Work Text:
Yes, there is a place
where someone loves you both before
and after they learn what you are.
-Neil Hilborn,
A Place Where Someone Loves You
I crept into the stable like a wounded thing. The night had been too much for me - first the ugly scene up on the path with Julie, lying pale and cold on the ground, and Con bending over her; and then my row with Adam in the cooler-house, as ugly in its own way. Well, that was over now, and if he truly believed Con had meant to kill Julie, there was nothing I could do to convince him otherwise. Let Con deal with it, let him take all his smooth charm and wriggle out of it on his own. It would be no more than he deserved.
Now, I just wanted the comfort of warm, living things, creatures that wouldn’t torment and judge me, that couldn’t threaten me, couldn’t make my breath catch and my tongue trip. I stood for long moments before the manger, peering down at the kittens curled there, their mother blinking up at me, her eyes wide in the dim light from the yard beyond. I hadn’t bothered to put on the light, and the whole room was bathed in silver. A whitewash, like everything else in this place.
“What have you got there, Annabel?” Con’s voice, a hushed sound in the darkness behind me.
Absurd, perhaps, after the night we’d been through, but my only fear was for the cats. I turned to face him, arms spread over the manger in a parody of relaxation, willing the wriggling creatures in the straw behind me to lie still, ears strained for the least betraying rustle or squeak. “Con,” I said, stupid, too bright and breathless.
He stopped several feet away, all that single-minded focus trained on me, and my mind raced, my tongue darting out to wet my lips.
Behind me, Tommy raised her head over my shoulder and yowled at Con, a wail both plaintive and annoyed.
He stepped towards us, and I threw my arms up in some futile hope of defending their soft, furry bodies, my hands curled into claws, ready to scratch his eyes out if needed. Once, a lifetime ago, I had let him get too close, and that was more than enough; already, I remembered it too well.
In the yard, lights flickered as Con stepped forward, shadows dancing across his face. One moment, his eyes gleamed in the darkness, the scythe-cut of his gaze sweeping over us all. In the next, the light washed over him, and I saw his expression plainly, confusion sitting ill on those sharp features.
“By God,” he breathed. “You thought I meant them harm.”
The word escaped before I could take it back. “Yes.”
“It’s Lisa who they’ve to fear.” The cat, jumping from her post at my back, made no sound on landing, twining herself around Con’s ankles, the warm hum of her purr breaking the silence. “I wouldn’t give them away.”
I tried to laugh past my racing heart, tried to breathe with him too near. “She sounded so serious about it in the kitchen that day, you see, and the two of you are so close…I assumed. I shouldn’t have, I know-”
“No,” he said, stooping, catching up Tommy, knuckles rubbing at her cheek before he stepped to the manger’s edge, setting her back in the straw, her kittens mewling and crawling about, seeking the warmth of another living thing. I knew how they felt. “But you assume a good bit about me, don’t you, Annabel dear?”
“Do I?”
“Yes.” He turned fully to me, the coiled whip energy of him pressing up against me, his thigh brushing mine. “You really believed all that stuff, didn’t you - all that about my trying to kill Julie.”
“Look-” Desperately, I tried to reassemble my scattered thoughts, to push them into some semblance of logic and order. “Con, I didn’t think-”
I might as well not have spoken. “Did you believe the other too, then?” His voice was soft, gentle as the fingers he laced around my wrist, stroking over my leaping pulse. “Do you truly think I tried to kill you once, girl dear? Because I’ve a very different memory of that night, me. I may have insulted you, but that’s all I’ll admit to.”
“You’re insulting me now.” I tried to withdraw my hand, but he held me fast.
“Am I?” He turned my wrist in his hands, thumbs rubbing circles across my palm, the bare touch somehow indecent under his fingers. My fingers curled over his bones, and he smiled. “I prefer to think of it as worship, myself. But I’ll not make the mistake of dreaming you might want it, not again.” He withdrew his hands from my grasp, leaving my skin chilled. All around me, the comforting smells of the stable rose in the night; the earthy hay, smelling of sunshine and life, the tang of horse and leather, the solid old wood of the place. The smell of Whitescar. And underneath it, the sharp edge of Con, still close enough to touch. “I’ll not be Forrest, Annabel darling. A man can only be a fool over you so many times in his life, and I’ve had my fill.”
Adam flashed through my mind, and the silly scene in the cooler-house, the raking over of a girlish infatuation long dead. “Oh yes,” Con said, seeing my expression change. “I overheard that little exchange just now.” He leaned in, his fingers ghosting across my ear, tucking back a stray lock so lightly that I shivered. “How do you think I knew for certain you were Annabel?”
