Jake had shown Megan into his small guest bedroom, a room he hadn't even considered the night he first brought her to his home. She had looked at him in weary confusion when he opened the door, threw up the window to let in some fresh air, and turned back the spread to check for clean sheets, but she hadn't protested.
The cats had followed her into the room and curled up on the bed. He'd wanted to join them. He still wanted to.
And she wouldn't send him away.
That was the hell of it: knowing he could open the door to her room and she would welcome him into her bed; not knowing whether she would be welcoming him for who he was or only as another means to escape facing the horror. And not knowing why her reasons mattered so much.
She kept the light on for so long he thought she must be sleeping with it, but at last the sliver shining through the narrow opening under the door blacked out. The living room was already dark, lighted only by the spill from the kitchen doorway. He moved over to the sofa, facing the mantel, and leaned back into Mattie's pillow as he propped his aching left leg on the coffee table.
Damn, he was tired, as tired as though he hadn't stolen a few hours of sleep that morning. So tired that all the pieces of the puzzle swirling around them took on the same size and shape and color.
And now there was another piece: Megan's father.
Without getting up to find a clock or turning on a light, Jake could only calculate the time. He added an hour for the difference in time zones. One o'clock or thereabouts in D.C. Not an unreasonable hour. Especially since the sheriff had told Megan to call her father, and her doctor had also insisted she call him.
Jake didn't know the senator or Megan's stepmother other than through a few superficial encounters he'd had because of Roger and Helen. Where had Megan been during those times? When he reflected now, he realized that he should have run into her on any of a number of occasions, but that she had been strangely absent whenever he let Helen draw him into that world. Off with Project Food? Possibly. Or just left out?
As Senator McIntyre's chief of staff and his son-in-law, Roger had lived in McIntyre's pocket and in his house. Helen had visited her brother often, sometimes without Jake, because he knew too well what really drew her to D.C. It wasn't family loyalty; it was power and prestige, even if only secondhand. And wealth, which somehow had managed to rub off on both Roger and Helen.
He eased his leg from the coffee table and stretched up from the couch, feeling bones and joints and muscles all protesting one more step. He didn't need a light to dial the highly guarded, unlisted number or to look it up in his personal directory. He'd long ago memorized it, although three months ago, when Helen had left him lying in a hospital bed, he'd sworn he'd never use it again.
Wilkins, the senator's houseman, answered, repeating only the number as an acknowledgment, and sounding as alert as if it were one in the afternoon instead of the middle of the night.
"This is Jake Kenyon. I want to speak to Senator McIntyre."
"Ah, yes, Mr. Kenyon, I recognize your voice. Unfortunately, the senator is not available."
Jake wanted to growl, but Wilkins was the only person in the senator's household who had not treated him as though he were an intruder, a pariah.
"It's about his daughter," he said. "It's important."
"Miss Megan?" Wilkins asked with mild surprise. "Of course. I had forgotten that you're in the same rural area. I trust she's recovering from her ordeal?"
"Recovering?" Jake bit back an oath. "I suppose. As well as she can, considering that three nights ago twelve armed law enforcement people burst in on her at midnight with a misdirected search warrant, today our local sheriff attempted to blackmail her into not filing a formal complaint about the raid, and tonight someone else broke in, blasted a hole in her bedroom wall with a shotgun, trashed the rest of the room, and stole the journal that the senator's friend, Dr. Kent, had insisted she keep to chronicle her recovery."
"Was she injured?"
Jake couldn't ignore the genuine concern in Wilkins's voice. "No. Not physically," he said, a little softer, a little less aggressively. "Now will you connect me with the senator?
"I'm sorry, Mr. Kenyon. He isn't here."
"Damn! Doesn't she have anyone she can depend on?"
"You, sir? You seem to have assumed a role of responsibility." As though realizing he had overstepped the bounds of his employment, his voice immediately regained its habitual formality. "I will relay your message to the senator when I hear from him, but I'm not sure when that will be. I believe I can tell you—for Miss Megan's information, of course—that it is because of her that he is not here. Her allegations about Villa Castellano proved so disturbing that he has personally gone on a fact-finding mission."
"I can't see Jack McIntyre slogging through the jungle," Jake said. "Where can I reach him?"
"I'm sorry, sir. I really can't give you that information. Perhaps Mr. Davies, his new chief of staff, could. If you will leave me your telephone number, and tell me where we can reach Miss Megan, I will advise him of your telephone call first thing in the morning."
