“I want ye to tell me what happened.” He set the candle on the mahogany stand beside her bed.
She glanced from it to him to the door. She should scream. Lord Cunningham would have wanted her to scream. But some strange nudge told her the old Meg would not have cowered.
She stood instead, facing him. “Who are you?”
“Tom.” When she only blinked, he said again, “Tom McGwen. Ye were hurt. Something happened to ye. Something to make ye forget.”
“How?”
“Someone set upon ye and yer uncle. There was a fire.”
“How did I get here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was there anyone else?” She hated that her voice quivered. She raised her chin to make up for it. “In the house, when the fire started. My mother and father or a—”
“They died when ye were four.”
“Brothers or sisters?”
He shook his head.
“My … uncle?”
His face tightened. His eyes slanted downward, and when they edged back up, they brimmed in the candlelight. He shook his head again, as if he wanted to speak but couldn’t.
Bile crawled through her.
Threads unraveled, all the pink and green and white of the dream she’d fabricated. There was no sweet mother in a pinafore, sending flowers to the wind. No loving father waiting at some cottage window, hoping for her to come home.
No one had loved her, save an uncle? He was dead? She was alone?
“And you?” Her legs threatened to give, so she backed into the edge of the bed without looking at him. “Who are you … to me?”
Too many things reared inside him. The dimly lit kitchen back of the apothecary shop, where she’d sewn the rip in his coat while he twisted her hair into outrageous braids. The knitted stockings she always left out to dry on the sill of her bedchamber window. Her indignation when he snatched them. Her burning face when she found them in unlikely places.
Then, just the sand along that quiet moonlit shore, where nothing mattered and everything was still. She had touched him with sandy fingers. She’d splashed. Laughed. Angered at him, then forgiven him, all in the space of a heartbeat.
The girl standing across from him now looked different.
But the same too.
Her stance was rigid, alert, and she wiggled her toe under the hem of her nightgown. She always did that. The reason her stockings ever had holes. Another matter Mr. Foxcroft scolded her for, as if the scuffed boots and lost hair ribbons and torn dresses were not enough.
In a second of unbidden impulse, he leaned forward and touched her lips with his.
Lightly.
His heart stuttered.
Then …
The sweetness of her, the wholeness, sucked him in like a maelstrom.Meg.Safe. Alive. Here with him. He shouted at his mind to pull back, to stop his arms from pulling her close, but the weeks without her had severed his control. She was all the things she’d never been before. Cold and unyielding and scented of smells he did not know—
Her palm stung his cheek.
Twice.
