Baron’s arm hooked into mine. It wasn’t a violent action by any means, but it felt like a threat in my gut. I hated to admit it, but I was afraid. And I couldn’t even say what I was afraid of.
I was afraid of him, but not in that moment. I wasn’t unduly afraid of him, like some sort of gun-toting boogeyman. He was who he was. I had been with him two previous nights, and neither night had any danger in store for me.
Something about this place, though, put me on edge. Perhaps it was the implication that one bed put in my mind. And perhaps more than that, it had something to do with the fact that in spite of my best efforts, I hadn’t yet managed to come up with any convincing excuses why it couldn’t happen.
I had good reasons why it shouldn’t. I had my conviction that it would be improper. But I couldn’t convince myself that I would make that impropriety known, and I couldn’t convince myself that if I were to make a fuss, that he would care about impropriety.
Of course, I didn’t know his feelings about taking a woman to bed without her enthusiastic approval. But I didn’t know that I would explicitly disapprove him if he were to put the question to me. It stirred a nervous feeling in my stomach. What if he tried to ravish me?
He didn’t need to pull hard, or yank, or squeeze me roughly to take me along with him. That was the first sign, I think, in my own gut. The first thing telling me that I was more than seriously considering letting him have his way with me.
But I still wasn’t ready to admit that to myself. I was going to be a good Christian woman. I’d always been one in the past. I’d studied my father’s Bible. I’d memorized plenty of verses. I could recite them at will. And yet…
I sucked in a breath as he put the key into a lock. It fit in perfectly. I tried not to imagine that it was a symbol for something else. The idea came unbidden. Lock and key, indeed. My heart raced. He pushed the door open.
“Go lay down,” he said roughly. My heartbeat surged in my ears, and the pit fell out of the bottom of my stomach. I knew where this was going, and I knew that I wasn’t ready for it.
But ready or not, I knew that it was going to come, and I knew that I wasn’t going to fight him on it. The look in his eyes the first day, and glances throughout our time together, kept playing out in my head. Ideas that he’d had about us. Ideas that I hadn’t been willing to let him realize that I had shared.
I took a shaky step toward the bed and took a deep breath, and then I laid down on it. My body refused to move the way that I wanted it to. I wanted to look cool and calm and controlled, to look like I knew what I was doing with myself.
But I couldn’t. I was in a panic, and my body moved stiffly. I struggled to take a breath. I could feel him watching me. I laid on the bed stiffly. Looked over at him.
He was still standing in the doorway. He was watching me. Thinking something. Judging something. I couldn’t say what it was, but I knew that whatever he was thinking, he was thinking it about me.
And then he pursed his lips.
“I’ve got to go get the horses dealt with. Rest there. I’ll bring you something to eat.”
The air went out of my stomach.
“How long do you think you’ll be?”
“Only a little while,” he told me. The fear had built up in my stomach so much that the very suggestion that he might not be about to take what he wanted from me felt like it let the air out of me.
“Okay.”
He turned, and he was gone. It took me a moment before the world started to speed up again. Before I realized what was going on. I hated myself for being so startled. For the way that I was starting to wonder why he hadn’t. It was what I wanted. I wanted to keep my virtue. That was obvious.
Right?
I pushed myself out of bed. There was something I needed to do. Rest wasn’t one of the things that was on the list. I crept to the door and listened for a long moment. The hallway was silent. Somewhere in the depths of the hotel, I heard the sound of boots thumping on floorboards as someone walked down the stairs.
I didn’t have to wonder who it was. I gave Baron a few minutes to get out, and then I put my hand on the doorknob and gave it a turn. Baron had locked it from the outside. But this side had a simple knob to turn. It thumped as it came undone, and then the door opened easily.
I let out a low breath and stepped out into the hallway. The floorboards had been covered with a rug, which had once been bright red. The color still showed through around the edges, where the middle had been rubbed to a dull brown. I kept to the middle, as if the red edges might leave footprints for Euler to find when he returned.
I crept down the stairs, still wearing my riding clothes.
The man behind the counter was smiling at me. He seemed like he smiled at everyone, in a distant, professional manner. He nodded as I approached.
“Missus Walker?”
“Can you have a telegram sent for me?”
“Ma’am?”
“On my husband’s tab.”
“Of course, we can arrange that sort of thing, but…” A fold appeared between his eyebrows, and then he smoothed his face over. “What should the message say?”
He held a scrap of paper in his hand, and a stub of a pencil. His eyes watched my face. I closed my eyes and composed a short message in my head. The shortest I could make it, without missing anything.
“I am fine,” I said. “Period. Love, comma, Marion. Full stop.”
The man wrote the message down. He read it back to me. It wasn’t a long message, and he hadn’t had much opportunity to screw it up. I nodded.
“Make sure that my family gets that message, back in Tempest. Sarah and Jodie Young.”
“Of course,” he agreed, and nodded.
If I’d realized the trouble that was going to come out of that decision, I might have reconsidered.
But I didn’t realize it. And I didn’t reconsider. As the man behind the desk called over a young boy to go run the message to the telegram office, the pair of them conspired, in a way, to seal my fate. All while they thought of nothing but doing precisely what I’d asked of them.