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The clearing went very quiet.

I stopped breathing. Forty men, and every Alpha among them turning toward that cabin door, and every single thing we had done in six days coming apart in the space of one sentence.

Guy did not hesitate for even a quarter of a heartbeat.

"Yes," he said, bored. "A woman was brought up from Edwinstowe to dress the wound, since I couldn’t reach it myself. I’m not in the habit of dying of pride. She was paid, she went home yesterday, and you are holding her cloak, which I expect you to put back on its peg." He let his gaze travel the full length of the man. "Did you imagine I had been up here entertaining the Ghost of Sherwood?"

A few of the garrison laughed. It was an ugly sound, and the gray-bearded man's mouth thinned, and the moment turned over and came down on Guy's side.

"Put it back," he said.

They put it back, and they searched nothing else. Aldric had the column turned and moving down the ridge inside a quarter of an hour.

I sat up in that pine for a long while after they had gone.

He’d stood in front of his own garrison and let forty men believe he’d paid a village woman to come up a hill and tend him, because the truth would have put a rope around my neck. He’d chosen the story that made him look small, in front of the only men in England who answered to him, and he’d done it without one second of calculation.

I came down out of the tree with my hands shaking, and it wasn’t the cold.

I had no memory of deciding to do it, and that is the part I object to. I remembered Guy coming back up through the trees around midmorning to tell me the column was gone. I remembered being perfectly calm about all of it, and then there was a gap of some while. Then I was kneeling on the bed with my hands full of wool.

I had taken every blanket in the cabin. My own cloak, the quilt, the rough linen from the chest, my father's old green coverlet with the moth holes in it, and I had built the whole of it into the corner of the bed against the two walls, pressed down and banked at the edges like a bird working a hedge. My bow lay inside reach. The compass sat on the chest beside it.

And in the middle of it, folded and tucked under the pillow where nobody was meant to find it, was the shirt Guy had been sleeping in.

My nest…

I was holding the edge of it when the door opened.

"Robin."

"What?"

He’d stopped two steps inside the room, and he was looking at the bed. "Is that my shirt?"

I looked down.

Unfortunately, it was.

"You're becoming very possessive of your laundry, Sheriff."

"Not complaining."

"Good."

"Although I am curious why it's beneath your pillow."

"Perhaps I intend to steal it."

His mouth curved. "You've already stolen considerably more valuable things from me."

I raised an eyebrow. "Such as?"

He looked directly at me. "My heart, Little Ghost."

For once in my life I had absolutely nothing to say.

He didn’t laugh at me. He didn’t come closer, or make one single remark about Omegas. Or do any of the forty things a man of his designation is entitled to do when he walks in on a woman building a nest out of his clothing.