Olivia was exactly who Gareth had been hoping to see, and precisely who he’d been dreading would appear. Wrapped in black clothing, with the moon lighting her pale face and the wind tugging at her hair, she looked more aethereal than human for a moment. She might have been an apparition his troubled mind had placed before him.
She also clearly had no real idea how to hold a weapon. Gareth’s experience of such things was only secondhand, but even to him her grip on the branch she carried was clumsy and uncertain. Either a spirit or a hallucination would have made a better job of it. Either one would probably have had better weapons—or none.
So he recovered enough to manage speech, though his first words were only: “Good evening.”
“Good evening,” Olivia said with a rather dubious glance up at the sky. “Finally.” She spoke a little too quickly. Nervous. Of him, or of the unknown figure that had prompted her to arm herself, however inexpertly?
He would have had to admit her courage, but he’d stopped trying to deny it some time ago.
“I didn’t think anyone would be out here,” he said and then realized he’d spoken as if in complaint. “You have every right to be.” This had all been much easier when he’d been trying to cast barbs in her direction.
“Yes, but I can understand how you’d think otherwise,” Olivia said before Gareth could think of any other way to soften his words. She sounded calm and amiable enough, if a little weary. “Charlotte suggested a walk would do me good.”
“Miss Woodwell’s a bright girl.”
Olivia looked up at him. In the moonlight, her eyes were very dark. “You’ve felt it too?” she asked with far more hesitation than Gareth was used to hearing in her voice.
“Yes,” Gareth said and considered what to say next, while the wind picked up and died down fitfully around them. “Tension. Irritability. Weariness. It happens sometimes. We’re not good at facing threats that don’t show themselves.”
The rest of his feelings had been, in his experience, far less common.
He didn’t dream of Olivia. When he did dream, there were mostly nightmares, and sometimes he didn’t dream at all, simply woke out of habit. When he did, his first thought was to seek her out.
Gareth’s second thought over the last two days had been to reject the notion. Most simply, he’d thought she had her duties the next day, and they would be somewhat more arduous with Simon absent. Waking her would not have been the act of a gentleman, even such a flawed one as he managed to be most times. If not for their conversation and for the train of his thoughts coming back from the Talbots’, he might still have done it.
But he still didn’t know, concretely, what he felt. He wouldn’t have been at all certain how to express it if he had. Midnight was not an hour that lent itself to either.
Still, his good resolutions were frail compared with his memory of Olivia’s passion. The longer he stayed outside, he’d reasoned, the more soundly he’d sleep, and the less he’d think of her.
Now she was here.
Gareth looked away from her, out across to the dormitories and the forest beyond them: oak and pine, ash and beech, dark, ancient shapes under the moon and the stars, more ancient still, and all holding secrets whose smallest portion he hadn’t comprehended until he’d reached Englefield. Not too long ago, Gareth knew he would have shied from that concept, from the awareness of all he didn’t understand. Now it sat more easily on his mind.
The woman beside him, another dark shape, was part of the reason, but that wasn’t all. Not all of the reason, or all of her.
She hadn’t spoken yet.
Gareth turned toward her. “I can’t be around you without wanting you,” he said, his voice rough and clipped. “I have tried. God knows. Perhaps with a few dozen years of mental discipline—but I can’t.”
The air between them seemed to heat, to thicken. Olivia’s face was grave when she replied, but there was an edge of irony in her voice. “I would imagine either of us would have stopped if we could,” she said. “Quite a while ago, I’d think.”
Gareth searched for something to say without insulting her. She knew what his feelings had been on their first meeting. He didn’t think she could help thinking of them now, but he didn’t want to speak of them, all the same. Perhaps regret was futile, perhaps his behavior had been justified, but he still wished he hadn’t hurt her. “The struggle is a bit distracting.”
“Yes,” Olivia said quietly. She folded her arms under her breasts and fell silent. Between them, the heat faded a little. In its place came stillness and waiting. Any words now would be weighty things, nothing to be forgotten or discounted the morning after. Lead and steel, not fairy gold.
Off in the distance, an owl cried, seeking its prey.
Olivia took a long breath and squared her shoulders. She started to step toward Gareth, and then, clearly thinking better of it, stopped.
“I can leave,” she said.
Lead and steel indeed. Gareth felt like he’d been hit in the side of the head with a bludgeon. Numb and almost dizzy, he stood and watched as Olivia continued.
