Page 53 of Dagger’s Shield

“I said I wouldn’t have sex with you. I never said I’d leave you alone tonight. Not after the day you’ve had.”

I expected an argument. Instead, her shoulders dropped, and the fight went out of her all at once.

I led her into the bedroom, turned down the duvet, and sat her on the edge of the bed. I knelt and took off her boots the way I’d wanted to the day I carried her up from the lake. Then I toed my own off, stretched out on top of the covers, and opened my arms.

She looked at me for several seconds. Whatever she was searching for, she must have found, because she lay down with her back against my chest and let me hold her against me.

For a while, neither of us moved. Then her breath hitched once, and again, and then she came apart in my arms.

Not for me. For her mother, for the years she’d stayed away, for all of it. I held her through every tear, every sob, and didn’t say a word. There wasn’t anything I could say that would fix any of it.

Her body finally softened against mine, and her breathing slowed into sleep. I stayed exactly where I was, with her heart beating under my hand.

She’d begged me tonight, and I’d said no. If she never forgave me for it, so be it.

Because someday, on an ordinary day, she was going to ask me again.

And when she did, I’d spend the rest of my life making sure she never regretted it.

12

MAËLLE

Iwoke with my cheek on Dagger’s chest and his arm wrapped around me.

The fire had died sometime in the night, and the cottage had gone cold, but I wasn’t. The blanket was over us, but it was his warmth that kept away the chill. That, and we were both still fully dressed, down to our socks.

The rest of what had happened last night played through my mind like a movie. My begging and his hands stopping me from lowering my zipper and removing my dress.

“Ask me on an ordinary day,” he’d said. “Ask me then, and God help you, because I will never let you go.”

And after, worse than any of it, was the crying. I’d sobbed in this man’s arms until I fell asleep, and now, I had to face him.

“You’re awake.” His voice rumbled under my ear.

“How could you tell?”

“You stopped drooling.”

I lifted my head to glare at him. “I do not drool.”

“You’re right. You don’t.” He tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. “Coffee?”

That was it. No smirk. No comment about the state of my eyes, which had to be swollen. Nothing about last night at all.

“Oui. Please.”

He eased himself out from under me, and cold air rushed in where he’d been. I listened to him move around the little kitchen—water running, cupboards opening—and waited for it. The teasing. Any other morning of the past year, the man would have milked it for a week. You begged me, mon feu. Say it again, just once, so I can remember how it sounded.

But he didn’t tease at all. He brought me coffee in a chipped white cup, drank his own leaning against the counter, and asked if I wanted to stop at the boulangerie before it closed for midday.

“We should return to the chateau,” I said. “Before Marthe sends a search party.”

“Or leads one herself.”

We closed up the cottage and drove toward Valais through frost-covered vineyards. He kept one hand on the wheel and hummed something tuneless under his breath, while I sat in the passenger seat, waiting.

He would collect. Men always collected. When my father gave my mother jewelry, he presented it at dinner parties, in front of guests, so the whole table could admire his generosity along with the diamonds. When he’d paid for the church roof, the plaque went up within the month. Every good deed my father ever performed was an investment, and he never failed to harvest the return.