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Cait brushed aside the memory. She’d become quite adept at doing so.

“When he wrote back, I thought to tell you. But . . .”

Terric’s eyes narrowed with suspicion, just as she’d known they would. This was why she’d kept their correspondence a secret for so long. She forced herself to finish her statement. “I did not.”

Putting her face in her hands, Cait closed her eyes against her brother’s accusatory glare.

A moment passed, and then she felt his large hand covering her small one. Her cheeks tingled, but Cait would not let herself cry. Not yet. There was still too much to tell.

Uncovering her face, she took Terric’s hand and squeezed it.

“His message contained nothing but a courtesy reply. And that may have been the end of our correspondence.”

That he continued to hold her hand gave Cait the strength to continue, to say it all at once.

“It was not. I responded, this time asking Bailey not to mention my addition to your missive. With each letter, the secret grew. Until I stopped writing. I pleaded with Conrad not to make mention of it.”

“Why, Cait?” her brother asked, his tone an entreaty. “What did you believe I would say?”

Taking comfort in their connection, she told the truth. “I did not know. And for this reason, I could not risk telling you. If you had ordered me to stop writing to him—”

“I’d never have done so.”

“Perhaps not. But if you had, for reasons I could not contemplate, I could not bear it. We only exchanged a few letters a year, but the joy of receiving his letters . . . those became the happiest moments of my life.”

She let her words penetrate.

“You had your training. Your tournament. Rory,” Cait said, willing him to understand.

“I had only . . .”

She nearly said Conrad. But it seemed too intimate a thing to admit.

“Bradon Moor is beautiful. And more important, ’tis safe. But it has little else to offer a young woman besides embroidery and prayer and waiting for a potential suitor I may or may not care for to come along and take me as a wife. To force me from my home and my family. So that I might continue to learn embroidery in another prison.”

There. She had said it.

“You hate embroidery,” Terric said finally. “Cait, if Bradon Moor feels like a prison, it is because you made it so. You could have come to another tourney with us. Rory and I asked many times. “If,” Terric said slowly, “you were writing to Conrad, if you had an affinity for him, then why did you refuse to come with us?”

Her inability to form an answer to that very question was the very reason she had stopped writing to Conrad. “I . . . do not know.”

Her brother released her hand, his gaze turning incredulous.

“You do not know?”

If she had, Cait would have explained it to Conrad many years earlier. She would have told him the truth of it last night.

“Did you think you would be attacked again? That I wouldn’t be able to protect you?”

“A braw warrior like you? Nay, I did not think it.”

Not precisely, at least. She had no doubt Terric could protect her, and yet there was a tiny part of her that never felt safe. Maybe it never would.

“You can commiserate with Conrad on this,” she said quietly, “as he asked me the same question so many times I could no longer count.”

“Is that why you stopped writing? Because you refused to meet him again and had no explanation for it?”

“Of sorts.”