“How, indeed.” My voice came out flat, toneless. I’d been too preoccupied to note it before, too bent on the ridiculous need to protect the kittens, too overwhelmed by having him too close, pressing against all my carefully built Roman walls. You, he’d said. Not her. Not Annabel. All my carefully constructed webs coming down around me, binding me in place, held fast, pinned under Con’s implacable gaze. “You understand why I did it, of course? It was never to cheat you, or drive you out, or anything.”
Not a muscle of him moved. He may as well have been carved of stone. “No? Why then? To get your own back on me, to make yourself as insulting to me as I did to you, once?”
“Stop that!” I cried, some thread of patience in me snapping, watching him pretend self-pity on top of everything else. “You didn’t insult me, Con. You didn’t put your hands-” and here I admit I flushed “-or anything else anywhere you weren’t wanted, the night I left.” My cheeks washed with heat, and I looked down, letting my lashes cut him off so as not to watch him watching me confess. “It’s not easy, you know, to try to explain the feelings of a girl of nineteen when one’s a good bit older and, one likes to think, more worldly than that.”
“Try,” he said, something tight and thick in his voice. “Was it Forrest, then, that made it so you didn’t want me? That made you run so far from the thought of my kissing you that it blew you clear across an ocean?”
I laughed, the sound too high pitched, too strained, and groped for his hand, missing it in the dim light. “No. God, no. Don’t you see, you fool?” I stepped closer, ignoring the way he tossed back his head, the careful stiffness in his posture. “I wanted you then, Con, so badly I didn’t know what to do with it. Maybe I still do. But you frightened the hell out of me. Oh, not because I feared murder, heavens-” this as he opened his mouth to forestall me “-but because I was so…well, so young, I suppose.” He looked down at me, eyes gleaming, and said nothing, waiting. “Try to see it from my perspective, please - a young girl, curious and a bit too headstrong-”
“Spoilt,” he threw in, soft, the mocking edge back in his voice. “Prettier than a peacock and with even less idea of what to do with it.”
I barely hesitated. “Yes, all right, fine. That, and - and this is the important part, Con - with a limited experience of society. My whole life lived here in the loop of Whitescar and the peninsula, and then you drop into it, like some fae creature out of legend. What sort of girl can resist that, when all he’s up against is the neighbor boys she grew up with and the odd forestry commission agent?”
“And Adam Forrest, girl dear. Don’t go forgetting him, now.”
I blinked for a moment before I recalled the conversation he’d overheard, the old wisp of romance dying for the last time between me and Adam. I already had, as Con had urged me not to, forgotten him. “Dear god, how can I explain that to you? You’re a man, you wouldn’t understand the things a girl feels, the desperation, the longing, all of the feelings the books and stories say you’re meant to have yet mustn’t have, not if you’re to be good, to be proper and right. I felt I would burst, trapped up here with you, with the way you looked at me, with how I felt I’d come out of my skin whenever you came near me. You’ve always been too much, Con Winslow. There’s something dark in you, something that told me if I let you in, you’d never let me go. I couldn’t be expected to be prepared for that, not at that age! No one could, not for the…the force of you! So I turned to Adam, and I told myself that was love, because he was safe.”
He looked at me blankly, as though he didn’t see me. “Safe?”
The sound that I let out was hardly laughter, a bare misbegotten huff of a thing. “Yes. A married man with too much weighing him down to ever let him really reach for me. But as long as I was chasing him, I wasn’t looking at you. Because the thought of you, of being with you, scared me to death.”
A kitten rustled in the hay, and his gaze flicked to the manger before returning, taking me in in that frank way of his. Never one to be shy, he. “Is that why you left, then? Too frightened of me to stay once I’d tried to kiss you?”
I shook my head, tired suddenly of it all, all the lies and twists and obfuscation, this mockery of a dance between us. “No. Not entirely, at least. It was him - Adam.” I struggled for words, and though the lines of Con’s posture suggested a loose sort of ease, his eyes glittered. “It had all got further than I’d intended, I suppose. He told me that night that he was prepared to leave his wife, to throw everything over for me and start again. And quite suddenly it hit me how horrid I’d been, and what a mess I’d created. We had a terrible row, and then I ran into you after.”
