Chapter 6 #2
He was assessing the latch, the gap beneath it where the wind pushed through, running the numbers on how long the wood would hold against a determined assault, when his eyes moved back to her.
He noticed it the third time, the way she’d drawn her knees up slightly, the way her fingers had relaxed, the small involuntary trust of a body that had finally, for a few hours at least, stopped anticipating pain.
He’d been watching her.
The recognition was unwelcome. He made a deliberate effort to fix his attention on the fire, on the logistics of tomorrow, on Webb’s wounded shoulder and what pace it would allow them to set. These were the things that required his attention. These were the things that would keep them alive.
His gaze crossed to her again.
He was a soldier. He’d held dying men. He’d made decisions in the field that had sent people to their deaths, and he’d carried those decisions afterwards with something that wasn’t exactly peace but was at least a kind of manageable weight.
He’d been in Spain for three years and never once lost his ability to think.
Not once. Even at Badajoz, even at Salamanca, even in the worst of it, there had always been some part of his mind that remained apart and cold and functional, the part that calculated odds and managed resources and knew, always, what the mission required.
He was watching her sleep.
Not out of desire, or not only. It was something simpler and more alarming than that.
It was the feeling that came over him when he tried to fix his attention on the door, or the fire, or the route north, and found that some part of him refused.
The same pull every time. The same interruption to his concentration.
Every time he meant to think about something else, there she was, at the edge of his attention, drawing it back.
She stirred slightly. Her lips moved around something in Welsh he couldn’t catch.
He’d been about to stand, to cross to her. He caught himself and stayed where he was.
That disturbed him most. Not the looking. The impulse that went with it, the instinct that said go to her, keep her from whatever she’s dreaming, as though that were his to do.
He had been in dangerous situations before.
He had always known, with precision, what his priorities were and how to hold to them when everything else was noise.
That was not something he’d thought of as a skill.
It had simply been how he worked. The mission.
The men. Everything else in its correct place.
She was not in her correct place.
She had come to occupy the same territory in his thinking as Webb did, that small and essential category of people whose safety was not a strategic consideration but a non-negotiable fact.
Except that wasn’t right either, because with Webb the feeling was the calm of long familiarity, and this was not calm or familiar.
This was something else. Something that had arrived without his consent and declined to be assigned a manageable position.
She stirred again, resettling, and her hand opened and closed once against the blanket before stilling.
She’d chosen to trust him. In that lodge, with every reason not to, she’d looked at him and decided he was something different from what experience had taught her to expect.
He didn’t know what he’d done to earn that.
He wasn’t sure he had earned it, or whether she’d been desperate enough to trust anything that offered itself.
But she was here. She’d crossed that river. She’d climbed on that horse.
Webb was right that he’d gone stupid over her.
What Webb hadn’t said, what Oliver was only beginning to understand sitting here in the cold with the wind at the door, was that it wasn’t the ordinary stupidity of attraction.
He’d felt attraction before. Attraction was manageable.
You noted it and set it aside and it diminished with distance and time.
This was something else.
This was the thought, arriving without warning and refusing to leave, I cannot leave her.
Not as a mission parameter. Not as a strategic calculation about testimony and justice for James.
As a simple, stark, prior fact. As something that had already been decided somewhere underneath his reasoning, before his reasoning had caught up with it.
He was compromised.
He sat with that word and let it settle.
It was the right word. He was a soldier who had allowed a variable to become something it had no business being.
He had crossed that river for her. He had said we all reach Shrewsbury together or we all fail together and he’d meant it, not tactically, not as a calculation about odds, but because the alternative, the alternative of her alone in those mountains or back in Penharrow’s hands, was something he could not make himself contemplate.
That was not how a man in his position ought to think.
He knew that. He’d told Webb that their first priority was keeping her alive long enough to have choices, and he’d meant it to sound like professional detachment, but it had been something else, and Webb knew it, and Oliver knew it, and now it was three in the morning and he was watching her sleep instead of planning their route and the evidence was fairly conclusive.
She murmured something again. Not distressed. Just dreaming.
He looked at the door. Held his attention there by an act of will, counted the seconds. Estimated the depth of the latch. Listened to the wind.
Looked back at her.
All right, then.
He was not going to resolve this tonight.
He wasn’t going to reason his way back to the clean, mission-oriented clarity he’d arrived in Wales with, because whatever had happened in the last two days had made that clarity unavailable to him.
He could note that fact and manage around it, or he could sit here fighting it at the cost of the rest, and he was going to need the rest.
The fire shifted. A log settled with a soft collapse of ash.
He would get her to Shrewsbury. He would see her safe. He would do his job. What happened after that, what he did with this impossible, inconvenient, apparently non-negotiable thing that had lodged itself in his chest, was a problem for a man who had slept.
Outside, the wind howled through the hills, and somewhere in that darkness Penharrow’s men were searching.
Oliver settled back in his chair determined to keep his eyes on the door.
He did not entirely succeed.