"No," Jake said. "Megan is going to be unavailable for a few days, and I'm going to be hard to reach. I'll contact him later."
So the senator had gone on a fact-finding mission, had he? Jake pondered that as he made his way into his dark bedroom. But where? Villa Castellano or somewhere in Pitchlyn County?
He didn't even try to stop his groan as he stretched out, fully clothed except for his boots but in his own bed for a change. What he ought to do was fill the tub with hot water and use that semi- antique whirlpool attachment he kept for the times his body claimed he had overworked it, but right now he couldn't face digging out the gadget and connecting all the wires and grounds. Right now he couldn't face looking at himself in the glare of the bathroom's overhead light.
The scars on his face and hand were bad enough. In the tub, he'd be looking at the mangled mess that was his left leg, at the puckers, marks, and slashes that were permanent reminders of the two bullets that had found his chest and the surgeons' efforts to patch up the damage they had done there.
It was enough to terrify small children and send women shrinking away in revulsion.
Send Megan shrinking away?
He wadded the two pillows beneath his head and lay looking out at the rain-soaked landscape, now lighted by a still-bright but waning moon. He wouldn't go to her. Wouldn't stretch out beside her. Wouldn't gather her in his arms and follow the desires of his body and hers.
For God's sake. He had only known her three days, and it felt as though she had been a part of his life forever. Three days, he reminded himself, during which she had been reeling from one attack after the other.
He ought to go out tonight, ought to try once again to find out who was coming onto the property and why. But he couldn't. Not with Megan in the house. Not after what had happened today.
He wouldn't sleep, he promised himself as he felt his muscles finally beginning to relax. He'd just rest a while and examine Megan's suspicion.
Would the senator send someone to steal her diary? It didn't make much sense, but then little of the high-powered political scene made much sense to Jake. If he had, how did that fit into the pattern of other things that had been happening?
The problem was, nothing fit. Correction, he told himself as he felt his eyelids growing heavy. Nothing seemed to fit. Somehow it did, it had to. And if he could only figure out how, he'd have all the answers he'd need.
Megan lay back in the strange bed, wide-eyed, dry-eyed, long after Jake had closed the door behind him and left her alone.
Alone. God, she had been alone so long.
If he had wanted to stay with her, what would she have done? Would she have shamed herself and stunned him with how much she needed him? Or would she have been the good little girl she had always been and denied herself by sending him away?
Always denying herself. Why?
Always deferring to others. Why?
Always accepting second best, or less, as her due. Why?
When she was very small, she had wanted love. Had wanted affection. Had wanted to know she belonged to someone in a special way, not just as property.
Her father hadn't been capable of that kind of love; her stepmother hadn't even wanted to try. By the time Megan finished school, she might have been envious of her friends who seemed to have that missing element, but she had long since stopped hoping for it herself. Not even with Roger had she really expected it. At last she could admit that he had been her father's choice and had seemed as good as any. With him, she had hoped for affection of a sort, respect, a sharing of mutual interests. With him, she had not had even that much.
Why had she been willing to settle?
She'd never thought to question before. But the attitudes of a lifetime were almost impossible to break. She couldn't face those questions any more than she could face the events of the past months. Of the past day.
Lydia. Megan grabbed that thought like the lifeline she had so often needed and so seldom had. Young innocent Lydia, with no more pressing problems than an unrequited love. She might only be a product of Megan's imagination, but in spending time with her, Megan wouldn't have to think about all that pressed in around her, wouldn't have to think about her father's betrayal and her trashed bedroom and stolen journal and the woman who cried in her sleep and Jake, awake even yet, prowling restlessly through the house. Wouldn't think about how much she wanted to open the bedroom door and call him to her. Wouldn't think about how mortified she'd be when he turned her down.
Lydia.
Oh, yes. Safety lay in thinking of Lydia, not in those other things. Quietly Megan slipped out of bed, retrieved the brown leather binder, and carried it back to the bed.
Lydia, she thought again, summoning images of the young girl at work at the quilt frame, wading in the creek with her brother, complaining to her diary of her aunt's bigotry, learning fine stitchery with the sisters at school, and dreaming her girlish dreams of Sam Hooker.
Megan looked down at the page and frowned. Lydia hadn't dated this entry. But then, Megan had stopped dating her entries too. And Lydia—it was Lydia's handwriting, but something was wrong, terribly wrong. Hesitantly, she again bent over the page.
