Chapter 3

The rain had not stopped. Three days in, the ford was a lake, the trail was a river, and the inn had settled into the comfortable siege-camp mood of travelers with nowhere to go and no will to get there. Isabel had stopped charging for the fourth night and started charging for dry socks, and business was excellent.

On the fourth evening, she found Eli in the stable as she'd known she would, mucking a stall that wasn't his to muck because his hands got restless when they had nothing to hold.

"You do know I pay a boy to do that."

"The boy does it badly." He leaned the fork against the wall. "The horses deserve better."

"The horses deserve better than all of us." She nodded toward the ladder at the far end, the one that went up to the hayloft. "Come with me."

"It's still raining."

"It's raining on the loft too, but the loft has hay, and I have a bottle I've been saving since my father could still walk, and if you make me climb that ladder alone I'll drink it with a horse."

He followed her up. The loft was dry and dim, gold-lit where the lantern she carried touched the stacked bales, and the rain drummed on the roof above like applause that wouldn't end. She spread a blanket over the deepest pile of hay, set the lantern in a niche in the beams, and poured two measures of a dark amber spirit that smelled like plums and burned like a debt.

Eli took his, drank, and coughed in a way that a man with his history should have been embarrassed by. "What is that?"

"Plum brandy. My father made it the year I was born and hid it so well he forgot where." She settled back against a bale. "I found it when I was nineteen, and I've been drinking it in emergencies ever since."

"Is this an emergency?"

"The rain's stopped the world for four days. My tavern's full of drovers playing the same three songs. You're leaving when the ford drains." She looked at him over the rim of the cup. "That's three emergencies. Drink up."

They drank, and the rain talked, and somewhere below a horse shifted and sighed. She let the quiet sit for a while, because she'd learned that Eli's silences were like bread dough — you had to let them rise before you could do anything with them.

It rose. He set the cup down in the hay and looked at the beam above him for a long moment.

"You asked me once why I wander," he said. "I told you I was thinking about my life. That was half of it."

"I assumed there was a half you weren't selling."

He laughed, short and rough. "The half I wasn't selling." He turned the cup in his hands. "My last contract, I was fighting for a lord whose name I never learned against another lord whose cause I never asked about. Standard. But there was a town between the two armies. Neutral. Rich enough to be worth sacking, and my employer wanted it sacked to starve the other side's supply." He was quiet for a moment. "I rode out the night before it happened. Didn't warn anyone, because warning them would have gotten me hanged by my own side and they'd have sacked it anyway, just later, with more anger. I just rode. I've been riding since."

The rain filled the pause. Isabel moved closer and put her hand on the back of his neck, fingers sliding up into his hair, and he let her.

"A whole town," she said quietly.

"A whole town. And I've done the arithmetic a thousand ways, and the arithmetic always comes out the same: I could have done something and I did nothing, and nothing was the safer choice, and I have been a man who chooses the safer choice his whole life, right up until the war made choosing pointless." His voice was rough, scraping against the wood of the beams like it wanted to be somewhere it couldn't be heard. "So I wander. Because if I stand still long enough, I start counting. And I don't want the total."

She didn't tell him it wasn't his fault. She was an innkeeper; she'd heard enough confessions over enough drunk nights to know that absolution handed out free was worth exactly that. Instead she tangled both hands in his hair and pulled his forehead down to hers.

"Here's my arithmetic," she said. "You've been running from a thing you did. And you took a stranger's wrist off me in my own tavern because I asked you to. You muck stalls that aren't yours. You told me the truth when the truth made you look worse instead of better, which is the only time telling the truth counts for anything." She kissed the corner of his mouth. "The total isn't what you think it is."

"You can't know that."

"I can't. But I've got plum brandy and four days of rain, and I'm choosing my total anyway." She kissed him properly then, slow, her tongue sliding against his, and felt the breath go out of him like something unlatching.

When she pulled back, she stood, and pulled her dress off over her head in one motion — no ceremony, no candlelit striptease, just a woman in a loft taking her clothes off because she was done with them. The shift followed. She stood naked in the lantern light with hay dust drifting around her like slow snow, and watched him look, and let him look.

"You keep doing that," he said, hoarse.

"Doing what?"

"Standing there like you've already decided everything and I'm just finding out."

"That's exactly what's happening." She knelt over him, pushed him back into the hay, and worked his belt open with brisk, unbothered hands. "Lie still. You've had a heavy day of arithmetic. Let me do the labor."

She got his clothes off him in the hay, running her palms over the scars she'd learned by heart — pike, saber, knife — and then she wrapped her hand around his cock and stroked him hard and unhurried until he was swearing softly at the rafters. Then she straddled him, rubbed the head of his dick through her pussy, wet and slow, coating him, teasing them both, until his hands came up and gripped her hips.

"Don't you dare rush me," she said, and sank down onto him anyway, all the way, in one long unhurried drop that dragged a sound out of both of them.

She rode him like she ran the inn: in charge, at her own pace, with an eye for what needed doing next. She braced her hands on his chest and rolled her hips, taking him deep, grinding forward on each stroke so her clit dragged against him, and the rain hammered the roof and the hay prickled her knees and neither of them would have traded it for a king's bed. He reached up and cupped her breasts, thumbs working her nipples, and she leaned into it and sped up, her breath coming in ragged bursts, wet slapping sounds rising under the drumming rain.

"Isabel — I'm—"

"Not yet." She changed the angle, found the spot, and chased it shamelessly, fucking herself on him with her head thrown back, hair wild, and when she came it tore through her in long rolling waves, her pussy clenching around him, and she heard him groan like a man going under.

"Now," she said, breathless, and he grabbed her hips and drove up into her, once, twice, three times, and came buried deep inside her with her name half-swallowed against her collarbone.

She collapsed onto his chest, both of them sweat-slicked and gasping, the rain suddenly a distant, irrelevant rumor. His heart was hammering under her ear. She listened to it slow.

"So," she said eventually, into the silence. "The ford drains tomorrow, by the look of the sky."

"Tomorrow," he agreed.

"You could stay," she said. "The stable boy does a bad job. The tavern needs a man who can break a wrist politely. And I have a whole other bottle of that brandy for the next emergency."

She felt his chest rise under her, a long breath, the kind a man takes before doing arithmetic.

"The room's free," she added. "The ale's not. Interest payable in this exact position."

His laugh rumbled up through her cheek. "You drive a hard bargain, innkeeper."

"I drive the only bargain on this road for forty miles." She bit his nipple, gently, and felt him twitch inside her, not quite done after all. "Sign the ledger."