Page 66 of The Ladies Least Likely
“That girl, the sister, didn’t recognize your name. Ewyas. What’s your real one?”
She stared into his eyes. “Gwenllian Carew.”
He stared back, waiting.
“My father was ambitious. He wanted to be accepted by theSaes.” Her voice was a whisper. It felt good to speak the truth at last, like setting down a stone she’d dragged behind her far too long. “But my mother was Cymry to the core.”
“So your nameisGwenllian, at least. Where were you born?” His breath brushed the hair above her ear, sending tingles down the backs of her knees.
She bit her lip. “We lived in a small village in Merionethshire called Llan Festiniog. The Moelwynion mountains to the north, a spectacular set of waterfalls, and Roman ruins close by—it was a lovely place to grow up. My father’s family farmed for centuries, and my mother’s family ran the Pengwern Arms.”
“Why ap Ewyas? For your false name.”
She sucked in a breath as he dragged a hand from her hip along her side, brushing her belly and ribs, resting in the curve below her breast. The wicked man knew his touch made her thoughts scatter like curlews startled from the riverbank. He knew, too, how she craved him above all else, couldn’t deprive herself of his nearness.
“When St. Gwladys told me to stay here—I had to be from somewhere, and I didn’t want my past. My father had told me never to contact him until I had redeemed myself. I had no friends who could take me in. The man I’d trusted had betrayed me, and I’d buried my child.”
His gaze held on her steadily, without accusation, without scorn. She ran her tongue over her lips, and his eyes followed. “The old histories sing of Eudaf, Earl of Ewyas, who battled for the Silures against the Romans. He was father to Elen the saint, who became the mother of Constantine and the wife of Macsen Wledig, Maximus the Great. I wanted to be from a place that bore such strong, fearless women.”
His gaze dropped to his hand, continuing its path up her body. One thumb circled her breast, teasing but not touching thetip. He knew her body so well. She wanted, at last, for him to know all of her. For the pretense to be done.
“Properly it should beferchEwyas, since I am a daughter, andapmeans son. But I was no one’s daughter. No one’s wife. No one’s mother. I never wanted to be hurt again in the ways a woman can be hurt.” She swallowed the hard lump in her throat. “A man can be free to make his way in the world. So can a saint. And so would I.”
He raised a hand to her throat, placing a finger in the delicate hollow between her collarbones. “You hid your past, and I lost mine. But you don’t want your past back. I wonder what you can tell me of mine.”
Her breath scraped like gravel in her throat. His eyes held a guarded look again, a veil she couldn’t see through.
“Dovey,” she said, choking on the word.
He frowned. “What?”
“I—I have to talk to Dovey.”
His hand tensed at her throat, and she had a quick, wild thought that he wanted to throttle her into telling the truth. She too wanted to tear down this last wall between them. He’d never hurt her, and she wanted to stop hurting him.
“All this time,” he said in a low voice, “you’ve been protecting Dovey. I ought to have guessed it.” He drew a long breath, as if steadying himself, and then with deliberate slowness let his hand drop as he stepped away. “If I know anything about you, it’s that you would step in front of a cannon for Mrs. Van der Welle or her child.” His mouth lifted on one side, not a smile, yet not a sneer. “Would that you felt such loyalty tome.”
Gwen gasped for air. Her chest couldn’t take in enough.
She’d let this go on far too long. She wanted to tell him everything. How ashamed she felt that she had ever let a boy like Daron Sutton use her. How Pen had awakened her heart. How much it hurt that Calvin Vaughn would threaten to say foulthings about St. Sefin’s when she had worked so hard to make a place of refuge for those like her whom life had broken.
Pen wouldn’t just hate her for lying to him for so long. He’d refuse to sell St. Sefin’s to her, too, and then she and her people would be in exactly the position she’d tried to avoid: turned out without a roof, without sustenance, without hope.
She’d be left with nothing. Again. And this time, she didn’t think she would survive.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Pen woke to an enormous racket of birds. He sniffed the air and from outside his window smelled the sea and the morning mist rising from the river. The day promised sun. He had lived here long enough to know the time by the slant of light, if the tide was coming or going, and whether the air carried rain.
Gwen lay with her head on his chest, her hair a wild tangle. He was torn between waking her to talk to her and watching the complete innocence of her sleep. When she came to his room last night, her face lit by the flickering candle, her expression unsure of her welcome, he hadn’t been concerned with explanations or just desserts. It was as if he lost every instinct for self-preservation when she was around. He craved the peace he found in her arms above every other thing.
He didn’t even care about her motives, though that made him a fool. He would be a fool for her. She had rescued him the way she had so many others, knit his broken places, made him whole with that gift she had for life and strength and hope. He’d never felt this contentment, this bone-deep ease with himself. He had a roof over his head and nourishing food in his belly. His body felt stronger than it had ever been from his days of honest labor, and his head was clearer without daily immersion in rum.
With Gwen in his arms, he found a part of himself he’d never known existed. With her silken body beside him, her hair spilling over his arm, her quiet, steady breathing and her face angelic in sleep, he woke to a world made new. The realization tilted the earth on its axis, made him dizzy though he lay in his bed.
There was his world with Gwen in it, and there was the world without her.
With her, his world was complete, even with the gaps in his memory. Without her, he wouldn’t survive.