I must release this fear and hatred before its poison destroys me and the little that has been left to me.
I once thought myself a strong person; now I know that until the events of this summer I had never been tried.
Megan bit back a moan. "Oh God," she whispered. "Oh my God." She recognized the emotions of this entry as clearly as she recognized the handwriting. The woman who cried in her sleep. The woman who wanted to invite the unknown man to her bed but knew she never would. The woman who was so different from young Lydia that Megan had believed she had to be herself.
What had happened? What could possibly have changed Lydia Tanner from the laughing schoolgirl who was looking forward with every fiber in her young body to returning home, to seeing Sam again, to convincing him that she was the one to show him the way back to life and to love?
Megan had wanted escape, but she could no more close the journal now than she could have closed the door on Lydia had she materialized in front of her.
With her heart pounding so hard she heard it echoing around her, felt it in the tremor of her hands, Megan again lifted the pen. For a moment it poised above the page, ominously still. For a moment she thought she might be spared a knowledge she wasn't sure she wanted. But then, taking on a life of its own, the pen began to move.
I killed a man.
It seems strange that I can write those words so calmly and yet cannot bear even to think of the events that led up to an act completely alien to the person I once was. But perhaps this is merely another symptom of the madness I feel growing ever stronger within me.
If only I could bear to speak of what happened. But I cannot. And even if I could bring myself to do so, I know it must remain our secret. To reveal it would bring only shame and possibly death.
So I will write. I will spill everything out on these pages, and then I will commit them and, please God, the madness that threatens me, to the fire. . . .
Jake woke sometime later as a fresh wave of the storm made a pass over the mountains. He noted the rumble of the thunder still rolling away into the distance as the cause of the noise that had awakened him and saw the trees outside his window, twisting and dancing in the rising wind. He smiled, thinking that anyone out on the mountain tonight was going to be miserable. Then, after listening a moment for the absence of any other noise in the house, he settled back into the pillows.
But something wasn't right. Megan?
He eased out of bed and down the hall. Her door was open, her room dark. Silently he turned the corner into the living room and stopped. The small light from over the kitchen sink cast just enough glow for him to see her sitting on the hearth in front of the open fireplace, legs bent beneath her and tucked demurely under the hem of her tentlike all-encompassing white nightgown, as she had sat other nights brushing her long silken hair. He wanted to go to her, but he'd known the pain of rejection too many times to easily subject himself to it again. . . .
Whoa! Where in the hell had that come from? Jake clamped a hand on the door facing to steady himself as a chill went through him. The room seemed to shift and spin and then right itself.
And there was Megan, sitting cross-legged, tailor fashion, on the hearth in front of his wood-burning stove, wearing another of those white India-cotton nightgowns that reminded him of a peasant's wedding dress, that covered her from breast to toe but left her arms and shoulders and her vulnerable throat bare. Her hair was short, as short as it had been hours ago when he'd forced himself to walk away from her bedroom door.
Next to her, as close as he could get without climbing in her lap, sat Deacon. The dog's attentions weren't unwanted. Megan had turned to him, thrown her arms around his neck, buried her face in his ruff, and now held on to him as though her life depended upon it.
Maybe it did, if what Jake had experienced was anything like the strange episodes she had been trying to explain to him.
He walked across the room, his steps muffled by his socks on the smooth hardwood floor, until he stood in front of her. What he wanted to do was sweep her up in his arms and carry her back to his bed, but he knew that even if she had been willing, his leg wasn't. Instead, he knelt on his right knee. "I give better hugs," he said quietly.
Slowly she turned her head from its hiding place in Deacon's ruff to look at him. She wasn't startled; instead, she seemed almost resigned to the inevitability of his having come for her. In the dim light from the kitchen he saw tear tracks on her cheeks and pain in her eyes.
"Bad dreams?" he asked.
She nodded and closed her eyes briefly. "Something like that."
He held his hands out to her, not touching her but offering, waiting. "Come here."
"Oh, please," she whispered as she unwound her arms from Deacon's neck and took his hands. "Yes."
He pulled her into his arms, and she came willingly, trustingly, holding him much as she had grasped Deacon, as tremors racked her fragile body.
There was nothing sexual in her embrace, far from it. Megan seemed so much a lost child that Jake despised himself for the desire that gripped him. Too soon her tremors stopped, brought to a halt, he suspected, by a supreme act of control. Then she pulled slightly away from him and he saw the tears streaming down her cheeks.
"Don't tell me not to cry," she said, in a determined but tear-clogged voice.
