Midnight Eyes by Brophy, Sarah (well read books .TXT) 📕

you we should be worrying about. Are you sure you don’t want to stop for a rest?”

“I warned you what I would do if you asked me that again,” she said sternly, then she sighed, her easy mood evaporating. She ran a weary hand over the bridge of her nose. “How much further do you think?”

Gareth looked critically up to the sky, painfully aware of the shadows that were forming already. Soon it would be dark and they still had a long way to go. “Not far,” he hedged.

She nodded her head silently, too tired even to reply, concentrating instead on the putting of one foot after the other.

The next time Imogen stumbled Gareth wasn’t quite quick enough. She fell on her knees into the snow. She clenched her fist in the icy slush, her breath coming in ragged bursts.

Gareth fell into the snow beside her immediately and gathered her close. “I knew we should have stopped,” he said angrily to himself, then reluctantly he loosened his hold and slowly drew her to her feet.

He led her to a relatively dry rock and knelt in the snow at her feet, chafing her hands back to life. His breath caught painfully in his chest at the sight of a solitary tear falling slowly down her smudged cheek.

She tried to wipe it away, but others quickly followed. “Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn!”

“Oh, Imogen, it’s not that bad,” Gareth whispered, his voice catching in his throat. He grabbed the corner of his woolen cloak and began clumsily wiping her tears away with the coarse fabric.

Her sightless eyes looked disconcertingly beyond his shoulder, fighting with shadows only she could see. “I so wanted to do this, so wanted to stop him ignoring me,” she said brokenly. “I wanted to prove, oh, I don’t know, wanted to prove that it didn’t matter that I was…am blind. I wanted to prove that I was still a normal woman.” Her jaw tightened painfully. “But I’m not. I am some oddity who should be locked in a room for her own good, just like Roger said. I knew I couldn’t do it. I knew it, but for just the smallest of moments it seemed so, so possible.”

No longer caring about the rights and wrongs of it, Gareth gathered her into the warmth of his embrace once more.

Lucas staggered up to the rock and plopped himself down into the snow near them, rolling himself up into a ball. He didn’t care about the snow or cold or the strange sight of Lady Imogen crying into Sir Gareth’s surcoat. All that mattered was that they had finally stopped and he could die in peace.

Gareth began rocking Imogen back and forth, trying only to comfort her, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself from greedily storing up the memory of holding her slight body close. He had never before counted himself a fool, but no matter how often he told himself sternly not to be deluded by the sweetness of holding her and that she wasn’t his, he couldn’t stop his heart from filling with her, even as he knew it was all an illusion. She didn’t want him. She never would be his, not when every word she spoke was of another, for another.

Even if she didn’t yet know it, for her there was only Robert.

Gareth felt that truth almost like a physical pain, but he had to close his mind to that pain for now, concentrating instead on the way even her chaste embrace burned through his body.

As if she could sense the tumult inside him, Imogen gently pushed herself free from his embrace. She quickly wiped her face on the back of her hands and tried to smile. “I must look a mess.”

“Yes,” Gareth confirmed softly, his voice a mere husky whisper.

She let out a watery chuckle. “Not very gallantly said, but the truth, I suspect.”

Gareth cleared his throat uncomfortably, trying to sound as normal as possible. “I think we should rest before proceeding,” he said firmly.

“But—”

“No buts. The tower isn’t going anywhere and can certainly wait a little longer for us. Besides,” he continued forcefully, “our young companion was so bored by your womanly display of tears that he seems to have gone to sleep and I certainly don’t plan on carrying his dead weight the rest of the way.”

Imogen hesitated a moment before nodding her head. “We’ll stop if you think it’s for the best. I don’t particularly want to be seen by Ro…by anyone…looking all red and blotchy.” Not again, she added silently.

Gareth stood briskly, carefully putting some distance between himself and temptation. “I’ll see if I can find some dry wood for a fire.”

“But we won’t be stopping that long, surely,” she protested. “And I barely feel the cold.”

“Ah, but it is not for you. I’m the one that isn’t used to this cold land. It will only take a moment, and it might slow down the freezing of my body a little.”

She didn’t believe him for a moment. She had just been close to the heat of him and not for a moment could she believe that he was suffering from the cold. “I’ll wait here,” she murmured and wrapped herself more firmly in the cloak as she settled herself more comfortably on the rock.

Within seconds she was asleep.

Gareth’s face softened as he looked at Imogen’s small sleeping form. For the moment she was his alone to protect, he thought with an unsettling sense of satisfaction, and he decided in that moment not to investigate this strange emotion too closely. Instead, he went off in search of wood, determined to simply enjoy the fleeting pleasure it brought him.

It was all he would ever have.

It was coming on dusk and Robert could look back on a successful day’s hunting.

While the men had been more than a little perplexed by their seemingly pointless excursion, they had all stopped grumbling at the mention of hunting. Matthew, however, hadn’t been so easily impressed. Muttering that if he