“And I was no help at all, is that it?” Stepping closer, he took my chin in his hand, the tip of one finger brushing the corner of my mouth. I looked up at him, breathing too hard, my hand tightening convulsively on the rail beside me, wood biting into my palm as though the pain were the only real thing in my world. “If you’d only told me, acushla,” he said, bending so close I felt his breath on my skin, “I’d have killed the bastard for you.”
He kissed me before I could protest; not a half-chaste kiss as he’d pressed on Mary Grey that first day at the gate, playing games and uncertain of his reception, but the sort of kiss we’d shared years ago, wild and desperate. His mouth moved hungrily against mine, a man starved of connection, of desire, and I answered him eagerly. My face burned by the time he broke away, all the fire in myself I’d thought dead blazing back to life.
“Don’t say things like that,” I said, twisting a fist in the fabric of his shirt, his hands tight on my arms. “It isn’t funny.”
“I didn’t mean it to be.” He grinned down on me, dark and inhuman and beautiful. “I’ve told you, I’d do anything to get what I want, to have my own way.” Together, we stepped away from the manger, again that echo of an eerie dance, my retreat from his advance until my back came up against the stall’s half door, hard enough to draw a gasp. “And don’t pretend you don’t like it, girl dear.”
I was all too aware of the lean hardness of him, pressed up against me, our bodies too close, too damp with the heat. “What do you mean?” My voice shook, helpless with longing, and I saw him smile.
“Why else come back the way you did?” His hand left my arm, skimming up my ribcage to cup the softness he found there. My body arched into him without thought, without conscious will. “Admit it, love. You enjoyed the game, the danger, the lies.” We stood forehead to forehead, his hitching words spoken into my open mouth as his hand played with me. “We’re more alike than you’d like to think.”
“More than Mary Grey would have liked, perhaps,” I managed. “You’ll find I’m not a frightened girl any longer, Con.” He pulled back at that, looking at me with honest appraisal. Whatever he saw in my face made him bold, bold enough to draw up my skirt in his free hand, waiting for my objection when his fingers met the flesh beneath it. He found none; I let him touch me, let his fingers stroke the soft skin of my thigh.
“I wonder,” he said. “Just how much was it you learned out there, out in the big wide world so far from Whitescar?” So far from me, I thought he might have said, if he’d dared.
“Not that much,” I said, as reprovingly as I could manage under the circumstances. “And that’s the last time you ever insult me, Con Winslow.”
He only laughed, fingers splayed across my thigh, his thumb digging into the muscle there, rubbing idle circles. “There’s that fire in you, Annabel, and by god I’ve missed it. It’s happy I am to teach you what you’ve missed, sweet girl.”
The Irish lilt was back in his voice, and those damnably clever fingers had found the place between my legs, a touch like a tentative question, as if I could still stop him. As if his other hand hadn’t crept up to my throat, caressing with just enough pressure for me to feel the intent. Under his fingers, my pulse raced, and I tilted my face to his, closed the gap between us and surged forward to kiss him. I felt his surprise in the twitch of his fingers, pressed briefly against the core of me, and moaned into him.
One thing, it seemed, I had learned in the years since he’d last touched me - the blurred place between fear and desire, where the two mingle, inextricable. “So now you know,” I said. “The truth of it, the whole of it. What’s it to be between us?”
“Do I?” He pulled back, his face cast in shadows so I couldn’t read his expression. “Why did you lie to me up on the Wall, that first day?”
The question was too fair. Stung, I threw it back in his face. “Why did you act so beastly? You frightened me, as you meant to, as you’ve always been able to when you pleased. Why should I have trusted you an inch?”
“Fair enough.” Between my legs, his fingers nudged my underthings aside, stroking the slickness they found there. I couldn’t begin to guess what he saw in my face, but whatever it was, it pleased him. “We’re both of us suspicious and jealous of the other, and with good enough reason to be.”
His fingers slid warm along me, nudging inside me, and I closed my eyes, struggling to keep my thoughts together against the onslaught of him, all my senses full of him. My body opened to him, my hips rocking up into his touch, and I heard him stifle a noise in his throat. “Where does that leave us?”
His fingers stilled, and withdrew, and when I opened my eyes, it was to that blank Con, he of the remote expression, the calculating eyes, the mind always two steps ahead, always looking out for the main chance. The Con I had feared, high up on the wall with the wind in my hair and the long, sharp drop on my left; the Con who had once pushed the girl Annabel too far, too fast in his eagerness and slandered her after, a sop to his own pride.
