Dangerous Exile by K.J. Jackson

{ Chapter 18 }

“I know this place.”

Talen looked across the carriage at Ness as she scooted forward on the cushion, her right hand going to the bottom of the window.

The devil take it, she was beautiful. A ray of sunlight angled in across her eyes, making them glow like molten gold. Excitement clear on her face as she searched the countryside along the edge of the village that they’d just passed through.

Four nights with her in his bed and where he should well be tired of her, his infatuation had only grown. Four nights in bed, with every waking moment spent with her on this journey north to Scotland, and his body, his mind should be sated of her.

But he wasn’t.

Infatuation? Hell, he was obsessed. Obsessed like a scrawny teenage whelp who’d just strolled past his first whorehouse with his mouth agape at the breasts and nipples stuffed high above corsets.

Except Talen’s obsession was centered on one woman, one body. Ness’s.

This was the longest continuous stretch of time he’d ever spent with one person. Declan and he had grown up together on the ships, but they’d always been busy, always working, always scraping. This—this had been a purity of time. No emergencies. No demands. No piles of ledgers to go through. No bones to bust. Just sitting across from Ness in the carriage, whiling away the hours with laughter and stories.

His chest at ease, when his chest was never at ease. The only thing in the last days that had made his chest tighten, his blood rush, was the moment when they would escape into a room at a coaching inn and her fingers would slip along the bodice of her deep blue traveling dress, nudging it off her shoulder, insistent that he help her undress.

He shifted slightly on his seat, trying to calm his cock that became ornery and demanding at any thought of some part of her body sans clothes. It didn’t matter which part. Her knee. Her shoulder. The spot just above her hip bone where he liked to set his lips to her skin and tickle her. Those images crept into his mind and the blood rushed straight to the very appendage he could do very little about in the carriage in the middle of the day.

The excitement on Ness’s face boiled to a pitch and she jumped up from the rear bench and banged on the ceiling of the carriage with the side of her fist. “Go left at the next crossroad,” she shouted at the top of her lungs to the driver.

A muffled “Aye,” came down to them.

Talen grabbed her wrist as she started to sit back down. “What the hell are you doing?”

“This is it—don’t you see? Look.” She wedged her right hand away from his grip and pointed, her finger wagging toward the window as words flew frantic out of her mouth. “Just look. This is it. This is where you lived or at least where you lived when I knew you. This is where your family’s estate is. This is where you grew up and where my family visited yours. This is it. I know because I recognized that church at the edge of that last village and then the old gnarled oak tree that is half alive and half dead with its crooked branches that I always thought were going to snatch me out of the carriage as we went by. This is it. We would take a left and I knew I was safe from the tree because we were so close to your family’s estate. I remember it so distinctly. The turn is not too much farther up the road, maybe a mile or two. We are so close. We have to turn. We have to go there.”

An icy chill ran down his spine. “We don’t have to do anything.”

She slumped onto the bench, her head shaking at him. “Why don’t you believe I knew you when we were young?”

“Does it even matter if I do or do not believe it?”

“Yes. It would seem to me, yes.” She reached forward, grabbing his knee. “You were buried, Talen. Buried with your parents. A third coffin, laid into the ground. But you weren’t in it. You were alive. Don’t you want to know why?”

“Whatever you think you know…” His words stopped as his gaze drifted to the window. Why did she keep up this inane insistence that he remember the past? The past meant nothing to him. It never had. “No. My life is what it is now.”

Her hand on his knee clutched hard. “What if I could prove it to you—prove to you who you are?”

“Leave it, Ness. Just leave it.” His hand jutted upward and he clunked on the ceiling with his knuckles. “Stay the course to Scotland.”

Another “Aye” echoed down to them.

Her look pinned him. “Why do you not want to know? Why won’t you even give it a chance—to know who you are, where you came from? How can you live with this blank space in your life?”

“Because it wasn’t good, Ness.” His words snapped. “Whatever it is that I can’t remember. It wasn’t good. It was bad. It would have to be or I would remember it. And I already live in darkness. I don’t need more.”

She crumpled back against the cushions, her right arm curling across her stomach. “You live in darkness?”

He stared at her for a long moment, his jaw flexing hard. “People that I’ve destroyed. Killed. Sins I’ve had to come to terms with. There is already so much darkness that permeates my world that it is hard enough to live in. I don’t need to add to it. I don’t want to know what happened to me. Where I came from.”

Her jaw dropped, her amber eyes stunned.

Good. She would drop it.

Her mouth closed for a breath, but then her lips parted, not quite defeated. “Knowing the past would make who you are now worse?” She leaned forward. “Or could it make everything better?”

His head instantly shook. “That is optimism not becoming of you. You’ve lived through the end of innocence. Is it worth knowing what you were when you compare it to what you’ve become?”

A frown set deep on her face. Worry. But not worry for herself. Worry for him. Worry so deep it made the corners of her eyes wrinkle as she looked at him.

He wouldn’t take her pity.

“We need to make it to Scotland, Ness. Your safety depends on it. We need to wed before anything else.”

She exhaled a long sigh, her voice quiet. “You don’t understand, do you?”

“Understand what?” This woman was intent on driving him to Bedlam.

“That I want you to know who you are before you marry me.”

“Why?” His hand flipped upward. “It won’t make a difference to me. I could learn I was the King of England and still the only thing I would be concentrating on is getting you across the border in front of a blacksmith with me.”

“But it will make a difference to me.” Her palm landed flat on her chest. “I want you to know who you are. This isn’t for you—it’s for me. So you don’t think you’re marrying a woman who is insane.”

“I don’t think that.”

“I know how marriages work in Scotland, Talen. The reasons it takes to get out of one. Believe me, I know.” Her knuckles set upon her lips as her stare fell to the floor of the carriage by his feet. “Adultery or desertion is primarily needed for a divorce. But an annulment may be pushed through if one party is insane or lied about one’s identity. Both of which are very relevant in our case. Both reasons which my father could manipulate to rip me away from you, and I don’t want to give him that chance.”

“How do you know so much about it?”

Her look snapped up to him for a second before her mouth clamped shut, and her stare shifted to the window.

“Ness.”

She kept her gaze trained at the window. “I inquired into it years ago when I still had hope of getting out of my marriage with Gilroy. We had married in Scotland and I knew the laws were different, but I didn’t know what they were. So I had to find out.” She paused for moment as her lips pulled inward. “And I ended up paying dearly for that knowledge.”

Instant rage coursed into his veins and he leaned forward, setting his face in her view, only barely able to keep his voice to a low rumble. “How did Gilroy find out? What did the bastard do?”

“The clergyman told him of my inquiry. That was when I realized I was truly alone up there. I was rewarded with a jaw pummeled so far out of place I couldn’t eat solid food for a month. So I know. I know what my father can use against me. Us.”

Never in his life had he wanted someone who was dead, so much alive. He wanted Gilroy alive. Alive so he could tear the bastard apart with his own hands. Limb by limb. Scream by scream.

He couldn’t do that, but he could give this one simple thing to Ness.

He shifted backward onto his bench, his words coming out through gritted teeth, the rasp in his voice rougher than usual. “Fine. We’ll go.”

He slammed a fist up onto the ceiling. “Take the left turn.”

In a minute, the carriage swayed with the turn, bringing him closer to the very thing he vowed he’d never do.

Learn his past.