Out here, alone with the blackness.
She didn’t fear the dark.
She should.
Damp grass parted around her legs, and the crescent moon cast off just enough light to glow through the treetops. She had not slept. Partly because she rose every hour, slipped to her uncle’s bedchamber, and peered into a still-empty room.
And partly—mostly—because Tom festered her. Like a thorn beneath her flesh, everything bothered her. The anger on his face when he’d leaned over her in the drawing room and scolded her not to raise her voice. The dinner table. What Lord Cunningham said.
The way Tom dug into himself, built bulwarks, and blocked her out.
All this time, she’d wanted him to leave her alone.
To forget her.
Then why in the name of mercy should any of this matter? Why could she not bear that he was … unhappy with her? Disappointed? Angry? Hurt?
She didn’t know what he was.
No more than she understood what she was doing now. But as she scaled the last hill and the cottage appeared over the rise, a rising sense of blood-heating anticipation glided through her. She waited until her breath evened.
What would she say?
He would demand to know what she was doing. How she could be so absurd.
The same questions she asked herself.
Her hand shook a little when she tapped her knuckles against the white-painted door.
Silence.
Then creaking. Thumping. The door whining open. “What are ye doing?” He leaned out with a bleary face, hair askew across his forehead, cheek dented as if he’d slept on his fist.
She said the first thing that came to her mind. “I came to sit with you.”
Tom leaned his shoulder into the doorframe. Either his brain was slush from sleep or Meg was three kinds of a fool. Had he fight in him, he would scold her—but he didn’t.
Not tonight.
Hesitating, she pulled the silky hood of a silver cloak from her head. “Have I fallen so deep in your despicable graces you will not ask me in?”
“Ye walked here in the dark?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I told you.”
Something untoward nearly sailed from his lips, but he clamped his mouth shut. He backstepped inside, clasping his hands behind his head. “Joanie is abed.”
“You were not, I see.” She moved to the table, where the Bible was sprawled out in front of a hastily scooted-back chair and a burnt-out candle. Her brow rose.
He frowned. “This isnae mine.”
“It would be no disgrace if it were.”
He whipped the book shut, then lit a candle to busy his hands.
