Did it matter?
Surely not. He’d been sleeping.
She was furious to realize she’d been a victim of her own assumptions again. Or perhaps, more accurately, her instincts.
Because she had no idea how she’d move through life assuming every human was something other than who they appeared. Trust was freedom, she understood now. It was a luxury. Without it, life was a cell. No emotion could ever get through unfettered and it seemed a hellish way to live.
Did she want to live that way? Could she? Was her every action to be a choice now? Her throat felt tight.
She knew there was no ocean vast enough to free herself from that.
And now she understood she ought to have known from her first look at him that he was nothing so benign as a country vicar. This man’s character seemed to animate his entire person with a sort of complex intensity. It was in his gestures. It blazed in his eyes, which were a dazzling crystalline blue, like fast water dashed over rocks. They never left her face when he spoke. She was being thoroughlyseenfor the first time in her life, as both a person and a woman. Brundage had never looked at her this way.
Noone had ever looked at her this way.
In this instant of epiphany, she understood that this mattered a good deal.
If she had known the difference sooner, perhaps she never would have needed to flee across the Channel and then across the ocean to escape the consequences of not knowing.
The man’s expression shifted and gentled as he studied her.
“Forgive me,” he said swiftly, humbly. “I fear my manners are a casualty of my awkward circumstances. It’s just that you are unexpected, Mrs. Gallagher. It was very kind of you to look after me. It seems I am in your debt. Thank you very much.”
She nodded slowly, once.
He studied her again. A faint frown shadowed his brow.
“Why did you do it?” he asked almost shortly. Then he smiled faintly. “Did you draw the short straw?”
“I didn’t want you to call out in the night and find no one there. I didn’t want you to die alone, if you were going to die.”
She hadn’t meant to be quite so blunt, but she was still reeling from the revelation.
He went still.
He eyed her somewhat warily. She sensed she’d thoroughly surprised him.
In the silent moments that followed, she thought he was assessing—perhaps reassessing—her, too, and his expression was inscrutable.
His eyes felt far too penetrating, as though whetted by a lifetime of peering into consciences. Or perhaps her soul was far too raw, and from now on gazes as direct as his would now feel like fingernails dragged across it.
She cleared her throat. “Sir, if you are not Mr. Bellingham, then...”
He hesitated a moment.
“My name is Mr. Hawkes.”
She let this information settle in.
It seemed portentous, somehow. Of a certainty the name fit him better than “Bellingham” did. She supposed it was a common enough English name. But she’d known of two others—one was her brother’s fencing master for a time.
The other Mr. Hawkes was the man she’d seen in the ballroom so many years ago, surrounded by rapt women, glowing beneath the chandelier.
But that Mr. Hawkes was in a French prison. And this Mr. Hawkes was thin, and covered in a bristly beard. He didn’t radiate.
“It was no trouble to look after you, Mr. Hawkes,” she said quietly.
“Nonsense,” he said firmly. “I expect it was harrowing and unpleasant at times for you, and it was valiant and generous of you to do it. I should like to say again, thank you very much, indeed.”