Surrender to Me (The Derrings #4)(24)

He assumed she slept until he heard her voice, strong and clear. “I don’t believe I’ve thanked you, Mr. Shaw.”

His eyes met hers over the spitting fire. He broke a twig and tossed it into the writhing flames, noting the way the flames gilded her hair honey gold. “No, ma’am.”

Her dark eyes clung to his for a long moment, glowing in the firelight like polished jet. “Thank you.”

He gave a hard nod, unnerved by that dark mesmerizing gaze.

He breathed with relief when her eyes drifted closed, shuttering the dark, compelling pools. Soon she slept, her chest rising and falling in slow, deep breaths beneath the wool blanket. Her stern features softened, and he realized she was younger than he first thought, not as old as himself, perhaps only five and twenty. Too young for someone to be so grave, so sad.

He thought about the husband that had left her, the man that had wanted to marry another woman while still bound to her. An angry burn centered in his gut. He stirred the fire, watching as it chased shadows over her fair skin. She really was beautiful, mysterious and solemn…so haunted by propriety, constrained by the dictates of her proper British upbringing.

She shouldn’t remind him of a blood-soaked battlefield. Or the woman buried there.

She shouldn’t. And yet she did.

She made him remember. Remember everything. All he sought to forget. San Jacinto. The violence of their surprise attack. The blood. The needless killing. They had the enemy whipped, but still they fought, still they had killed, cutting down so many. He remembered that massacre…and the woman that had been caught amid it all. Perhaps she had been a laundress, a camp follower. He didn’t know. It didn’t matter.

He had shouted at her…at his fellow soldier charging her with a bayonet. Useless. She dropped, her dark-eyed gaze locking with his through the smoke-shrouded field.

He remembered her. Remembered the plea he had failed to answer in those dark eyes. Liquid dark eyes. Black as sin. So like Astrid’s.

And he remembered his father never looked at him the same way after the war. Aware of that day’s butchery, Donald Shaw never disguised his shame in him.

With his father’s death, Griffin finally felt free to put that behind him. Or at least try. He hoped to learn the truth, to solve his mother’s deathbed ramblings and perhaps find his place in the world…to obtain a measure of redemption for himself. To discover if he was perhaps more than the man his father had judged him to be. A better man than even he believed himself.

His prickly duchess rolled onto her side with a soft sigh. He studied the fine arch of her brows, several shades darker than her fair hair. Her lashes, dark smudges of coal, fanned her cheeks while she slept. His fingers itched to trace their inky lushness.

He gave himself a hard mental shake, reminding himself that he liked women with blue eyes. Blue eyes full of mirth. Never dark eyes. Never.

He liked women with humor, who knew how to laugh and smile. Not somber females with ghosts shadowing their eyes and diffidence in the curve of their mouth. That would make her too much like him.

She was beneath the bed again. Blood crawled toward her on all sides. Bertram’s blood. Dark and thick as grease, it slid up her fingers, rolling over her hands and wrists, up her arms. She parted her lips to scream, but then the blood was in her mouth, choking her, drowning her…shaking her.

Hard hands gripped her, jarring her very teeth.

“Wake up. Duchess, wake up!”

Astrid blinked, a scream lodged deep in her chest as she focused on the face above her. The fire’s glow licked at the shadowed features staring down at her, concern etched in the hard lines.

“You’re safe now,” he murmured, brushing a lock of hair from her forehead. She flinched at the touch, and he hesitated, his hand hovering over her face, his palm wide, his fingers long and blunt-tipped, both elegant and masculine.

“You’re safe,” he repeated, lowering his hand back down with infinite slowness, as if she were a skittish animal he must reassure. The tips of his fingers brushed her forehead, tenderly, gently.

Her eyes locked with his, drowning in the pale blue of his stare. Tearing her gaze away, she looked around her, noticing for the first time that they shared the tarp and blanket. Some time during the night he had joined her. The air caught in her chest. A space no more than an inch separated their bodies. Her lungs tightened.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, tugging at the blanket that cocooned both of them, drawing it to her neck.

His dark brows drew together over his eyes. “Waking you from a bad dream.”

“No.” She shook her head and arched her spine to increase the space between the two of them. “What are you doing here? With me?”

“I thought that obvious.” He blue eyes gleamed down darkly at her. “Sleeping. At least I was until you screamed in my ear.”

“You cannot sleep with me,” she protested, wincing at the squeak in her voice. Clutching the blanket to her chest, she sat up.

“We only have one tarp. And with the weather as it is, I thought it sensible to take what warmth we could from each other. I don’t relish the feel of cold ground beneath me.”

Sensible. Her lips compressed. Glaring at him in suspicion, she wondered why he had not mentioned the specifics of their sleeping arrangements before she fell asleep. Before he crept beside her like a thief in the night.