Jake remembered Barbara's admonitions, remembered Megan's too-controlled reactions to events that should have sent her into hysterics. "No," he said, "I won't"
He rose to his feet and tugged on her hands until she stood also. Still tempted to try a grandstand play like sweeping her into his arms and carrying her from the room, Jake felt doubly frustrated, knowing that physically he could not, not tonight, and that he shouldn't, even if he had been able.
Instead, he led her to the overstuffed chair at the end of the sofa, settled into it, and pulled her onto his lap. He pushed her head down into the hollow of his throat and wrapped his arms around her.
He felt her small start before she settled against him. Now he had surprised her. Hell! He'd surprised himself. He'd never thought of himself as being a particularly sensitive person; too often Helen had accused him of being just the opposite.
She cried furtively, with tiny little tremors and whimpers, like someone ashamed or afraid of being found crying. He said nothing, merely held her as he listened to the thunder rumbling in the distance, stroked her arm, her hair, made comforting circles on her back, and felt totally incompetent in this business of giving aid and comfort.
Finally she hiccupped once, twice, and began swiping at her cheeks with her fingers.
So much for all this sensitivity crap, he thought with disgust. He didn't have a handkerchief, and the only disposable paper products in the house were toilet tissue and towels. He leaned over slightly, snagged Mattie's pillow off the end of the couch, and wrestled it out of its case, remembering as he did so another time when he had done something similar for—it had been Megan, hadn't it?—yes, for this woman.
He tried to hand her the case, but she only looked at it, shook her head reluctantly, and continued to wipe her fingers across her cheeks.
"Here," he said as he gently pushed her fingers away and began drying her cheeks with the pillow case. For some reason, that only started the flood again. But this time, instead of sobs and hiccups the tears came silently, as she looked up at Jake with something like wonder in her eyes, and this time, instead of leaning into his embrace, she finally snatched the pillowcase and buried her face in it.
"Why were you sitting in here hugging my dog?" Jake asked.
She lowered the case and twisted her hands in it. For a long, silent moment he thought she wouldn't answer. "Because it was lonely in the dark," she said softly.
"You could have come to me."
She tilted her head slightly to look at him in the dim light of the room, studying his eyes, his expression, the set of his mouth, weighing what she found there and accepting it. Accepting him. "Now I know that."
The softly spoken words carried a wealth of trust, a wealth of longing. They touched him in a way Jake had never thought possible and at the same time wrapped a crushingly heavy burden around his heart.
"I thought you were asleep," he said. "If not, I would never have gone to bed and left you alone in the night."
"I know. That's why I finally turned off the light. You need your rest, Jake. I've deprived you of it too often."
"And your needs, Megan? What of them?"
"I need to face my past. Isn't that what everyone has been telling me?"
"Alone? In the dark? With nothing but a dog to hold on to?"
"And now you," she said.
The dim light from the kitchen still held them in shadow, and the thunder still rumbled in the distance, but Jake felt as though everything in his life had changed. "Yes," he said, pushing her head back into the hollow of his throat and wrapping her tightly in his arms. "And now me."
For minutes, as Jake listened to the soft sounds of her breathing, to the diminishing rush of the wind through the trees outside, and to the occasional splatter of rain tossed against the window screens, she lay quietly against him. Then he felt her shoulders tense slightly, as though she were gathering strength.
"My mother died when I was four," she said. "I didn't understand why she was gone. Someone, I don't know who, spanked me for crying and told me to act like a big girl. No one would talk to me about her. And later, probably much later but I can't be sure of that either, I overheard my father and the woman who became my stepmother discussing how much I should be told, or whether I should be told at all, because I really needed to forget my mother and talking about her kept me from doing so."
"Bastard," Jake muttered.
"No. Misguided, maybe, but I can't believe he was malicious. At least I didn't then. The night you rescued me," she said, not raising her head, making no effort to leave the safety of his arms. "When I was screaming?"
Jake nodded and rubbed his hand along her arm, trying to dispel the chill he felt.
"I remember some of it," she told him. "And one of the things I remember is thinking that the screams were too much for what was happening. Another was that I wasn't the one screaming, that whatever was happening wasn't really happening, or was happening to someone else.
"There was a girl at the clinic, a young native girl no more than fourteen. She screamed for a long time. I heard her for days as we walked through the jungle before I was at last able to turn off the sound.
"Tonight, when I found the destruction in my bedroom, I heard her again. I thought maybe she was the one . . ."
