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Because now I knew what his mouth felt like against mine, and how gently those dangerous hands could hold a woman who had spent six years certain that no hands were safe. And I knew that when he finally walked out of this cabin and went back down the hill to Nottingham, some foolish part of me was going to want to follow him.
The Sheriff of Nottingham was supposed to be my enemy.
So why did the thought of losing him frighten me more than the thought of being caught?
17
GUY
Iawoke with the Ghost of Sherwood asleep against my right side. Her warmth flood me, and for the first time in twenty years I did not think about my duties.
That wasn’t a small admission.
Since the border, I had woken every morning of my life with a list already assembling itself behind my eyes. The roads to be patrolled and the petitions to be read, and the men to be answered; and, I had come to believe that was simply the shape a disciplined mind took. Then I’d opened my eyes in a one-room cabin with her locs scattered across my chest and one of her hands resting flat over my heart.
And the list disappeared from my mind.
Her scent had gotten into everything.
Two nights of it had gone down into the wool and the straw and the old quilt.
Wild lavender and pine and the clean smell before rain…
It had been joined in the last day by something warmer underneath that I had decided not to name out loud. Now it was thicker, and some how unmistakably richer and sweeter. I lay there in the gray light breathing it and noticed, with the detachment of a man watching someone else’s life, how completely at ease I had become in a bed that was not mine, in a forest where every living soul wanted me gone.
She woke the way she does everything, which is all at once and without any warning to the people nearby.
“You’re watching me.”
“I am.”
“How long?”
“Some while.”
She turned her face up against my shoulder, and I could hear the smile in her before I saw it. “Comfortable, Little Ghost?”
“Your bed is warmer than the floor.”
“It’s your bed.”
“Then you’re trespassing.”
“I’ve been accused of worse.”
“You could be arrested.”
“By whom?”
“Me.”
Her eyes drifted down to my mouth and stayed there a moment, and something in my chest turned over.
“And what would my punishment be?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“Take your time,” I murmured. “I’m in no hurry to escape.”
