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And Gods help me, I think that may be what undoes me most.

Because it means I’ve been wrong to shove him away as though he were like all the rest. Not wholly wrong, perhaps. A woman learns caution for a reason. But James is different, and I can admit that to myself, if not aloud.

With him, the guarded parts of you might finally ease. I shove the thought down, down down. I can’t handle it right now.

“I’d never be the sort of man a woman must endure. I’d sooner live my whole life without a wife,” he says.

The image of him giving himself to someone else comes and goes in a single cruel instant, but it twists in my gut all the same.

“And I’d sooner perish than put fear in the eyes of the woman who stands beside me.”

I hold his gaze, and for one suspended moment all I can see is the earnestness in his hazel eyes, so unwavering it cracks me open.

“I ken,” I whisper. My voice trembles, but I don’t care to take it back. It belongs to him.

My hand lifts before I can stop it and presses to his chest, right over his heart. The beat of it is strong and living beneath my palm, and for one foolish moment, the whole world narrows to that single truth.

“I ken ye’re not that sort of man.”

I have known it longer than I’ve wished to admit.

His expression shifts, softened by something that feels far too precious to look at for long.

“And I mean that,” I say, because I can give him this much. “With all of my heart.”

Footsteps rush toward us, but I barely hear them at first. Róisín cuts in, her voice pulling me back to myself, and all at once I know I can’t stay here another second.

Not with my chest aching this way. Not with the safety of him feeling more dangerous than any flirtation ever has.

So I lean up, press the briefest kiss to his cheek, and leave before he can look too closely and see I’m already halfway undone.

I’m almost down the passage before my vision blurs. By the time I slip into the nearest dark room and shove the door closed, the tears come rushing.

Not only for Aileen.

For myself, too.

I’ve learned to brace myself so hard against pain, I seldom know what to do when tenderness finds me instead.

And for James, perhaps most foolishly of all.

Because now I’ve admitted the truth of him to myself, but knowing it doesn’t ease my fear.

It only makes me wish that I’d been born into a world where I could’ve trusted such tenderness at once, and never known the hurt of doubting it.

I think, wildly and helplessly, that if I ever had sons, I’d sooner see myself in the grave than raise boys who thought strength meant cruelty. I’d strike them down with my own hand if they so much as lifted one against a woman.

And yet, even as the thought comes, another rises after it, louder. I’d like to think it would never come to that.

My sons would be good. Loyal. The sort of men who stand between harm and those who can’t bear it alone. Protectors, not tyrants. Men who keep their word. Men who refuse to be something women fear.

And if I had daughters, I’d spend my life teaching them this world had no right to diminish them. I’d give my life rather than let them believe they had to endure cruelty just to survive.

They’d be cherished. They’d be safe. They’d know from their first breath that no man’s anger, no man’s title, no man’s desire had the right to break them.

I’d do for my daughters what my father never did for me, and what my mother couldn’t do before she died.

I’d keep them safe, at all costs.