Jake closed his eyes against the horrors Megan must have faced. If he wanted to do that, how much more must she? "And now?"
"I worked on my journal for a while tonight. Not for the right reasons—you know, putting all the pieces together—but because I thought I had found another way to escape. It didn't work."
"Megan," he murmured, rubbing his cheek against her soft, sweet- scented hair. "Oh, Megan."
"I think the screams are mine, Jake. And not just for Villa Castellano and Sheriff Pierson's raid but for something else, something buried so deep I don't really know it. And even though I don't want to, even though the thought of discovering something so horrible scares me senseless, I have to find out what it is."
He carried her to bed. To his bed. After all, he had done it before. And if his body protested, that was too dammed bad. The need tonight—hers and his—was too great.
He stretched out beside her and gathered her to him in another of those passionless hugs he had been restricting himself to all evening, which she accepted, welcomed even, as she had all evening, and all went well, until suddenly it wasn't enough for him. He cradled her face in his hand and bent over her, telling himself it was just for a kiss, one kiss, one moment of sharing such as they had experienced in her kitchen, that was all, nothing more—
—and she cringed away from him.
He held himself still for a moment, cursing himself for wanting what he had known he couldn't have, cursing himself for rushing her at a time when she had to be damn near shell-shocked, and then eased down beside her.
"Jake." He heard the stunned disbelief in her voice, but for what, his actions or hers? "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
"Shh," he said. Cautiously, gently, he pulled her toward him in another of those damned passionless hugs. "It's all right," he promised, not knowing what it was but pretty sure that nothing was all right.
Except, he thought drowsily as he drew her slight weight next to him, as he felt her comforting warmth penetrating the chill that had too long been his life, as he drifted impossibly quickly toward sleep, she was in his arms and in his bed and in his life, this time to stay.
Of course I taught. On the first day of school I dressed in one of the dresses I had chosen a lifetime before but which now hung loosely on me, gathered the new books I had so carefully selected in that same lifetime, packed them into a satchel large enough to hold Sam's pistol, and allowed my brother to drive me to the small frame building halfway between our house and the community of Prescott.
This should have been a great honor for me. Although not one of the exceptional boarding schools the Choctaw Nation sponsored, this was a school for Choctaw children. The few white children and the even fewer freedmen's children had their own schools, which were less conveniently located than those for the children of the citizens.
Peter should not have been attending this school. He was of the age and of the privileged class to be sent back to the States for a more formal education, but he had refused to go. And although he had not given his reasons, I knew they in part concerned our father's latest moneymaking scheme. Daniel Tanner had decided raising cattle would be more profitable than attempting to raise cotton and had hired a number of workers to take care of the actual physical needs of his cattle and fields. And the workmen still came sporadically to work on the stone outbuilding.
"Lights, Lydia," our father had said when I asked about the building. "As in civilization. As in the gaslights your Aunt Margaret covets and does not yet have. Miners have been using carbide for years. With it contained outside the residence, it's perfectly safe. The plantation owners on the Red River use it."
That, of course, was the crowning argument. No question of safety from fire or explosion could counter it. No expense was too great, no extravagance too wild, when he felt he had been bested. The lighting fixtures he ordered had been arriving all summer, packed in crates of straw to protect the fragile cut glass and delicate crystals and painted isinglass. And if the white workmen seemed surly toward Peter or offensive toward me, our imaginations were working overtime because we feared progress.
So Peter didn't leave. Nor, for long weeks at a time, did Sam. Often I looked down the drive and saw him riding along the road past our house. Often, when I sat on the second-floor veranda outside my room, I felt him near. But he did not approach me. And I remembered him telling the army lieutenant that I was not, had never been, and never would be his woman. I'd known since the day I returned to this beautiful, harsh land that I would never be anyone's woman. Why then did the knowledge that I would never be Sam's bring me so much pain?
Why did his pain bring me so much more pain?
Because Sam was in pain. I saw it in the days I spent with Granny Rogers; I saw it in his eyes when he encouraged me to teach. I felt it in the distance he now kept between us, a distance that even when I was in the throes of my childish and probably embarrassing love for him he had not forced himself to keep.
I had eighteen students, ranging in age from tiny little Therese LeFlore to Will Henry. Most of my students were of mixed blood, because Sugarloaf County had been settled primarily by mixed bloods at the time of the removal from Mississippi, and its proximity to Fort Smith had made incursions and later intermarriage by whites or mixed-blood Cherokees from Arkansas possible.
