Chapter 11 #3
Not the escape. Not the river crossing. Not Oliver coming back for her in the freezing current.
Those had been terrifying and desperate and vital, but the bath—the deep copper tub filled with hot water that smelled of lavender and rose, the soft cloth, the soap that lathered into something approaching luxury—that had undone her in a way that danger never quite had.
She’d cried. Silently, with her knees pulled to her chest and the water cooling around her, she’d cried until there was nothing left.
Now she sat before the fire in the bedchamber they’d given her, wrapped in a night robe of ivory silk so fine it whispered against her skin like a secret, and she tried to understand where she was.
Saxton Castle.
The name alone was enough to make her feel like an imposter.
She’d been shown to her room by a maid who’d curtsied to her, actually curtsied, as if Megan were someone worthy of the gesture.
The girl had laid out the borrowed nightgown and robe across the bed with careful hands, had asked if she required anything further, and had closed the door softly behind her when Megan couldn’t find the words to answer.
She hadn’t been able to answer because she’d been staring at the room.
It was beautiful. Of course, it was beautiful. She’d lived in beauty for fourteen years, silk curtains and fine furniture and pretty things carefully chosen to disguise the cage they’d decorated. She knew beauty but wasn’t dazzled by it.
This was different.
The room at the hunting lodge had been beautiful the way Penharrow was beautiful—deliberately, purposefully, with an edge beneath it that reminded you at every turn who owned it and who it was for. Every comfort designed to soften and bind and keep.
This room simply was. A fire that asked nothing of her. Curtains drawn against the dark and windows with no bars. A bed turned down with clean linen. A chair pulled close to the hearth as if someone had thought, here is a tired person who needs warmth, and made it ready.
Megan pulled the robe tighter around herself and looked into the flames.
She was out of Penharrow’s clutches.
The thought arrived the same way it had been arriving all evening, in waves she couldn’t quite brace against. She’d think it—you’re free—and her mind would still, like an animal that’s run so long it doesn’t know what to do when the ground levels out.
She’d wait for the catch. For the door to open and the familiar dread to flood in.
It didn’t come.
Just the fire. Just the silence. Just the distant sounds of a household settling into night, footsteps in corridors, the muffled closing of doors, the ordinary sounds of people who went to bed without fear.
She hadn’t heard sounds like that in years. She hadn’t known she’d missed them.
A maid had bobbed a curtsy at her in the corridor earlier, eyes down, cheeks pink with the effort of proper deference. Megan had stood completely still and had to stop herself from looking behind her to find whoever the girl was actually curtseying to.
The housekeeper had called her my lady twice before Megan remembered she was supposed to respond.
My lady.
She was nobody’s lady. She was a woman who couldn’t read her own name if it were written in front of her.
She was a woman who’d spent a week sleeping in shepherd’s huts and eating half-cooked hare by firelight.
She was a woman with scars on her back and gaps in her memory where her childhood should have been and fourteen years of a life she couldn’t speak about in polite company.
She most certainly was not a my lady.
And yet here she sat. In a room the size of the entire upper floor of the hunting lodge. In a castle that she’d get lost in. With a fire that didn’t require her to be grateful for it. Wrapped in silk, laid out for her by a girl who curtsied.
Where did she fit?
The question pressed against her chest, familiar and unwelcome.
She’d thought it in the lodge. She’d thought it in the mountains.
She’d thought it riding through the gates of this enormous castle as the grooms came running and the butler appeared on the steps and everyone moved with the particular efficiency of a well-run great house, and she’d sat on Oliver’s horse and thought I do not belong anywhere in this picture.
But then she hadn’t belonged at the hunting lodge either. She hadn’t belonged anywhere for so long.
Megan pressed her fingers against her lips.
She’d kissed Oliver this morning. Her choice, freely made, the first choice she could remember making for reasons that had nothing to do with survival or compliance or the avoidance of punishment.
She’d kissed him because she’d wanted to, because he’d talked about his falcon and she’d felt something in her chest crack open like a window thrown wide after a long winter.
And he’d kissed her back. Carefully at first, then not carefully at all, and she’d understood in that moment what it was supposed to feel like. What it was supposed to be when it was chosen rather than endured.
She closed her eyes.
She could not want Oliver Sommerset. The wanting was a luxury she absolutely could not afford.
He was heir to a dukedom. He had an uncle in the next wing who even now was probably telling him exactly what sort of inconvenience she represented.
She had no name, no family, no dowry, no history that could be spoken of without ruining every room she entered.
She was precisely the wrong kind of woman in precisely the wrong place.