dislocated moment of clarity Marian saw the tight features under his calm, the fury in his eyes, the restrained passion in the thinly pressed lips. “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”
Marian let him hold her, too stunned and weary to think. He smelled of sweat and rain and grass, exactly as he had moments before when his weight had her pinned to the ground. The hands that brushed mud from her features were gentle now, the same hands that had bruised her shoulder so badly that it hurt when he embraced her.
And when he drew back to gaze at her, looking almost as confused and stunned as she, there was no flicker of recognition. He’d looked into her eyes on the other side of the wall, spoken to her face, lingered over her masked features—and he hadn’t known her. And he didn’t know her now.
Her exhaustion shifted, something else stirring in her heart. They’d been as close as lovers, grappling there in the mud, and he hadn’t seen her. She’d fooled him.
She’d won.
Gisborne’s hands, cold and shaking, clasped hers and drew them up to his lips. “You’re safe,” he said again. “You’re safe now.”
TWENTY-FOUR
MARIAN SAT AT THE window, wrapped in a woolly dressing gown and an extra shawl, the fire crackling anxiously in the fireplace. Her father, pacing within the limited confines of his chamber, had asked more than once if she wouldn’t prefer to sit closer to the hearth, but though she still felt chilled through her bones, she could not tear herself from the window. Her eyes scanned the grassy slope beyond the walls of the town, searching for a prick of warmth in the gray afternoon.
They’d promised to build a bonfire, her men, to signal that all had gone right on their end of the scheme. But the slopes were farther away than Marian had remembered, harder to see than she’d imagined, and if the fire never came, she would have no way of knowing whether it meant they were captured or dead, or that they simply couldn’t find any dry wood and get it to catch in the rain.
Marian tried to look as though she were only watching the rain, which had slowed back to a miserly drizzle again, but she suspected her father saw some of the anxiety on her features.
“Tell me again what happened,” her father said, his expression wooden.
“I took Jonquille out,” Marian said quietly, echoing the story she’d given Gisborne once he’d brought her inside the castle. She hated to lie to her father—he’d done nothing wrong, except possibly, in the eyes of others, indulged her freedoms more than a stricter guardian might have done. “I heard a cry from the forest, and when I went to investigate, they were waiting for me.”
“This Robin Hood and his men?” Her father had heard the story already, but he was watching her intently, as if waiting for her to contradict herself.
“Yes.” Marian met her father’s gaze, ignoring the inexorable pull of the soggy vista beyond the window. “They were very courteous. I wasn’t injured.”
Her father’s eyes crinkled, but not with the laughter that had etched those lines. He frowned, and his lips were thin. “But for rope marks at your wrist and bruises on your throat and—”
Memory made Marian swallow instinctively, and she immediately wished she hadn’t. The binding marks were little more than patches of irritated skin and would fade—were already fading, far too soon for believability—by the end of the day. But her neck, where Gisborne had half throttled her with her own cloak . . . those marks were bruises, and they were growing more livid by the hour.
“None of Robin’s men meant to hurt me,” Marian murmured. Gisborne did.
Her father let out a derisive sound, then dropped heavily into an oaken chair by the fire, facing his daughter at the window. “Marian.” His voice was gentler now, carrying a hint of appeal. “What really happened?”
Marian opened her mouth, but she was still looking at her father’s face, and the warm familiarity of him caught her in a way his interrogation hadn’t. The repetitions of I don’t know and My memory is fuzzy died on her lips. She hesitated, fighting the need to shiver despite her extra layers.
Her father waited, and when she didn’t speak, he leaned forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, eyebrows raised. “It cannot be coincidence, Marian, that this man masquerading as Robin targeted you. I won’t be the only one who comes to that conclusion. If