Everything is a Choice

Chapter 30

Previously...

He presses a small, hard object into the palm of my hand. It's a ring. A silver band embossed with alternate stags and wolves on a leafy background. "I once gave a ring to someone I cared for and she put it on her right hand and punched me in the face. I'd be very happy if you didn't do the same."

I slide the ring on the middle finger of my left hand.

Guy says, "A perfect fit. As I hope we'll be." Putting icy fingertips under my chin, he tilts my head so we are eye to eye. "I'm not sure about the beard, but I expect I'll get used to it." He kisses me. Unlike his hands, his lips are warm. I open my mouth slightly and he pushes his tongue past my teeth. I can't taste berries or any other trace of his recent sickness. All I can taste is need and want and maybe even I love you.

A chill blast of rain-drizzly wind cuts across the back of my neck, but, right now, I feel as if I'm basking in sunshine.

Chapter 30

"Robin!" Much drops the pan he is holding and sprints towards me. Wrapping his arms around me, he crushes me into his chest. He smells of animal fat and wood ash. "You're alive and well."

"And why wouldn't I be," I say once he lets me breathe again. "It's not as if this is the first time I've been out in the forest after dark."  

"Yes, but when you were a boy you didn't have Gisborne chasing after you, a great big sword at his hip." Much glances past my shoulder, towards the stand of trees that partially obscure the entrance to our camp, his hand reaching for his sword and then dropping to his side when he realises he's not wearing it.

I half turn, following his look, relieved to see that Guy has done as I asked him to and concealed himself.

After a lengthy period of kissing and touching and embarrassed smiles, Guy's and my walk back to the camp had been a near silent one, each of us lost in our own thoughts at the enormity of what we were about to embark upon. When we did speak, it was about whether or not we, meaning I, should tell the gang about us. Guy had insisted it would be a mistake and I had argued that skulking around behind their backs was not something I felt comfortable with. He'd thrown back his head, laughed, and then grabbed me, shoving me back against a tree. "So you'd be more comfortable with them seeing this then, would you?" he asked, after he slid his tongue out my mouth.

"Don't be an idiot," I replied, thinking perhaps I was the idiot for imagining the gang would simply shrug their shoulders and then go about their business as though I'd said nothing more than I'd decided we should all start wearing yellow and call ourselves the sunshine gang. "We'd be discreet."

Guy hadn't pressed the point, deciding to leave the decision up to me. Although he'd warmed to my friends somewhat on the journey across France, Allan in particular, Guy did not regard them as his friends and, I suspect, couldn't give a damn what they think of him or his behaviour. I am the centre of his universe, just as Marian had once been, and, as far as he is concerned, everyone else can go to Hell. If we are to stand a chance of surviving beyond our first night together, Guy must understand that my friends are part of the bargain of having me; I will not give them up for him. Which is why I am standing here now agonising over what to tell them.

"My father and his belt came pretty close, though," I say in response to Much's remark about Guy chasing after me, armed with a sword.

"Your father didn't spend most of his waking life plotting your death though, did he?"

Pushing off the tree he'd been lounging against, Allan saunters over, John and Rowena following. Allan grins. "You look like how I feel after I've spent the night with the buxom Betsy Miller and had a jug too many. What happened? One moment Much is smooching with a dead deer and the next you're taking off and Gisborne is chasing after you, blood running down his face."