Will's father, like ours, was one of those whites from Arkansas who capitalized on the advantages of Indian citizenship. Unlike ours, he hadn't been quite as successful in his business ventures as he had expected to be.
Will was a bully. With a quarter, or some said less, Choctaw blood, he looked down on those with more. With pretensions to wealth, he looked down on those with less. Peter stood toe to toe, even a little above him, in standing in the community, but several inches shorter in physical stature. Still, he stood up to him, defending those smaller or weaker than himself—and me.
Will decided he was much too important for me to discipline, much too fascinating for me to ignore, and, even though I was older, I was, after all, Daniel Tanner's daughter and would make a suitable wife for him. If, of course, I was or could be made malleable. And if, of course, I could be brought to succumb to his less than subtle advances.
Advances that once I would have met with a sharp slap of the ruler.
Advances that once I would have laughed about.
Advances that, because of his size, brought back too many memories for me to do anything but shrink into a silent shell, leaving Peter, valiant Peter, to defend me.
One day Peter was kept busy with our father's ventures and did not return in time to accompany me home from school. Will intercepted me at the turnoff to the tree-shaded road that led to our house and eventually to Granny Rogers's, a road that held too many memories of another interception, another oversized bully.
He attempted to grab my satchel from me, announcing that he would carry it. And then he attempted to grab me.
I panicked.
I swung the satchel at him, striking him in the chest and causing him to stagger, then tore out across the countryside—straight into the arms of one of my father's imported white workmen.
"Damn, little girl," he said. "What's got you so afraid? Looks like you need a man to take care of you."
Did he mean me harm? I will never know. But at that moment he was all my nightmares, all my fears.
I backed away from him, tugging Sam's gun from the satchel and pointing it at the workman, until I stood pressed against a tree with nowhere to run.
"She has one."
Sam's voice sounded through my panic.
"And if he ever catches you bothering her again," he said easily, "you'll be a dead man."
The man blanched. "Hell, Hooker. She came running right at me. I didn't hurt her."
"I know. That's why you're still alive. But maybe you'd better give serious thought to finding another job. Somewhere far away from here. Starting now."
I didn't watch as the man left. I was too mortified by my loss of control and still too caught up in my fear.
I felt Sam's hands on mine as he pried my fingers from the gun; then, cautiously, he took me in his arms, wrapping me in safety. "I'm sorry," I said. Over and over I repeated it. "I'm so sorry."
"No, I'm the one who should be sorry. I trusted your father and Peter to look out for you. I was wrong."
I became aware then of his arms around me, of his warmth, and of his closeness. Of his size. Of the strength which I knew in my heart, but not in my poor tortured mind, that he would never use against me. With a whimper I pushed him away. And he went.
"Lydia," he said, not touching me now but so close I still felt as though he did. "Lydia, look at me."
I could not step back; the tree held me captive. I tilted my head and looked up into his troubled eyes. "This isn't working, is it?"
I didn't know what he meant. My expression must have told him that.
"I thought that once you returned home you would begin to heal, that you would be able to put at least some of what happened behind you. but you haven't."
"How can I?" I asked him. "Please tell me how to forget."
He closed his eyes momentarily. "I don't know," he said. "But you can't go on this way, losing weight, looking like death, taking flight instead of fighting back."
I dipped my head, unable to look at him any longer. "Fighting did no good."
"Lydia."
I felt his hands on my shoulders, and even knowing who touched me, I tensed. I tensed but I forced myself not to flinch away.
"Oh, Lydia. What have I done to you? What have I done?"
"You?" I straightened my spine and faced him. "You've done nothing except rescue me. Still again."
"And still again after you have been hurt."
"Hurt? No. No, Sam. No one hurt me this time."
"No? Then why are you trembling? Why can you not look at me? You were frightened, and I was not there to prevent it. I want the right to be there always, Lydia. I want the right—"
Thick with emotion, his words broke off.
"What are you saying?"
He looked at me, lifted my face to his with a calloused palm, and curved his mouth in a bitter, twisted smile. "What I should have said to you before you left for school. I want to marry you."
I felt my heart catch before it raced upward to my throat. Once I would have given my life to hear him speak those words. Now I knew how truly impossible they were.
"I can't," I said in a choked whisper. "You of all people must know I can never truly be any man's wife."
"Yes," he said, and I heard the weight of the rest of my empty years in his voice. "Yes, I know."