The Wrong Groom on My Wedding Night novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Crispin's POV

Crispin's POV

I stood at the fence for an hour after she went back, with my hand over the scar on my shoulder.

It beat in time with hers.

I had felt that second beat for four years and told myself it was a fever that never quite broke.

Now it had a name, and the name was Lena.

I had a father, too, and I was trying not to think about that.

The widow who raised me taught me to hunt with a bad leg and sleep with one ear open.

She never said I was loved, and she never said I wasn't.

She left a clean shirt on my bed every Sunday for twenty-six years.

I thought that was all a man could be given.

Then twigs cracked on the Redfern side, and I turned.

A man was walking toward me across the snow with his hands out and open.

He had my face.

It was the first time I'd seen it from the front without a mirror.

His shoulders were softer, his jaw less certain, and he smelled of lavender.

"Don't," he said quickly. "I'm alone. I'm not armed. I came through the orchard."

"Leon," I said.

He flinched.

"You know me."

"I know your face."

He stopped three feet from the wire.

Up close he looked sick.

Dark half-moons ran under his eyes, and his hands were shaking worse than mine.

"They told me you were a stranger," he said. "I looked it up. I looked up every Ridge warden in the last ten years. You were born in the same week as me."

"Not the same week. The same night."

He closed his eyes.

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