Chapter 9
The storm caught them a day later in the high country.
Oliver had watched the clouds mass on the northern horizon all morning, had pushed them harder trying to find shelter before it hit. But the mountains this high were bare rock and windswept heath, with no trees for cover and no structures in sight.
When the first snowflakes began to fall Megan knew they were in trouble.
“There!” She pointed toward a dark opening in the hillside ahead. “Is that a cave?”
It was. It appeared to be a shallow depression in the rock face, barely deep enough to deserve the name, but it would have to serve. Oliver urged his exhausted horse toward it as the snow began falling in earnest.
They reached the cave just as the storm truly hit. Within minutes, the world beyond their meagre shelter became a white curtain of driving snow, the wind howling like something alive and furious.
Oliver got the horses tethered in the deepest part of the cave. There was no fuel for a fire. Nothing grew at this elevation, and they’d burned the last of their supplies two nights ago. They would have to rely on body heat alone.
Webb collapsed against the cave wall, his face gray. The river crossing had reopened his wound, but it hadn’t festered, and Megan knew that was the only piece of luck they’d had in days.
“We need to get warm,” she said, already removing her wet cloak. “And food—”
“There is no food.” Oliver’s voice came out hard. “We have what’s left of the dried meat and that’s all. We’re one day from the nearest village, assuming the storm doesn’t last. If it does—”
He didn’t finish.
He didn’t need to.
Megan looked at him for a moment, then moved to Webb’s side to check his wound. Behind her she heard Oliver cross to the cave entrance, and she could feel the particular quality of his silence—the kind that turned inward, that started cataloguing failures.
She recognized that silence. She’d lived inside a version of it for years.
“It’s not your fault,” she said, without turning around.
She heard him move. “You can’t know what I’m thinking.”
“You’re thinking this is your fault.” She adjusted the bandage on Webb’s shoulder and then stood and turned to face Oliver. “That you should have planned better. Should have anticipated every problem.”
He said nothing. But his expression confirmed it.
“Even if you’d known all of it,” she said, “you still would have come for me. You still would have gone after Penharrow.” She paused. “You’ve kept us alive for nearly a week against impossible odds.”
“We might not survive this storm.”
“We might not. But we will fight.” She held his gaze. “Not letting Penharrow win is sufficient motivation.”
Something shifted in his face. Not quite a smile, but an easing.
“We should try to sleep,” he said. “The storm might blow itself out by morning. The horses will be fine at the back here. They’re hungry but I don’t have any feed.”
They huddled together in the back of the cave, all three of them, in a close circle for warmth, Webb between them.
It was unavoidably intimate. Megan was pressed against Oliver’s side with Webb’s weight against her other shoulder, and the heat of Oliver’s body was the only thing standing between her and the cold that had been working its way into her bones for hours.
She was aware of him with an attention she didn’t want.
She knew how to be wary of men, had learned it young, and it had served her, and she had been particularly careful to learn the wariness that mattered most, the wariness of kindness.
Penharrow had been kind, at first. The stable hand who had reported her first escape attempt to him had been kind too, until he wasn’t.
She’d learned that the kind ones were worth fearing most, because they made you trust things you shouldn’t, made you soft in places that couldn’t afford to be soft.
She had held herself tightly closed for fourteen years. It had kept her alive.
Pressed against Oliver’s side in the dark, she was aware of a loosening she didn’t know what to do with.
It had nothing to do with desire, or not primarily.
It was something more fundamental than that.
It was the reluctant, cellular recognition that she felt safer here than she had felt in any closed room for as long as she could remember.
That her body, which had learned to remain vigilant even in sleep, had slowly made a separate assessment of its own.
She didn’t trust it. She was aware of not trusting it. But she could feel the loosening happening anyway, incremental and unwilling, like ice in early spring that doesn’t want to melt but can’t help it.
The storm raged on.
Hours passed. Oliver drifted. Megan lay awake and listened to the wind and tried not to think about the fact that she was getting warmer.
When Oliver woke, his eyes found hers in the dark with a directness she’d come to recognize as simply the way he looked at things. No performance in it. No reading her expression for what she wanted to see there.
“Tell me about James,” she said quietly.
She wasn’t sure why she asked it. Partly distraction.
Partly because she’d been thinking about the way he sometimes went somewhere distant when James’s name came up, and she’d found herself wanting to understand that distance.
Wanting to know what it looked like when a person lost someone they cared about.
Oliver was quiet for a moment. Then he pulled her slightly closer, purely practical, and she let him, and he began.
“We met at Eton. I was the heir to a dukedom, expected to be arrogant and insufferable. James was the third son of a baron, expected to go into the church or the military. We should have had nothing in common.”
“But you did.”
“We both hated the pretense. The posturing.” He paused, and she felt the quality of it, not performed reluctance, but genuine remembering.
“James once told me he could see through my mask to the person underneath. The boy whose parents had just died, who was being raised by an uncle who saw him as the heir to a title before anything else.” His voice was steady and quiet, and she felt the cost of that steadiness.
