“Who did you do it for? You say it was driven by wanting better for your men’s families, but who were you doing it for?”
“Nobody.” He stopped, shaking his head. “No. My men. Their happiness was what was important. Loyalty dictated it. Their loyalty to me, my loyalty to them.”
Her head curled down along his chest as her arm slid around his torso. “I am sad for the loss of your innocence. The loss of the boy you once were.”
“I don’t remember that boy, Ness.”
She held in a sigh. “Then there is nothing to grieve.”
“Exactly.”
She exhaled a long breath.
Maybe he’d been right all along. He wasn’t that boy. Hadn’t been him for a very long time.
So did it even matter if he remembered or not?
And why was it so bloody important to her?
{ Chapter 18 }
“I know this place.”
Talen looked across the carriage at Ness as she scooted forward on the cushion, her right hand going to the bottom of the window.
The devil take it, she was beautiful. A ray of sunlight angled in across her eyes, making them glow like molten gold. Excitement clear on her face as she searched the countryside along the edge of the village that they’d just passed through.
Four nightswith her in his bed and where he should well be tired of her, his infatuation had only grown. Four nights in bed, with every waking moment spent with her on this journey north to Scotland, and his body, his mind should be sated of her.
But he wasn’t.
Infatuation? Hell, he was obsessed. Obsessed like a scrawny teenage whelp who’d just strolled past his first whorehouse with his mouth agape at the breasts and nipples stuffed high above corsets.
Except Talen’s obsession was centered on one woman, one body. Ness’s.
This was the longest continuous stretch of time he’d ever spent with one person. Declan and he had grown up together on the ships, but they’d always been busy, always working, always scraping. This—this had been a purity of time. No emergencies. No demands. No piles of ledgers to go through. No bones to bust. Just sitting across from Ness in the carriage, whiling away the hours with laughter and stories.
His chest at ease, when his chest was never at ease. The only thing in the last days that had made his chest tighten, his blood rush, was the moment when they would escape into a room at a coaching inn and her fingers would slip along the bodice of her deep blue traveling dress, nudging it off her shoulder, insistent that he help her undress.
He shifted slightly on his seat, trying to calm his cock that became ornery and demanding at any thought of some part of her body sans clothes. It didn’t matter which part. Her knee. Her shoulder. The spot just above her hip bone where he liked to set his lips to her skin and tickle her. Those images crept into his mind and the blood rushed straight to the very appendage he could do very little about in the carriage in the middle of the day.
The excitement on Ness’s face boiled to a pitch and she jumped up from the rear bench and banged on the ceiling of the carriage with the side of her fist. “Go left at the next crossroad,” she shouted at the top of her lungs to the driver.
A muffled “Aye,” came down to them.
Talen grabbed her wrist as she started to sit back down. “What the hell are you doing?”
“This is it—don’t you see? Look.” She wedged her right hand away from his grip and pointed, her finger wagging toward the window as words flew frantic out of her mouth. “Just look. This is it. This is where you lived or at least where you lived when I knew you. This is where your family’s estate is. This is where you grew up and where my family visited yours. This is it. I know because I recognized that church at the edge of that last village and then the old gnarled oak tree that is half alive and half dead with its crooked branches that I always thought were going to snatch me out of the carriage as we went by. This is it. We would take a left and I knew I was safe from the tree because we were so close to your family’s estate. I remember it so distinctly. The turn is not too much farther up the road, maybe a mile or two. We are so close. We have to turn. We have to go there.”
An icy chill ran down his spine. “We don’t have to do anything.”
She slumped onto the bench, her head shaking at him. “Why don’t you believe I knew you when we were young?”
“Does it even matter if I do or do not believe it?”
“Yes. It would seem to me, yes.” She reached forward, grabbing his knee. “You were buried, Talen. Buried with your parents. A third coffin, laid into the ground. But you weren’t in it. You were alive. Don’t you want to know why?”
“Whatever you think you know…” His words stopped as his gaze drifted to the window. Why did she keep up this inane insistence that he remember the past? The past meant nothing to him. It never had. “No. My life is what it is now.”