her. Her heartbeat quickened as she passed the door to her father’s room—she could not quite face another confrontation with him—but it didn’t open.
Marian pushed her door open with a visceral sense of relief and leaned against the cool, varnished wood gratefully.
A scrape of leather on stone sent relief scurrying away, and her jaw clenched as she lifted her head. She wasn’t alone.
Gisborne stood by her bed, for once lacking the stiff poise he wore like armor. He was half bent over, his hand on her blanket, head turned toward the door. She was too scattered to interpret the flickering display of emotions that crossed his features, and by the time she’d taken a breath and looked again, his face was impassive.
“Forgive me,” he said, straightening and settling, like water taking the shape of a vessel, back into his usual rigid posture.
Fear transmuted to anger in her voice, which blurted, “What are you doing in my chambers, Sir Guy?”
The man’s eyes slid sideways, his immobile features darkening with a flush that would’ve shocked Marian had she not been so unsettled. “I came to look for you.”
Marian stopped herself before she could look at the tapestry in the corner, the one she’d been admiring when Gisborne had first come to her quarters. Rather than hide her sword in the bed’s canopy as she’d done with her cloak, where its rigid weight would leave a telltale shape in the draped fabric, she’d stowed it along the top of the tapestry, where it could not be seen from eye level.
Gisborne interpreted her silence as fury and combed his gloved fingers over his dark hair. “I came to look for you,” he repeated. “And when you were nowhere to be found, I . . . I searched your room.”
The knowledge of the sword’s location pulled at Marian’s eyes, and she resisted only by forcing herself to look not at Gisborne’s face but at the scar at his jaw and throat, where it vanished underneath the high collar of his tunic. “You searched my room?”
Gisborne turned away, pacing toward the narrow slit of a window. “I have no excuse, my Lady. I can only try to explain. When out on the road, long hours of riding with no conversation or interruption, the mind . . . opens up. An idea came to me, and I could not dismiss it, despite how mad it was. And when I found you absent, I . . . I could not resist it.”
Marian had not left the door, her back still pressed against the oaken solidity of it. A bead of sweat worked its way down between her shoulder blades and huddled, itching and distracting, in the small of her back. “What idea?” Her voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else—remote, cool, detached. She sounded like Gisborne.
Gisborne put a hand against one of the stones framing the window, and though his gloves hid the strength of his grip, Marian could see the line of tense muscle shifting in his back. “Robin Hood,” he said in a low voice.
Marian leaned hard against the wood at her back. She could not move or speak—she could not even think.
Gisborne’s head bowed. “His crimes are all any lady—or lord, for that matter—can speak of, and yet you never speak his name unless I ask you directly. He wears the mantle and the name of your . . . of Robert of Locksley. And you . . . try as you might to seem so, you are not like other ladies.”
Absurdly, Marian’s mind seized on his last few words, conjuring up images of Elena and Lady Seild. You don’t know ladies, she thought, but managed to bite the words back. With his head bowed and his back turned, Marian risked a look toward the tapestry. As far as she could tell, it lay undisturbed, but she could not see whether the sword was still there without climbing on the dressing stool.
Gisborne shifted his weight, then finally turned back toward Marian. “I believe someone inside Nottingham Castle must be helping him. I thought—God help me—I thought it was you. I thought if I searched your chamber I might find evidence of collusion. A letter, perhaps, or some other token that would connect you to him.”
Marian forced herself to move, peeling away from the door and taking three steps toward Gisborne. She could not manage a fourth. “You don’t trust me.”
Gisborne’s eyes met hers, lingered for half a breath, and fell. “Forg—” He cut