With a strained chuckle, he resettled himself on his side, facing her but carefully separated by a space. The fire was dying, and with it the light. He briefly considered rebuilding it, but then thought the darkness might make talking easier. And he wasn't cold. Having her this close—and the both of them undressed—made a fire of another kind altogether.
A fire he was determined to resist.
"What do you want to know?" he asked.
"Everything. When did you first sleepwalk?"
"As a small child. I used to do it quite often, but as I grew older, I seemed to outgrow it. The episodes tapered off. Now it seems to happen only when I'm under stress of some sort. The occurrences have really become quite infrequent. In fact, I was hoping they had stopped altogether. Until this week, I hadn't sleepwalked in three or four years."
"Since your uncle's death," she mused quietly. "What is it like?"
"I don't know. I never remember." He'd guessed right that the darkness would help. Answering a disembodied voice was so much easier than responding to an expectant face. And yet more intimate somehow. "What does it look like to you?"
"My eyes were closed," she murmured. "I wasn't looking."
Her tone made him imagine that if the room were lighter he'd see her blush. "How about the other night? When you caught me 'stealing' the chocolate cakes. What were your impressions then?"
"You were sleepwalking then?" Her voice was suffused with wonder. "Of course," she answered herself. "That's why you didn't remember our kiss. I can see it now. See you, I mean. You seemed a bit…distant—well, other than during the kiss—and you didn't respond well to my questions. I thought you were being deliberately evasive."
"Others have said the same. A blank look in my eyes, responses that don't quite make sense." He sighed. "I never, ever remember. It's rather frightening, if you want to know the truth."
"No, it isn't. I would think it should be, but it isn't."
Bless her for that. But that wasn't what he'd meant. "I've never kissed anyone in my sleep before, let alone climbed into another's bed. It's frightening because I don't know what I might do next." And for some unknown reason, he felt compelled to add, "And what else I might already have done."
"Like what?" she breathed.
His voice dropped to a low, almost-whisper. "Like possibly—though I don't remember it—poisoning my uncle."
There. He'd said it out loud. He prepared for her shock and immediate departure, but she didn't run screaming from the room.
Instead, she reached across the mattress, rooting beneath the covers until she found one of his hands and took it in hers. "You don't really believe that."
Like an unexpected blow to his midsection, her simple statement stole his breath. Her unquestioning belief in him was a force all its own, a sort of acceptance he'd never experienced or expected. Though he couldn't see her in the dark, her hand squeezing his told him all he needed to know.
She had more faith in him than he had in himself.
"You don't believe that," she insisted. "Tell me you don't."
"Sometimes, in the dark of the night, when I wonder what I did to deserve my life going so dreadfully wrong…"
He'd never told anyone this. Not even, he suddenly realized, himself.
He wasn't the sort to brood over life's inequities, and until recently—very recently—he hadn't felt particularly deprived. Even taking his isolation into consideration, he had so much more than so many other people in this world. A magnificent ancestral home that he enjoyed updating and improving, several estates to occupy his time and challenge his talents and ingenuity, and more money than he knew what to do with. Considering the misery most people endured on a day-to-day basis, he knew he had no right to complain.
It was only lately that he'd realized he was lonely. But that shouldn't be so much to bear.
"My uncle died in the middle of the night," he said. "I had recently arrived from Jamaica to find my own father had passed on. Uncle Harold hadn't been himself since the deaths of his wife and sons, and I was staying with him at his request." He knew he'd told her some of this before, but he needed to put it in context. "As I was now his heir, he wished to instruct me, and I wished to cheer him. Truly, I did. He was only in his early fifties; I expected him to live a long, long time. I had no wish for his death."
"I'm sure you hadn't," she said quietly.
"But can't you see? I was there, sleeping in his house, that morning when he failed to awaken. And I'd been sleepwalking—after three years of peaceful nights in Jamaica, I'd come home to find my father dead and my financial life in a shambles, and I'd begun sleepwalking again. I don't remember murdering my uncle, and I felt nothing but love for him, I assure you. I don't consider myself capable of killing anyone, let alone the man who had fathered me more than my own father. But the fact remains that I was under great pressure at the time, and I'd already sleepwalked once or twice…so a part of me has always wondered."
"A very small part of you, I'm sure."
He wasn't sure it wasn't a large part. It was something he tried not to think about.
"That's what's kept you from digging too deeply to clear your name," she said. "You're afraid you might discover the opposite, that you were responsible for your uncle's death."
His first reaction was knee-jerk denial, but she sounded so reasonable he felt obligated to mull it over a moment. "Perhaps," he finally conceded. He'd never clarified that in his mind; he'd always thought of it as putting the past behind him and getting on with his life. But he had to admit that what she said might be true.
And that she must understand him very well to surmise