“James was the only person who ever knew the real me. Not the Marquess. Not the cavalry officer. Just Oliver.”
“And now he’s gone.”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you’re doing this? Pure revenge?”
The question came out more direct than she intended. But she’d learned, in this last week, that directness was one of the things he responded to genuinely. That it met a quality in him.
“It started that way,” he admitted. “I wanted Penharrow dead for what he did to James. I thought I could use you to destroy him.” She felt him hold still, giving her the honesty of that without dressing it up. “But it’s not about that anymore.”
“Then what is it about?”
He was quiet for a moment. Choosing words rather than reaching for the nearest ones.
“You,” he said. “It’s about you. A woman who was stolen as a child and survived things that should have broken her.
Who tends a wounded man and crosses a freezing river and never once complains about the cold or the hunger or the danger.
” Another pause. “I understood, somewhere in the middle of all this, that some things are worth fighting for past the point where revenge has anything to do with it.”
Megan didn’t answer immediately. She lay there in the dark with his words settling around her and felt the loosening go further than she’d intended to let it.
She thought about what she was about to say. She was aware it was a gift, and that gifts given from a position like hers were never simple. She gave them rarely and she did not take them back once given.
“I trust you,” she said quietly. “In case you want to know why.” She felt him go still.
“You came back into the river. You share your food even when there isn’t enough for one person.
You look at me like I’m a person, not a problem to be solved or a possession to be managed.
” She stopped, then made herself finish it.
“And when you talk about your friend, I hear grief. Love. I think a man who can love someone that way can’t be entirely what you’ve been telling me you are. ”
She felt him absorb it. The silence that followed differed from the silences before it: fuller somehow, more careful.
He didn’t rush to answer. He sat with what she’d said, and the fact of him sitting with it, not deflecting it or folding it immediately into something else, was itself a kind of answer.
When he finally spoke, his voice was lower than before.
“I want you,” he said. “I should say that alongside the rest of it. Not because it changes anything or because I would act on it. But I’ve wanted you since before I had any right to, and you’ve just been more honest with me than almost anyone has been, and you deserve the same in return. ” A pause. “So. Not entirely noble.”
Megan was quiet for a moment.
“Not so noble,” she said. “That’s honest, at least. Better than pretty lies.”
And she didn’t move away.
She felt it register in him, that small fact. The particular quality of stillness that settled over him in response, as though he were holding something he didn’t want to disturb.
She didn’t examine what she felt herself. She noted it and set it to one side, filed under things that would need attending to when she had the room for them. When she wasn’t frozen and hungry and being hunted across the mountains of Wales.
“Stop telling me all the reasons I shouldn’t trust you,” she said. “I already know them.”
“Then why—”
“I told you why.” Her fingers found his in the dark, threading through them. “That’s the reason. You don’t need a better one.”
He turned his hand over. Held hers.
They fell silent. The storm continued its assault. And in the darkness, Megan lay pressed against this impossible, careful, grief-carrying man and felt the last of the grip she’d held for fourteen years loosen another degree, entirely against her will, and didn’t try to stop it.
The storm lasted two days.
Two days of howling wind and driving snow, of hunger that gnawed like a living thing, of cold so intense that Oliver lost feeling in his fingers and toes.
He and Webb took turns making sure the horses had water, packing snow into the rock crevices and letting it melt.
The animals were too cold to care much about food. So were the rest of them.
But they survived.
On the morning of the third day, Megan woke to silence.
The wind had stopped. The snow had ceased. Beyond the cave entrance, the world was white and gleaming and so still it looked like something in a dream.
Oliver was already awake. He was standing at the cave entrance looking out at the transformed landscape, and she watched him shift from a man who had been waiting through the night into a man with a plan.
She’d noticed it before, that transition.
Something in his posture, in the way his attention organized itself.
She found it, against everything she’d intended, reassuring.
“It’s over,” she said.
He turned. “We need to move today. Before we’re too weak to travel.”
She stood, her muscles screaming in protest, and went to check on Webb.
“Tell me we’re close,” Webb said, without opening his eyes.
“One day’s ride,” Oliver said. “Maybe two in this snow.”
“Wonderful,” Webb said. “Absolutely wonderful.”
Megan almost smiled.
Oliver spent an hour preparing for departure.
He distributed the last of their food without ceremony, giving the larger portions to her and Webb despite their protests, in the manner of a man who considers the argument already settled.
He checked his pistols, checked the horses, checked the ground ahead with the focused calm of someone who has decided on his next step and is simply executing it.
She watched him and thought about what he’d said in the dark.
I want you. Said plainly, without artifice, alongside everything else, as though it were simply one more honest thing he owed her.
She put it away again. Carefully. In the same place she’d put the other things.
When they finally set out, leading the horses through the deep snow, Megan walked beside Oliver and didn’t speak, and he didn’t press her to, and the silence between them differed from the silence of a week ago. It had a texture now. A history.
She wasn’t sure what to do with that.
But she was, for the first time in longer than she could account for, something close to glad to be alive.