Page 9 of Sherwood
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t invent a story simply because you don’t know the truth.”
“Why don’t you enlighten me then?” Marian asked. “Because we’d kissed that afternoon and then”—she flushed, presumably at the memory of what had happened after we’d kissed. But she determinedly moved past it—“you didn’t return my calls, my texts, my emails. You ignored me for five years—and only me, it seems—and now you’re here, telling me to stay away from Rafe de Lacy without explaining why. Or even explaining how the hell you know who Rafe de Lacy is.”
She turned away, to gather herself perhaps, but it had the effect of revealing the low back of her dress to me, of revealing how the fabric exposed the length of her spine, the delicate sculpture of her shoulder blades.
Of revealing the neat little bow at her nape which was all that stood between me and seeing her bared to my gaze.
Instinct took hold as I stood. She went very still as I approached, her shoulders tense, her eyes straight ahead, and I couldn’t resist: I ghosted a single finger down the valley of her back. Goosebumps followed my touch like contrails streaking behind a jet engine.
“I think about the day I left all the time, little fox,” I said quietly, now running the tip of my finger along the curve of her shoulder. “We said goodbye right over there by the front door. Do you remember? Because I do. I remember so well it hurts.”
She didn’t move, didn’t look back at me, but I felt the catch in her breath. She liked knowing that I remembered. It mattered to her.
“You were wearing a yellow dress and ballet flats, and you looked like spring itself. And the shade of lipstick you wore that day…like the inside of a petal. It was smeared all over your mouth by the time I left.”
“Stop it,” she said, spinning on her heel to face me. Taking two large steps back. “Stop—tauntingme.”
“I’m not taunting you,” I said. “I’m reminding you. You were everything to me that day, and that’s why I couldn’t keep you. Because that’s what it would have been:keeping. I couldn’t give you the kind of partnership of equals your parents had, I couldn’t even have given you the generous affection my own parents had with each other. I wanted to have you in a way that would have meant—”
I stopped, frustrated with the limits of language when it came to this. “You weren’t supposed to want it back,” I attempted anew. “You weren’t supposed to want the way we were that afternoon, not after we were done at least. You were supposed to realize that you’d been caught up in the heat of the moment and that you actually preferred someone easy and nice to be with.”
She stared at me. “So you ghosted me because you were afraid that you were going to…what? Taint me with kink? Is that it?”
It sounded so ridiculous when she put it like that. But she couldn’t have seen herself that day, with her hair all disheveled and her dress wrinkled from kneeling on the floor. She couldn’t have known what I wanted to do to her then, how much I wanted to pin her to the floor and ruin her for anyone else, anyone else ever.
“I left you alone because I am notsafefor you,” I said sharply. “And that became truer and truer as the years went on.”
The doubt was sketched all over her face. “Really.”
“Yes. Really. You weren’t interviewed by federal agents because I’ve been leading a quiet life, you know.”
“And I suppose you’re not going to tell me anything about this unquiet life?”
The wind picked up outside, flinging the rain against the glass walls of the house. I imagined that I could hear the forest on the other side of the road, all wild and tossing in the storm, and I closed my eyes. No matter where I’d gone—as the Loxley heir, as a soldier, as a spy—Sherwood had always been home. Had always been the plan.
“It’s not a good idea,” I said after a minute, opening my eyes. “I’m being looked for as we speak. The less you know about what I’m doing, the better.”
“But you seem to know plenty about what I’m doing,” she said. She watched me as I took a step closer, and then another step, the fall of my boots barely audible over the rain. “You knew where I was tonight, and with whom.”
“Much Miller was at The Knot tonight,” I said. I was close enough to touch her now, but I didn’t. “He saw you.”
“Tuck’s friend,” she said to herself and then shook her head. “I didn’t know he was back in Sherwood.”
I didn’t tell her that he’d only recently returned, along with me and Jovanna. Even showing myself to her tonight was a risk, given that Rafe was already here and no doubt looking for me, but he’d left me no choice. “He saw you and Rafe. And Marian…I’ll grant that I might have been wrong about you and kink, but I’m not wrong about Rafe. He’s a dangerous man, and he absolutely cannot be trusted. He is ruthless, merciless. He doesn’t feel things like the rest of us do.”
Marian’s hand went to her wrist as I spoke, and then she quickly dropped it, like she’d given away a secret. But it was too late anyway. Those wine-colored crescents were the first thing I’d noticed as she’d wandered dazedly into the house.
A Rafe de Lacy signature if I’d ever seen one.
“Would he hurt me during a scene?” Marian asked. “Ignore a safeword? Do anything to me that I wouldn’t want done?”
“No,” I said, reaching now for her bruised wrist. I wrapped my fingers around it, the slender bones nestling perfectly into my palm, and I lifted it up so I could study the marks more closely. They were deep enough that they would properly bruise, but despite the small starbursts of broken blood vessels, the skin itself wasn’t split. It took more care than one might think, to bite a lover like this, to make a bite’s memory known without drawing blood. “Rafe is generally very careful about his kink.”
Except with me, I wanted to add, but I didn’t. I couldn’t lay the brutal frenzy that had been between us at his feet.
Or notentirelyat his feet, at least.
“Then I don’t see a problem,” Marian said flatly. “If he’s not going to harm me—”
