Of course he wasn’t going to answer her. She’d known it even as she’d asked the question. But suddenly the truth enveloped her, like a sandstorm, harsh and unrelenting. She loved him. She might have never really experienced it before but that didn’t mean she didn’t know. Besides, there was nothing else that this deep, roaring, all-consuming thing inside her could be.
Love.
Painful and beautiful.
But wholly unrequited.
Still, she didn’t know how she broke contact, taking a less than steady step backwards.
‘That wasn’t what I was asking. And, for the record, I think a person can have both.’ She barely recognised her own discordant voice. ‘And I’m going to the new camp.’
‘Bridget...’
She straightened her shoulders, hitherto unknown strength beginning to flow through her. Sluggish and reluctant, but there nonetheless.
‘I have to go. For me. Not for anyone else and certainly not for you. I want to do something for me. Can you understand that?’
She turned, barely able think straight, but in the instant before she looked away she was sure that she saw him take pause for a moment.
Or, probably, it was some perverse wishful thinking on her part. The silence stretched out for what felt like an eternity and then, finally, he answered.
‘I can understand it.’ His voice rasped over her. ‘Have a safe flight, Bridget. They’ll be lucky to have you.’
‘Thanks.’ Her throat was so constricted she could barely answer.
And then Hayden walked away—as her silly, insubstantial dreams floated down around her like ashes.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘I CAN’T BELIEVE you’re advocating that I leave the army,’ his sister snorted at him as she sat, upright with back straight, at the kitchen table in their father’s home. ‘You were the one who told me—repeatedly—that I was crazy for giving it up for George. But you think it’s okay to give it up for Kane?’
Did he think that?
Hayden faltered. For the first time in his life he wasn’t one hundred percent sure what he thought. His head was all over the place and it was all to do with the woman who was still thousands of miles away right now.
Bridget.
It didn’t matter how far away she was, she was nonetheless haunting every one of his thoughts.
He’d been so caught up in his own astonishing hubris, and the paralysing fear that something could happen to her out there that he hadn’t accepted what she’d been saying even as she’d said it.
In that one idiotic move he’d effectively asked her to turn her back on her passion and her goals, the things that made her her. The things that had made him fall for her in the first place.
He would never have entertained any woman who had demanded those things of him. In fact, he hadn’t entertained them, and they had tried it.
There was an indisputable irony in that fact that didn’t pass him by.
‘No,’ he heard himself answering slowly. Reminding himself where he was and who he was talking to. ‘I think it’s crazy to give up something you love for anyone else but yourself.’
And it was gradually dawning on him that although he was speaking aloud to his sister, in the kitchen of his childhood home, in his mind he might as well have been saying the same exact words to Bridget.
He could see Mattie turning to stare at him, no doubt wondering who he was and what he’d done with the brother she knew. Or had known, right up until Bridget had walked into his life. The least he owed his sister was to answer her questions, but instead of with his head he’d be answering with his heart.
‘Be that George, Kane or the Queen of England—and you take the Queen’s shilling every pay cheque. My point is that you can blame others as much as you like for not telling you the truth back then, but you’ve had a chance to put things right—if that’s what you really want—and you’ve decided to stick with the devil you know. And that’s on you, Mattie. No one else.’
Just as it was on him to put things right with Bridget, Hayden thought, turning around to pick up his sister’s freshly brewed mug of tea and pass it to her.
He watched her cup it in her hands and slide her fingers through the handle, glowering at him over the rim. And still all he could think about was Bridget, and how he only had himself to blame for the way things had ended between them.