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"Tell me."

I looked up at him, with his shirt under my pillow and his horse blanket under my feet and his hand around mine.

"I think I already have."

Night came, and with it the thing I had been waiting two days for.

It was not a crescendo. It came up slow and enormous, like water filling a cellar, and by the time full dark had settled I was shaking and burning and perfectly lucid, which is the part nobody warns you about either. I knew precisely who I was and precisely what I wanted, and the two were not in conflict, and that frightened me more than losing my mind would have.

He did everything and asked for nothing. He brought the water pail in where I could reach it, banked the fire high, and found the last of the feverfew in my kit and made me drink it, all of it with the careful competence of a man who has nursed soldiers through worse and does not intend to be thanked for it.

"Guy."

"Yes."

"Lie down with me."

He stopped. "Robin, if I get into that, I am not going to be much use as a sentry."

"I have been a sentry since I was eighteen years old." I held out my hand. "Lie down."

He came in beside me, careful of his side, and I got my face against his throat and breathed him in, and everything in me that had been clawing at the inside of my ribs all afternoon went quiet all at once. That is the only way I can describe it. The whole storm simply sat down.

His hand moved slowly up and down my back, and we lay there a long while, and then I asked it.

"If I asked you to claim me," I whispered, "would you?"

His hand went still. "Robin."

"Would you?"

He drew back far enough to see my face. "Yes."

My heart stumbled.

"But not tonight, and not because you're frightened, and not because your body is shouting at you, and not because you think you owe me anything for the business in the clearing this morning."

I touched his cheek. "Then why?"

"Because you love me," he said, "and because you want to spend your life with me. Those are the only two reasons I’ll ever accept, and you will say both of them to me with a clear head, or we’ll go the whole of our lives without it and I’ll still be here."

I swallowed. "And if I do?"

He kissed my forehead. "Then, Little Ghost, there isn't a kingdom in England that could keep me from you."

He went to sleep before I did, with one hand over mine.

For years I’d believed that freedom meant never needing anybody, never trusting a soul enough to let them hurt me, never handing another living person the tools to break my heart. I was proud of it. I thought it was strength. I’d built an entire life out of being impossible to take anything from.

Then a man spent three years chasing me through Sherwood Forest, and he stood in a clearing that morning and let forty of his own soldiers think less of him rather than say my name, and somehow without ever once putting me in chains he had become the one person I wanted on the other side of the dark.

I was not falling in love with the Sheriff of Nottingham. I was not falling in love with the Alpha who hunted me.

I was in love with Guy Bisbane.

And, I had been for considerably longer than two days.

I lay in the nest my own hands had built out of everyone who had ever loved me, with his hand over mine and his shirt under my cheek, and for the first time in my life the thought of belonging somewhere didn’t feel like surrender.