“Will you be here in the morning?”
He looked at her. The corridor was dark. They were standing two inches apart.
“I promise,” he said.
She nodded and went inside. Closed the door. Leaned against it.
She heard him on the other side. He did not walk away. She pressed her hand flat against the oak.
She could hear his breathing. Steady but quick. The breathing of a man who was standing in a dark corridor on the wrong side of a door, trying to decide whether to walk away or break it down.
She pressed her forehead against the wood. It was cool against her skin. She imagined his face on the other side. His tight jaw. His green eyes. The scar on his neck that she wanted to trace with her fingers until he told her the story of how he got it.
She heard his hand on the wood. A soft sound. Palm flat against the oak, same as hers. Inches apart. A door between them.
Then his footsteps. Not walking away, but walking to the end of the corridor and back. Pacing. The steady, measured steps of a man who was fighting with himself.
She listened to him pace for two full minutes before his footsteps stopped. Then the door handle turned, and he came in.
She did not look at him. She went behind the screen in the corner and changed into her shift. When she came back out, he was sitting in the chair by the fire.
She climbed into bed. Left the candle burning. She kept her eyes closed. He was watching her. Making sure she was covered. Safe.
She could hear him shift in the chair. The small sounds of a large man trying to be quiet. The leather creaking under his weight. His coat brushing against the armrest. The sound of his boots being pulled off, one and then the other, set carefully on the floor.
He was staying. He was not leaving. He was sitting in a chair in her bedroom, on a night when he could have gone back to his own room, locked the door, and put the wall back up and become the Hound again. Instead, he was here. Watching her breathe. And that, she thought, was a kind of bravery that had nothing to do with pistols.
She lay still. She could feel him watching her the way one felt sunlight through a window, warm and steady and constant. He was not looking at her the way Gordon looked at her—with assessment and calculation. He was looking at her the way aman looked at something he had been given and was afraid to hold too tightly.
She wanted to tell him that she was not fragile. That she had survived three years of Gordon Hansley and she was not going to break because a man with scarred knuckles sat in a chair to watch her sleep. She wanted to tell him that the watching was not frightening. It was the kindest thing anyone had done for her in years.
But she did not say any of it. She lay still and let him watch. The silence between them was not empty. It was full. Full of all the things neither of them was ready to say.
She drifted, halfway between sleep and wakefulness.
“Thank you for coming back,” she murmured.
A long pause. The fire crackled.
“I will always come back,” he said, so quietly she was not sure she heard it.
She did not know if it was a promise or a prayer. It sounded like both. The voice of a man who had made promises before, in darker rooms, for darker purposes, and who was now trying to make one that meant something different. Something clean.
She wanted to tell him that coming back was not enough. That she needed him to stay. That the difference between comingback and staying was the distance between survival and living, and she had done enough surviving for a lifetime.
But the words were too heavy for the dark and the quiet and the sound of his breathing. She would say them tomorrow. Or the day after. Or on their wedding day. She would find the moment, and she would say them while meaning every syllable.
She felt him adjust her blanket. Pull it higher over her shoulders. His fingers brushed her collarbone and lingered there for a moment, light as a moth, and then withdrew. She heard the creak of the chair as he settled. The quiet rhythm of his breathing. The fire crackling in the grate.
She thought, in the space between waking and sleep, that this was what safety felt like. Not the absence of danger, but the presence of someone who stood between her and the dark.
He thinks he does not deserve me.He is wrong. But he is not ready to hear that yet.
She slept. The last thing she saw before her eyes closed was Edward settling into the chair by the fire, watching her with an expression she could not quite read. Something careful. Something quiet. Something that looked, if she had been awake long enough to name it, like a man making a promise he was not sure he could keep.
CHAPTER 23
The horse did not care that he had not slept.