But no, I realized, watching him watch me. Watching the strain at the corners of his eyes, the tight line of a mouth that longed to be wide, and mobile, and full of laughter. Watching the mask of an unrecognized man, hiding all the broken hopes of an unwanted boy. “It’s all of us, isn’t it,” I said softly, still aware of his fingers against my throat. “Grandfather, and you, and I myself, the whole blasted lot of Winslows. Heaven knows how Julie’s managed to escape it, but there it is.”
“There what is?”
“The stubbornness. The refusal to be open, to be who we really are, out of fear or something, I don’t know. That guarded, sharpened pride, honed in the darkest parts of us to use as weapons against each other. Only we always end up hurting ourselves, instead.”
His face moved minutely, the barest shift of expression. Anyone who knew him less well wouldn’t have seen it at all. “Am I hurting you now, Annabel?” he said, smooth as silk, and I shuddered beneath his hands.
“No,” I breathed out, before his lips met mine again in the barest brush.
“Do you want me to?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
He laughed, and for a moment he sounded like the old Con I remembered, the boy finding his place in a new world, not a bit afraid of what it would bring him. “I know what I want, and sure I do, acushla. If you’ll trust me?”
I’d spent long enough running from my life, from him, from this, the thrumming inevitability of it. Eight years and an ocean hadn’t been far enough to kill it, this desire digging a hollow in me, the longing for him singing in my blood. I wanted to scream, wanted to sob, wanted to wrap my legs around him and lose myself to giddy laughter. I couldn’t have spoken if my life had depended on it.
Under his fingers, I nodded.
Con smiled and kissed me, parting my lips under his, long and slow and deep, stealing my breath and my mind, leaving me clinging to him with both hands to keep myself upright. When he broke away, I blinked up at him, dazed.
“Tell me just this one thing more, dear, sweet girl. What does your grandfather’s will say?”
Of course it would come back to this in the end. We were too old now, he and I, to be lovestruck children led by passion, to not walk into what we were doing with eyes wide open. I hated him even as I loved him for it, hated the intrusion of cold, ugly reality between us even as the part of me that took after Grandfather coolly approved of it, the practicality and the finality. If we were to do this, let us do it knowing exactly why, exactly where we stood.
I breathed in, and out, felt his fingers at my throat, moving with my breath, and trusted him. “You get Whitescar. I get the money, with the caveat that I can’t touch the principal.”
He laughed, eyes dark. “Sounds like the old man. Taking it as a challenge to make the lot of us unhappy.”
I took another breath, his thumb pressing into the soft flesh beneath my jaw, the pressure of it firm. “Unless.”
I think his eyebrow moved; I couldn’t see, his face too close to mine, his voice the velvet of night against my ear. “Unless?”
“Unless I were to marry you. In that event he noted that I could have the money, free and clear. All of it.”
“Did he now?” At my throat, his thumb moved, and a heady pulse of blood washed over my face, over my mind.
“Attempting to matchmake even from beyond the grave, I suppose.” How I managed that much I shall never know, not with him looking down on me as he was, lust and greed papering over that desperate, aching hope.
“If I go to my knees before you it’ll not be for that reason, my love,” he said, flashing his old charming grin, my skin flushing under his hands as he cupped my face. “But all the same, will you?”
I thought of the money, mine and not mine, not without Con; thought of Whitescar, his and not his, not without the capital that dowered me. Thought of the pair of us, lashed so neatly together, the matched, mirrored set of us. Of the darkness in us both, the lines we raced along, the cliff edges we teetered at together, catching the wind between our teeth.
I would. A thousand times, I would, to have him.
But there was no need for him to know that, not just yet. “I won’t give myself away for nothing.” I pressed my hips to his and didn’t flinch from the hardness I felt, drew his face back down to mine and kissed him as hard as he had me, catching his lip in my teeth, the barest nip. I am not afraid of you, I said to him without words, and didn’t let myself linger on the truth of it. I never will be again. “You already stole my honor with your lies of having been my lover.”
He flushed a bit at the reminder, red under the tan of his skin. “I did ask your forgiveness for that.”
The game was back on between us in full now. It was in the curve of my mouth, in the glitter of his eyes, in the current that ran between us, the sparks of his skin on mine.
I lifted his hand in mine, leaving a kiss along his knuckles, along the scrapes and nicks the work had left him with, and placed it, quite deliberately, over the buttons of my frock. “I don’t give a damn for forgiveness,” I said, as his fingers toyed with the first one, as I felt it loose. “Just make it true, Con.”
“Darling, I thought you’d never ask,” he said, and that was the last we spoke for some time.