He took a single step closer, the damp earth soft beneath his boots. The air between them seemed to grow thinner, charged with something she could not define. When he reached out, his fingers brushed hers — a brief, searching touch — and she did not pull away.
She did not know who moved first. One heartbeat she was looking up at him, and the next his mouth was upon hers — tentative at first, then surer, the heat of it stealing her breath. Her hand rose of its own accord, resting against the fine fabric of his coat, feeling the rapid thrum of his heart beneath.
The world contracted to that single point of contact. The forest, the mist, the sunlight — all of it faded until there was nothing but the warmth of him and the strange, dizzying certainty that this had been fated from the beginning.
And then the shot rang out.
It split the air with shocking violence.
Gabriel jerked against her, then stepped back. No. He staggered back. For an instant she thought he had only been startled, or perhaps he’d recognized the folly of what they had just done. But then she saw the blood — bright, impossibly red — blooming across his shirt. And his sun bronzed skin began to turn pale before her eyes, taking on the gray and sickly pallor of impending death.
“Gabriel!”
There was no answer. He simply sank to his knees, leaning against the thick stump of an oak.
She dropped to her knees beside him, hands shaking as she pressed them to the wound, trying to stem the flow. The blood was warm beneath her fingers, soaking into her skin. “No, no, you must not?—”
But his eyes were already dimming, the light fading from them like the last trace of day.
“Do not leave me,” she whispered, but her voice broke, and the world tilted, the forest blurring into shadows and smoke.
“Eliza…” Her name was carried on the wind, a soft and insidious whisper that chilled her. She turned to look back, to look into the trees at whomever it was that had taken the shot that had ended the life of a vital and virile man in his prime.
But her eyes never locked on anyone. A pair of strong hands seized her, closing about her throat with brutal force…
Then she woke with a strangled cry. Her hands were clawing at her throat as if to pry away those of her nightmare attacker.
As she moved, the chair creaked beneath her, and the fire had burned down to embers. Her book lay open upon her lap, her hand still resting upon it as though she had never moved. For a long moment she could not breathe, could not think. The scent of gunpowder and the terrible coppery smell of blood still clung to the air — or perhaps it only lived in her mind.
Her fingers touched her lips, finding them trembling. They felt warm, though whether from fear or something far stranger, she could not tell.
Gabriel’slast memory was of his study.
He had been at his desk, reading by the faint light of a candle guttering low in its holder. A restless wind stirred the curtains, bringing with it the scent of rain. He thought he heard a soundoutside — a voice, a laugh perhaps — and when he lifted his head, he was no longer in his study at all.
He stood in the forest.
The air was damp, heavy, frost crunching under his boots as mist curled around the trees. Somewhere nearby, water dripped through a hollowed tree, the sound echoing in the stillness. He turned — and saw her.
Eliza.
She was walking toward him through the mist, her skirts brushing against the ferns, her basket forgotten in one hand. The pale light caught the gold in her hair. When she smiled, it was small and uncertain, but it struck him like sunlight breaking through clouds.
He went to her without thinking.
“You should not be here,” he said quietly. “It is not safe.”
“You are here,” she answered.
Her voice was soft — softer than he had ever heard it — and it unsettled him in ways he could not have explained. The space between them narrowed, until only a breath separated them. He could see the quick rise and fall of her chest, could feel the warmth of her skin in the cool morning air. And in that moment, he wanted nothing more than to taste the sweetness of her normally tart mouth.
When he reached for her, she did not flinch.
Their lips met, and the world seemed to still. Everything he had kept buried — the loneliness, the restraint, the careful armor of duty and pride, the regimented existence that he had permitted himself — fell away in that single, unguarded instant.
Then came the shot.
The sound tore through the silence like the crack of the world splitting open.
