Page 106 of Paladin's Faith

Marguerite rolled her eyes. Why am I attracted to this man? He can’t go five minutes without sinking into despair. “Are you worried about Grace?”

“What? No, of course not. Stephen would gnaw off his own sword arm before he’d lay a finger on her.”

“And you wouldn’t?”

He huffed. She waited. “Fine,” he said, after a moment. “I’m being ridiculous.”

“Not at all.” Marguerite leaned back. “You’re being cautious.”

“I’m trying.”

“And also, at a guess, you’re afraid of getting your heart broken, so you’re hiding behind being noble and self-sacrificing.”

Shane turned his head to look at her. She gave the look right back, still with a slight smile, waiting.

“Damn,” the paladin said finally. “Warn a person before you stab them like that.”

“Am I wrong, though?”

He studied his hands. “Are you going to break my heart?”

“I might. Not deliberately, though. Are you going to break mine?”

His glance this time was wry. “Is that possible?”

“Oh, very much so.”

“I’ve been informed that people in your line of work don’t fall in love.”

She snorted. “Whoever told you that was full of shit. We just try not to, because it might make someone a target. But as these things go, I’d say a berserker paladin is about as well-equipped as anyone to survive it.”

“I suppose there is that.”

Marguerite sighed. “You told me your story, so I’ll tell you one of mine. When I was young and thought I was clever, I attempted to get information from a man who…well, let’s just say that he learned far more from me than I did from him. Every question I asked, he worked out why I was asking it and traced it back to what I was trying to accomplish. By the time I figured out what was happening, his client had neatly cornered the market and mine was hemorrhaging gold.”

Shane winced sympathetically, which Marguerite appreciated, even knowing that he probably didn’t think money was nearly as important as undead-hermit-crab-wolverine monsters. Which, granted, it probably isn’t.

“I went to Samuel, my mentor, and confessed everything. Exactly how foolish I’d been, and why I hadn’t seen it sooner.”

“That’s never easy to do.”

“No. The only thing worse would have been not confessing. I told him, and he made me recite every single conversation I’d had with the man, as close to verbatim as I could manage. And from that, he deciphered enough information to soften the worst of the blow. The client was even pleased. He thought we’d saved him from losing everything.” She grimaced. “It was horribly embarrassing, and I expected Samuel to fire me on the spot, but he didn’t. He said that I’d learned an important lesson about believing that I knew what was going on.”

“If I’ve learned anything,” Shane said, “it’s that I have no idea what’s going on.”

Marguerite reached up a hand and stroked the back of his neck. He jerked slightly but didn’t pull away, and after a moment, she felt the tension under her fingers ease.

Even the back of his neck was muscular. There ought to be a law against things like that.

“You know,” said Marguerite gently, “one other thing he taught me is that some choices aren’t wrong, no matter which you choose. They just are.”

“Hmmm,” he said. Not a negative sound, but a thoughtful one. Marguerite let her hand drop, somewhat reluctantly, and decided that she’d pushed far enough and fast enough for one night.

“This is all a bit moot at the moment anyway,” she said, glancing over her shoulder toward the inn. “It’s not as if we could spend a night together, even if we wanted to.”

“Dreaming God, no.” Shane blanched at the thought. “I’d never ask Wren to share a room with Davith.”

“I was more thinking that Davith would be murdered in his bed, but it’s the same thing.”