He could feel her unsteady breath. He wouldn’t fishfor a handkerchief or fuss. He reckoned some tears ought to be allowed to flow, and she ought to be able to do it in front of him.
She brushed her hand against her cheek. “And then?” Her voice was husky.
He cleared his throat. “Andthen... this woman, like a clever resourceful lion, using her ingenuity, escaped a frightening, brutal cage. And sailed across the sea. She had many adventures, all of them pleasant and interesting. And her life was... Her life was very happy.”
He was not a whimsical man; the story would not be embellished. If he could he would incant this destiny into being for her, like a sorcerer.
He didn’t know if he’d truly ever been a source of comfort for anyone before. Why hadn’t he known what an honor it was?
“Did she find love.” It was a murmur so sleepy the question wasn’t inflected.
He waited until her breath was steady.
“She found love,” he told her.
But he thought she was asleep.
Aurelie awoke more than once during the night, less startled than she might think to find herself wrapped in the arms of a man she’d known for mere days and underneath a pile of coats and a borrowed coverlet in a strange cottage. His hands—long elegant fingers, rough palms—formed a little blanket for her own. She savored the feel of his skin against hers. She in fact thought she’d awakened just so she could consign these moments to her sensory memory forever. How he smelled: Of smoke and the outdoors, sweat and tobacco, and a sort of singular, alluring, musky, freshly-baked note that was clearly his alone.Thrilling and foreign and manly. How he felt: safety and danger.
His thigh was hard and hot against hers; his shoulder a nook for her head. She could feel the rise and fall of his breath against her. Her heart felt like a kite. Her body felt like it hummed with currents that he stirred in her as if he were Poseidon himself.
It ought to have felt strange and scandalous and even frightening, but somehow fit her more comfortably and felt more instinctive than the clothes she’d borrowed from her lady’s maid.
She was luckier, she supposed, than she deserved to be—that such a man existed, and that he was her protector. The notion that she’d intended to marry someone else who had attacked her seemed like a fragment of a dream she’d once had. At the moment she could not quite call it into focus. That the two men even belonged to the same species seemed preposterous. Granted, she was probably exhausted. Perhaps there was lingering shock. She had no doubt Hawkes spoke truth, from experience: how she felt about everything that had happened to her would evolve over time. But it seemed to her that if one found an island of joy amidst the box of knives one ought to linger there. And so she did, until she drifted to sleep again.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Aurelie awoke with a start from a dream of having suddenly been set adrift at sea.
She realized it was because Hawkes had slipped from the bed while she was sleeping. He was like an island and she the castaway who’d been lucky enough to crawl ashore.
And her thigh was suddenly chillier.
Signs that he’d been up and about for at least a few minutes: The fire had been built up. He must have been outside to see to his horse and gather more wood. She thought she smelled tea—had he found some tea, or brought some? He must have brewed it on the little hearth.
Then she noticed his shirt was draped over the back of the little chair and her heart gave a jolt. He was roaming about half-dressed, so it would seem.
But then she heard what sounded like the trickle of water into a basin.
She slipped out of bed.
The air was chilly on the back of her neck where she’d loosened her laces. She pushed her hair from her face and moved, quietly, to peer into the main room.
He was standing before it, trousers loosened and rolled to his waist.
He was pressing a cloth to his face, as though he’d just finished giving it a wash.
And then he unwound his bandage, and he was attempting to clean the edges of the wound with a scrap of cloth.
That’s when he saw her. He went still.
Their eyes met and a great rush of emotion crashed over her heart.
She wanted to tell him she loved him. The words wanted to burst from her, like a song.
What if she was wrong? She’d been wrong before. It was just that it seemed the only word that fit this strange, vast peace and rightness with which she now felt surrounded, that odd sense that boundaries had dropped from time. This peace was laced through with spiky, breath-stealing desire and tenderness. It seemed born whole, this feeling. Could she love someone she’d known for so short a time? Her soul must have recognized him years ago, when she stood admiring him from the top of the stairs. She must have known he was hers.
It didn’t feel irrational, but it certainly wasn’t reasonable.