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Ellie’s heart clenched inside her chest. She came upright and swung her legs over the side of the cot so that she sat beside him, albeit at different levels.
“Ask the question,” she ordered gently.
He took a breath as though gathering himself before he answered.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” He swallowed, obviously uncomfortable. “You knew I wouldn’t ditch you in the swamp over it, and you keep saying you felt like you owed me, so…”
There were things he wasn’t saying. Somehow Ellie sensed that those things were what really mattered—and that they were fragile. That if she answered wrong, something desperately important might simply break.
There was only one way to respond to that. She had to tell the truth.
“I didn’t want the way you looked at me to change,” she quietly confessed.
Adam didn’t move… and yet it still seemed as though the air of the tent had shifted.
“How did I look at you?”
His voice was soft and deep. It carried to her through the darkness as though it could’ve crossed a hundred times that distance, even at a murmur.
Ellie let the answer fall from her lips, even as her voice broke a bit on the words.
“Like I was your friend.”
Birds called softly through the night air. Footsteps crunched beyond the walls of the tent, blending with the crackling of a campfire. Someone laughed a little distance away.
“Ah hell, Princess,” Adam replied softly.
The cot jolted again as he moved. He rose from the floor, and then plopped down beside the place where she sat. The springs creaked under his weight.
His arm came around her. Ellie let it. She leaned into his side, and her head fell to his shoulder.
His chin came down to rest on her hair.
Emotions tripped and thundered inside of her… and then stilled. A warm, solid sense of calm moved through her. It was all wrapped up in the steady rhythm of Adam’s breath, which Ellie could feel rising and falling through the place where her cheek rested against his chest.
“I’ll find us a way out of this,” Adam declared. “I’ll need to get my hands on a knife—it’d be nuts to try to slip away without one—but I can work on that.”
“Bates, there are a lot of armed men running about,” Ellie cautioned.
“I’ve gotten out of worse scrapes before.”
“Have you?” she pressed.
“Er… maybe not, but it can’t be that different. It’s all about waiting for the right opportunity and then improvising.”
Adam’s cheerful reply sparked a flash of concern.
“What about a plan?” Ellie countered urgently.
“Sure,” Adam agreed with a shrug. “We can make one of those too.”
The way he said it gave Ellie the distinct impression that Adam’s regard for plans fell significantly short of her own… but it was not his alarming faith in his own improvisational skills that made her go quietly still under the weight of his arm.
“What is it?” Adam asked, sensing the change.
Ellie hesitated.
“Princess,” Adam pressed warningly.
