Page 45 of Raven's Rise
“You stay alive.”
She murmured some reply, feeling sleepier by the moment. Rafe’s words circled through her mind.You stay alive. Good advice in the circumstances, she supposed. But it wasn’t enough. A person needed something beyond simply staying alive. She needed a hope, or something to dream about. She was just about to ask Rafe what he hoped for, but then sleep took her and she drifted off, the question stuck on her lips.
When morning came, she sat up in bed, feeling infinitely better and more charitable toward the world. She saw Rafe lying across the bottom of the doorway, dozing in the pale dawn light. He was stretched on his side, looking quite peaceful. His unsheathed sword lay a foot or so away from him, the length of it paralleling his own body. For all his joking, he was serious about guarding her from threats. Angelet felt reassured, though she hoped they never again encountered the thieves from the day before.
She slipped out of bed and padded to him. She bent over and reached out to shake his shoulder. “Rafe?”
As she did so, her hair tumbled down, the loose braid falling till the ends hit his cheek.
Rafe caught the braid in one hand, looping the end around his palm once, twice. His eyes were still closed, but he was smiling. He brought his hand to his mouth and kissed the braid around his hand before letting it go. “Definitely a good way to be roused in the morning.”
“You’re still dreaming,” she retorted, straightening up again.
He chuckled, and sat up on his blanket. “A whole night alone with me, and you’re not even a bit ravished,” he said cheerfully. “Disappointed?”
A tiny part of her was, actually, but she just sniffed, pretending to be annoyed. “Certainly not!”
He wasn’t fooled, to judge by how he laughed at her tone.
“Well, I am,” Rafe said. Then his demeanor became serious. “We’d best get moving. Who knows if someone chose to keep pursuing you, but the further away we get from the path we were on, the better off you’ll be.”
“Would they assume we’d continue on to the abbey?”
“That’s the logical guess, based on what everyone has heard. Certainly, no one would expect us to be here. Chance brought us to this place.”
She nodded. “Then let’s move on. Let chance help us stay hidden, for now.”
They had so few supplies that packing up was easy. They made their way out of the room and toward the ground floor.
Just at the top of the stairs, the hem of her dress got caught under her shoe and she stumbled. She flung one arm out to the wall to get her balance, but that same moment, Rafe’s arm circled her waist and held her firmly on her feet.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his eyes scanning her anxiously.
“Yes. I just tripped. My dress got snagged by something.”
They both looked down and there indeed were a few long threads of her gown, caught by a splinter in the floorboard. Rafe relaxed, loosening his hold a little.
“I worried you might be having another fit.”
She shook her head. “No. The symptoms of that are entirely different. You’ve seen them.”
“By the time I found you, you were already unconscious,” he pointed out. “So I don’t know how it looks when it begins.”
“Well, I’m not suffering from another fit,” she said, hoping to reassure him. “Just a rough floor.”
Angelet became conscious of just how close they were, and remembered the way he’d kissed her the evening they’d been out during the moonrise. Just how terrible a person would she be if she wanted a little more of that closeness? “Rafe…”
“Yes?” The way he was looking at her suggested he might be thinking along the same lines.
I accept your offer.Angelet took a breath. No, she couldn’t say that. “You can…you can let me go now.”
He released her. “You’ll tell me if you ever start feeling unwell.”
“Of course.”
Rafe stepped around her and offered his hand.
“I can walk down a flight of stairs myself,” she said. “I’ve done it for years.”
