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

When finally he had managed to track down the wandering king, his sole ambition had been to get it all over with and start for home at the earliest opportunity.

As distasteful as it was, Robert had even been prepared to play the courtier if it would hasten the process. After all, with the correct amount of subservient drivel administered, even the most recalcitrant monarch could be rendered pliable.

Then Robert could have got to his very important point.

He knew he would enjoy telling William firmly and succinctly that he was no longer for hire. He was retiring from the life of a mercenary and the king would have to find himself some other fool to come running when he beckoned. If William didn’t kill him after that outburst, Robert thought wryly, well then, he could start planning the rest of his life.

The first thing he would do with his retirement would be to start looking under some of England’s most aristocratic rocks to find out exactly where Roger was skulking these days. Beyond finding the little scum, Robert hadn’t quite decided what precisely he would do to him, but whatever he chose, it would be deliciously and irrefutably permanent. With that pleasurable little job done, he could return home and, if all went according to his schemes, he would never again leave it.

That had been the plan, simple yet effective. Just the way Robert liked things, but everything remained strangely elusive.

Elusive be damned, he hadn’t yet even managed to clear the first hurdle. Thus far he had been denied even an audience with the monarch. With a truly exasperating politeness, Matthew and he had found themselves imprisoned in two small rooms, ostensibly awaiting a royal audience. Oh, they had placed the most discreet of guards on their door and didn’t once mention the word arrest, but that was just a small political technicality and everyone knew it.

So he was forced to wait.

Day after long day passed while he awaited an audience that he had never wanted in the first place. Really, it was enough to cleave a man permanently from his sanity, Robert thought with a grim smile. God knows, he could feel his own slipping away a little bit more with each successive day of enforced inertia.

Inertia was a grim punishment for a man used to action. It was leaving him with far too much time for thinking. The more he was left to his thoughts, the more he dwelled on how everything had got so messed up, and it wasn’t a very edifying exercise. No matter how he tried to sort it all out into some semblance of rational order, it came back to one certainty that haunted him: he should have stopped this torture before it got started. He should have stopped Roger from getting his talons into Imogen’s soul.

If he had managed to do that one small task, then perhaps he could have prevented his world from collapsing around him.

He should have simply run all of the messengers through with the point of his sword and burnt their parchments into so many pounds of ashes. Granted, it wouldn’t have been very friendly, but at least it would have left Imogen untouched by the soul disease that was even now eating its way through her.

Or he could have taken Imogen away from this cloudy island and let her find some peace in the sun of southern France far away from her brother.

Robert gritted his teeth and closed his eyes in self-disgust. Should haves and could haves all boiled down to one sickeningly solid reality: he should have done everything in his power to save her from the nightmare world that was slowly crushing her into nothing, and the only way he could have done that was by making her tell him exactly what the hell was going on between her and her brother. Then he could have put an immediate stop to it, bloodily, if that was what the situation required.

Strange, but from this distance it all became clear. It really had been as simple as that. But something had stilled his hand.

No, not a nameless something, he thought with a disgusted growl, but pride. It was his own cocky, foolish pride that had stopped him doing what needed to be done. What else but pride would demand that he wait for her to come to him? It was his pride that had desperately wanted her to admit that she needed him as much as he needed her.

Now, all his pride was gone, burnt away by the shame that almost overwhelmed him. What did his pride matter in the face of love?

A love he had never declared when she could hear.

And that was another thing that he should have done. He should have gone to her on bended knee and told her that he loved her. He should have taken her into his arms and held her tightly and never let her go. Damn, but he didn’t like being so far away from her, not when he had left so much unsaid between them. It ate at him.

What if she wasn’t safe? What if she had stopped eating entirely and had even now faded away? What if she was being stalked by her nightmares with no one to hold her in the darkness?

He paced to the window and stared into the sunshine without seeing. He was being tortured by what ifs, he thought with a derisive snort, and began pacing once again.

“If you don’t stop that, I may be forced to kill you,” Matthew said amiably, the sleepy expression on his face at odds with the violence of his words. He lay on his side in the cot that had been pushed hastily against one wall to accommodate the old man in Robert’s makeshift prison. A half-drunk jug of wine sat on the floor beside him, the major contributor to Matthew’s amiability.

Robert tried to quiet the stalking demons that possessed him,