“You could always turn me in,” she offered. “That should salve your knightly code.”

She’d pricked his temper again. “Don’t bloody tempt me,” he bit out angrily.

They stared at each other in the darkness for a few long heartbeats, the dark, dangerous emotions swirling around them both. But there was also longing and heartbreak, the understanding that the dream—the fantasy—was over.

“So that’s it, then?” she asked, almost in disbelief.

Blue eyes bit into hers unrelentingly. “It is not me who wants this, it’s you.”

“It is the last thing I want, Alex. But what other choice is there? I cannot stay here and you will not come with me.”

“As you said, an impasse.”

He looked so remote. So angry. Her heart squeezed with such longing, it stole her breath. Why couldn’t she have stayed as she was—a ghost, there but not there, unable to touch or be touched, incapable of feeling? Then maybe it wouldn’t have to hurt so badly.

Slowly, she pulled his ring off her finger. Holding it out to him, she said, “This never belonged to me.”

He flinched, looking at the gold band as if it was going to bite him. Finally, after a long, heart-wrenching pause, he took it.

She reached for him, letting herself touch him one more time. “I’m sorry, Alex. Truly. I never meant . . .”

He just stared at her accusingly, his eyes as hard and unyielding as sapphire, until she dropped her hand. Feeling as if each step she was taking was through a deep bog, she walked slowly back to her room.

He didn’t try to stop her.

Alex left at dawn. With tired, red-rimmed eyes, Joan watched from the tower window in Alice’s chamber as he rode out the gate of Berwick Castle at the head of the Earl of Pembroke’s two hundred knights and men-at-arms.

She waited anxiously for a sign. A look. A glance. Any slight turn of the head in her direction that would indicate a chip or crack—no matter how small—in his resolve.

Look up . . . please don’t do this . . . please don’t go.

But her silent pleas could not penetrate the stone walls of the castle or those that surrounded his heart.

His head remained fixed straight ahead. Not once did he look back.

Joan’s heart felt as if it were being squeezed between a grinding stone, but there was still a part of her that refused to believe he would actually go through with it. He couldn’t march on Scotland and fight against the men he’d once stood beside.

He can’t just walk away from me.