“Eliza!” He called out.
The name was out before he realized he had spoken it, too familiar and too bold, but it was too late to call it back. She did not respond. Did not turn. Did not so much as falter in her step.
“Eliza!” he called again, louder this time. “Miss Ashcombe!”
Still nothing.
A flicker of irritation stirred in his chest. Was she truly so childish as to ignore him completely? Did she mean to play some petty game of evasion simply to vex him? The very thought has his jaw clenching, his back teeth grinding together. Gathering the reins, he urged his horse forward, determined to catch up with her and demand an explanation.
He should have caught her quickly. He could see her on the path ahead, though she was much further away than she ought to have been given that she was walking so sedately.
Ducking his head to avoid a low hanging branch, when he straightened again the path before him was empty. Even the fog had stilled. And Eliza Ashcombe was simply gone.
Just… gone. One moment she was there, the mist swirling around the deep claret of her cloak — and the next, there was nothing. Only the dense white fog and the quiet drip of dew from the branches above.
Gabriel reined in sharply, staring at the empty space where she had been. His heartbeat thundered in his ears, too fast for the simple exertion of riding. “Impossible,” he muttered under his breath. He had seen her. Heknewhe had seen her. And yet she had vanished as though she’d never been there at all.
Was he losing his mind? Had his imagination — stoked by too many hours spent thinking about a woman he barely knew — conjured an image of her from the mist? The notion was absurd. And yet so was the alternative. Women did not simply vanish into thin air.
He turned his horse around, retracing his path back toward the main road, intending to return to the Hall and forget thewhole foolish business. But as he rounded a bend in the trail, his horse snorted and slowed, and there she was again — standing calmly a short distance ahead, basket in hand, as though she had been walking there all along.
This time she was not spectral. She was solid and real and infuriatingly composed.
“What the devil is this?” Gabriel demanded, swinging down from the saddle in one fluid motion. “What sort of infantile games are you playing at?”
Her brows rose, her expression the very picture of cool indifference. “I do not play games, Lord Blackburn.”
“You vanished,” he said flatly. “One moment you were there — directly ahead of me — and the next, you were gone. And now here you are again, in the opposite direction no less.”
She tilted her head, regarding him as one might a particularly slow-witted child. “If I vanished, my lord, then I fear that is your problem, not mine. I have been here all along. I only left my cottage a few moments ago.”
“Do not toy with me,” he bit out, more sharply than he intended. “I saw you.”
“Then perhaps you should question your eyesight,” she replied, her voice maddeningly serene. “Because I assure you, I have done nothing of the sort. I have neither the time nor the inclination to play games — and even if I did, I would hardly play them with someone I hold in such profound dislike.”
Her words landed like a slap — not because of their content, which was no more than he had expected, but because of the utter calm with which she delivered them. There was no malice in her tone, no venom. Merely a statement of fact, cool and dispassionate.
“Dislike?” he repeated, something inexplicably tight settling in his chest.
“Indeed,” she said lightly. “You are far too arrogant and far too pleased with yourself for my tastes. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”
She brushed past him, the faint and familiar scent of rosemary lingering in her wake, leaving him standing in the middle of the misty path — unsettled, frustrated, and more intrigued than he cared to admit.
Chapter
Five
Eliza had told herself, quite firmly, that she would not think of him again.
And yet, as she knelt among the damp leaves, her skirts tucked up and her cloak pulled close against the chill, she found her thoughts circling back to him once more. Gabriel Hawthorne had crossed her mind for what must have been more than a dozen times since their encounter only a half hour before.
Perturbed hardly covered it. He had been insufferable — arrogant and accusatory, with a temper she had not expected from a man so otherwise self-contained. And yet beneath his irritation there had been confusion, genuine confusion. It was that which unsettled her even more than his demands.
He hadseenher, he insisted. First walking ahead of him, then disappearing, and finally reappearing further back on the path behind him. She had dismissed the claim in the moment — with good reason, she thought — as nothing more than the arrogance of a man unused to having his perceptions questioned. And yet, now, with the quiet of the forest pressing in around her and nothing but her own thoughts for company, the certainty she had felt began to fray like tattered silk.
Gabriel Hawthorne was many things — high-handed, prideful, utterly exasperating. But he was not, she suspected, prone to flights of fancy. Whatever else he was, he did not seem the sort to imagine things that were not there.
“Perhaps,” she murmured to herself as she brushed away a layer of damp earth and exposed the rough, knobby crown of a truffle, “hedidsee someone.”
