently edging the rim of the cup. “You need not be locked in this room. I have a library at your disposal. A large garden if you wish to take your morning and evening constitutionals there. A dining room if you choose to take your meals there. My home is yours.”
“You do not ask my parole not to escape?”
The faintest suggestion of humor traced the line of his lips. “Four hundred acres of open parkland surround Stonehaven. Unless you look like a fat wooly sheep, you would have a difficult time blending into the scenery. Nor could I guarantee your safety beyond Stonehaven’s borders. Though I suggest you allow your leg to heal before you try. Jason or Mrs. Duff will accompany you wherever you want to go.”
As he stood, so did she, but only because he was so tall. He came around the table, sure of himself as she stood before him with bared feet.
No man had ever made her feel feminine and petite. Placing the cup in her hands, he wrapped her fingers around the warmed porcelain where his palm had just been. “Now drink. Eat. No one at Stonehaven will harm you. You have my word.”
“The word of an outlaw.”
“The word of a border lord, Lady Roselyn.”
“A privateer.”
“A Scots.”
She held the cup between them like a wall, a barrier against her emotions.
He merely sat against the table watching her, and with a twinge of illogic, she wondered why he had not tried to kiss her since coming to her chambers.
She drank from the cup and nearly choked with the fiery heat. “Whisky ...” she rasped in disbelief. “You lace your coffee with whisky?”
