Paladin

Chapter 34 Part 2

Sam’s mouth fell open. After a few false starts, she sputtered, “Is this some sort of joke?” It would be a cruel jest, but it wasn’t as though she hadn’t earned it.

Tristan’s cheeks reddened. “A joke?” he snapped. He gave a slight shake of his head. “I’m completely sincere.”

“But Tristan,” Sam said helplessly, “you don’t even like me.”

His blush deepened. “That’s not true.”

“Tristan, be serious. I annoy the hell out of you,” she said. “You think I’m selfish and spoiled and disobedient. A day hasn’t passed where we haven’t squabbled.”

Tristan tightened his grasp on her hands. “It will be different now,” he said earnestly. “That was when you were my trainee. If I had known—”

Sam pulled her hands from his. “If you had known that I was Lady Samantha Haywood, you would never have allowed me to be your trainee. You would have returned me to my father with a scolding and a swat on the arse.”

Tristan flinched, and opened his mouth. She put her finger to his lips. “Don’t deny it,” she said. “You want a wife that you can come home to, who wrings her fingers while you’re gone. I’ll never be that woman, Tristan. It doesn’t matter if you put me in skirts, fix up my hair and call me Samantha—I’m the same Sam of Haywood you knew as your trainee. I’m willful and stubborn and I’m damned near as good as you with a sword. I’m not going to sit home and mind the babes while you wage my war.”

Tristan rose from his kneeling position and sat on the edge of her bed. He glared into her eyes, his expression fierce.  “Don’t put words in my mouth.”

“I did no such thing,” Sam retorted. “You said as much yourself. Right after…” She forced herself to say the words. “Right after you found out Lady Samantha was dead.”

“You speak of her as though you are not one and the same.”

Sam turned her face from his. “I have not been Lady Samantha for a long time. Even before you knew me I had given her up.”

“I don’t understand it,” said Tristan, “but I have never had to hide who I am to be who I want to be. Would it be so bad to become her once more?”

 Sam would be lying if she said she hadn’t asked herself that same question. She didn’t dislike being a woman, just the trappings that went with it.  “Yes, if I can’t also be Sam of Haywood."

Even as she said it, Sam reconsidered—not the path she'd chosen, but the woman she'd become. Here, a marriage proposal had fallen in her lap, from a man who'd seen her true colors and still wanted to wed her. Must she only be Sam of Haywood, and never Samantha? And did Tristan—or any man—want a woman with her warrior heart? Pride made her say, “You don’t need to marry me because of some stupid promise you made to my father.”

Tristan shifted on the bed so that he was lying down beside her, his head propped up on his elbow. “I thought about it a lot over the past week,” he said. “I was angry, you know, when Braeden first told me.  It was bad enough when you were just a girl, but worse when I learned you were Lady Samantha. You let me believe that someone important to me was dead.”

“Tristan, I’m sorr—”

Now it was his turn to shush her.  “I wanted to yell at you, and I did, for a while. For lying to me, for not trusting me, and for having the damned nerve to get yourself halfway killed. Of course there’s not much point at yelling at someone when they’re unconscious. And once I realized you weren’t going to yell back—that you might never yell back—I got scared. You were barely breathing, Braeden was gone—”