“Not right away. Not completely. I—” She stopped whatever she was going to say, swallowed. “I care about your happiness, but not, I’m afraid, enough to forsake everything I’ve found here. Before, when I was tricking people…it was never the right thing to do, even if it worked out well in the end. This, with the Grenvilles, is. But I don’t have to do it here.”
Gareth stared at her. “The school is here,” he pointed out, because of all the objections he wanted to make, it was the simplest.
“I’m sure there are other duties I could perform. Finding students, perhaps, or teaching those whose parents won’t let them stay here. Research. And there are other teachers. Miss Grenville will be coming home, eventually. When she does, or when Mr. Grenville finds another likely candidate, I can ask him for more remote tasks.”
“My God, Olivia—”
She lifted her chin. “Let us be practical, please,” she said, but there was a softness in her eyes that looked anything but pragmatic. “We…desire each other. Immoderately. In other situations, perhaps there would be other solutions. But my life was as it was, and I made what choices I did, and you cannot approve of them, or of me. I will not ask you to.”
Gareth never thought for a moment of doubting her sincerity.
The determination in Olivia’s voice, the angle of her head as she looked at him, the quiet patience in her dark eyes. Gareth couldn’t have named one single thing that affected him. All of them hit him with the same force, and the thoughts that had been diffuse and chaotic suddenly lined up.
He stepped forward and reached out. Olivia’s shoulders were rigid under his hands, her body stiff with surprise, and the branch she still held in one hand made their position more awkward than Gareth would have liked. He thought of asking her to put it down then realized he had more important things to say. She hadn’t stepped away from him and she hadn’t tried to twist out of his grasp and these were encouraging signs.
“You’re half-right,” he said, looking down into her eyes, watching her conviction turn to confusion. “But only half. I can’t rejoice in your past or think it was good, even if…even though you and I and Englefield might have profited from the results. You wouldn’t believe me if I pretended otherwise. But…” Gareth brought his hand up to cup the side of her face, stroking his gloved thumb down her cheek. “What you did to survive wasn’t what you were. And it’s certainly not what you are now.”
Her eyes widened, filling his gaze. “And,” she said, struggling to keep her voice light and not quite succeeding, “what am I, then?”
“Brave. Dedicated. Brilliant. Lovely.” Gareth bent his head and brushed his lips against hers, a caress briefer and gentler than anything that had passed between them before. “Loved.”
Olivia stopped breathing at that point. Only for a few seconds, but Gareth thought shocking her back into normal respiration was clearly his medical duty. He pulled her to him and kissed her again, lingering this time, until she dropped the stupid branch and her arms came up around his neck.
As Gareth was beginning to entertain serious thoughts of taking her on the ground, despite the hour and the cold, she slid her hands down against his shoulders and pushed away, gasping. “Are you sure?” she asked. “The things I’ll be teaching—”
“Are useful. If I think they’re not, I’ll object then.”
“You might not be the only one who recognizes…who I was, you know. It could be embarrassing for you to be seen too publicly with me.”
“God save me from ever becoming that sort of man,” Gareth said. He tilted her face up with one hand. “If this is your way of rejecting me, you’re doing a damned poor job of it.”
“No,” she said and shook her head. “No, I love you. I just want you to know what could happen.”
“And nothing that happens will be the end of the world.” Gareth laughed. “Hopefully.” He felt free, almost weightless, as he hadn’t felt since he’d left England years ago. He felt as intoxicated as he had in the grip of magical power. “All we can do is go forward.”
Olivia relaxed into his arms again. “Or back, in this case,” she said.
“Hmm?”
“If we want to sleep indoors tonight,” she said and glanced over his shoulder toward the house.
Her body stiffened even as Gareth heard the footsteps. In an instant, he’d released her and turned, putting himself between Olivia and the dark figure moving toward them. “Who’s there?” he demanded and hoped to be neither shot nor dismembered for his pains.
The figure froze, becoming, as Gareth’s eyes focused, tall and lanky and unsure. It was still under a tree, the shadows obscuring its face, but the voice was unmistakable. “Sir?” Waite asked.
Some of the tension left Gareth. Not all of it. There were still many questions to be asked.
Olivia stepped up beside him, the tree branch in her hands again. She wasn’t holding it threateningly, not now, but nothing in her posture suggested a joyous welcome either. “Really, Arthur,” she said, “this is outside of enough.”