Chapter 14
She waited until the castle was fully, deeply quiet.
Not the surface quiet of a house where people had gone to their rooms, but the real quiet, that settled into old stone after midnight, when the fires had burned down to coals and the final footstep on the last stair had long since faded.
She sat on the edge of her bed in the borrowed night-robe and counted her own heartbeats and told herself, twice, that she wouldn’t do this.
Then she got up and went, anyway.
Oliver’s room was two corridors from hers; she’d noted it without meaning to in the way she’d spent fourteen years noting exits and distances and the position of every person who had power over her.
Old habit. She moved through the dark without a candle because the moonlight through the high windows was enough, and because she didn’t want a candle.
A candle meant intention. A candle meant she couldn’t tell herself, if she lost her nerve in the corridor and turned back, that she’d merely been restless.
She would not turn back.
She knocked twice, quietly.
The pause on the other side was brief. Then the door opened, and Oliver was there in shirtsleeves and breeches, his feet bare, his hair disordered in the way it never was during daylight hours, and the candlelight from within the room fell across him in a way that made it very difficult to remember any of the careful things she had planned to say.
He looked at her. His expression moved through surprise, then a rapid, controlled assessment, and then something quieter and more careful that settled in his eyes and stayed there.
“Megan.” His voice was low, steady. Not unwelcoming. Not anything she could easily categorize. “Is something wrong?”
“No.” She held his gaze. “May I come in?”
Another pause. Shorter this time. He stepped back from the door.
The room was warmer than the corridor, the fire still alive enough to throw a low, amber light across the floorboards and the rumpled evidence of a man who had been lying awake rather than sleeping.
His boots were by the chair. A book was open face down on the nightstand.
She noted all of it and then looked back at him, because looking at the room was avoidance, and she had not come all the way down two dark corridors in order to practice avoidance.
“I want to ask you something,” she said. “And I’d like you to hear all of it before you answer.”
Oliver leaned against the wall beside the door, arms crossed, watching her with that particular quality of attention he gave to things he was taking seriously. “All right.”
She had rehearsed this. She had sat on the edge of her bed for the better part of an hour rehearsing it, moving the words around, discarding the ones that were too naked and the ones that were too composed and the ones that sounded like something she’d constructed to protect herself.
What she’d arrived at in the end was simply the truth, unvarnished, because anything else felt like an insult to both of them.
“We leave tomorrow,” she said. “And everything that happens after that—London, the lawyers, the inquiry—I don’t know what any of it will look like.
I don’t know how long it takes. I don’t know where I am in it, what I become, where I go when it’s finished.
” She kept her voice even. “I have learned, these last weeks, not to assume that what I want will still be available to me at some future point when things are more settled. Things are never settled. There is only now, or there is nothing.”
Oliver said nothing. He was very still.
“I want to stay with you tonight,” Megan said.
“I want…” She stopped. Began again. “I am not here out of gratitude. I want you to know that clearly, before anything else, because I know that’s the thing you’d wonder.
I am not here because you saved me and I feel I owe you something.
I am here because for the first time in my adult life I want something for myself, freely, without any calculation of what it costs or who it serves or whether I will be punished for it afterward.
” She looked at him steadily. “I want you. That is the whole of it. And I wanted you to know that I chose this. That I’m choosing you, Oliver. That this is mine to give.”
The silence that followed was very full.
Oliver uncrossed his arms. He didn’t move toward her, not yet, but something in the careful architecture of his posture shifted, opened, in a way she hadn’t seen from him before.
“You don’t have to—” he began.
“I know I don’t have to. I said I’m choosing to. Those are different things and you understand the difference or I wouldn’t be standing here.”
The edge of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something more serious than a smile.
“I’m going to ask you something,” he said quietly. “And I want you to answer honestly, because we’ve managed honesty with each other so far, and I don’t want to lose that now of all times.”
“Ask.”
“Are you afraid that I’ll turn you away?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. And because she had just said she’d come here for honesty, replied, “Yes.”
“Why?”
The word landed the way it always did when he used it, simply, without pressure, with that complete attention that made evasion feel not just pointless but somehow beside the point of who she wanted to be.
“Because I am not…” She stopped. Began again, more slowly.
“Penharrow used me. For years. And I know that what happened in that house was not my fault and not my choice and not a reflection of my worth. I know that, here.” She touched her temple.
“But the rest of me knows something different, some nights. It seemed possible that you might look at me and see…” She lifted her chin.
“Used goods. There’s no more elegant way to say it than that. ”
Oliver moved.
He crossed the room to her in three strides, and he stopped close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, could see the exact expression in his eyes, which was not pity and not performance and not the particular careful gentleness of a man managing a fragile thing.
It was hunger. Clean and direct and barely contained, and the effort of containing it was visible in the set of his jaw and the tension in his hands, which had not touched her.
“Listen to me,” he said, low and entirely serious.
“I want you more than I want my next breath. I have wanted you since you stood in a window barred lodge and looked at me like you’d tear my throat out if I was another one of his men.
I want you in ways I have spent the last two weeks constructing very elaborate arguments with myself about, because you had been through enough without me adding to it.
” He held her gaze without any wavering at all.
“There is nothing in me that sees what you have just described. There is no version of you, no history of you, nothing that was done to you that changes what I see when I look at you. Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” she said. Her voice was slightly less steady than she would have liked.
“Good.” He still hadn’t touched her. “I have one more question for you, and then I’m done asking questions.”
She nodded.
“Is this what you want? Not what you think you should want, not what gratitude suggests, not what the fact of us leaving tomorrow makes you feel you’d regret missing. What you actually want.”
She reached up and put her hand against his jaw. Felt the slight roughness of it, the warmth of his skin, the way his breath changed fractionally at the contact.
“Yes,” she said. “Oliver. Yes.”
He kissed her.
Not the way a man kisses a woman he’s uncertain of, cautious and restrained and waiting to be stopped.
Not anything tentative. He kissed her like a man who had been waiting with great discipline for permission to do exactly this and had intended to do it properly the moment it was granted.
One hand came up to cup her face, the other finding the small of her back and drew her in, and Megan forgot, briefly and completely, every composed thing she had told herself about managing this sensibly.
She kissed him back.
She kissed him back with everything she’d carefully contained in polished corridors and borrowed dresses and formal dining rooms for the past day, everything she’d contained for longer than that, across frozen rivers and mountain passes and nights in shepherd’s huts when she’d listened to him breathe in the dark and told herself firmly that wanting was not the same as having and some things were not available to her.
He was available to her.
He was kissing her with a hand in her hair and his forehead coming down to rest against hers when they finally broke apart, both of them breathing unevenly, and she felt him looking at her in the particular way he had, cataloguing, assessing, making certain.
“Still all right?” he said.
“Still all right,” she managed. “Don’t stop.”
He didn’t stop.
He was gentle in a way that had nothing to do with fragility.
She understood the difference, had been handled with the false gentleness of a man who treated breakable things carefully because they were his to break, and this was nothing like that.
Oliver was gentle in the way he did everything, with full attention, with intelligence, with a quality of care that was entirely about her and not at all about himself.
He noticed things. She hadn’t expected him to notice so much.
The slight catch of her breath when his hands moved to her shoulders, the way she went still for one moment when the robe slipped, the difference between still and afraid, because he tracked those things and adjusted for them without making her feel tracked or adjusted for.
“You can tell me,” he said, against her hair. “If anything…”
“I know,” she said. “I know I can.”