Page 45 of To Desire

Nodding to Liana, he too left.

“You are incredible,” he said, meaning it. “How did this happen?”

Liana told him of her reading, the runes she drew and how she connected them. But he could sense there was more.

“What are you not telling me?”

Her pause gave Darien further evidence he was right. But instead of saying more, she shook her head. “There will be time for that. It seems ‘at once’ means you are leaving right away?”

He could no longer be so close without touching her. Darien pulled Liana into his arms, and she came willingly. His lips settled on hers, as if they were meant to do so. Soon he was kissing her without abandon, his lips moving down to her neck and then lower. When he reached the mark that he’d first spotted that day in her cottage and had been unable to look away from since, he kissed that too.

Reluctantly, some time later, he pulled away, wishing the eve they planned at the midday meal would come to pass. Instead, by nightfall, he and his comrades would be well on their way to Wallingford.

“I wish I could come with you.”

He wished it too. “It will be much too dangerous. We ride into the midst of this war.”

“Which means it will be dangerous for you as well.”

Darien said nothing, not wishing to confirm her words as they were very much true.

“You could be ending a war,” he said.

“I see only what already will come to pass.”

“But perhaps seeing it makes it happen sooner?”

“Perhaps.”

He would say more, but Darien could not find the words. How could he tell her that nothing would please him more than for Liana to become his wife when, in doing so, she would be introduced to court society, with scrutiny and questions about her family’s background and skills inevitable? If she became his wife, people would be far more observant of her actions, and her identity as a seer would not stay secret long. The only solution he’d been able to devise would be controlling the narrative.

To tell them first.

But that would be asking Liana to do the one thing she feared most.

So instead, he kissed her one last time. “I will return to Castle Blackwood as soon as I am able. And we will talk. Of us. Our future. You have my word.”

“Godspeed, Sir Darien of Crimson Hollow. May we meet again under a more united England.”

Leaving that chamber, leaving her, was the hardest thing Darien had ever done in his life.