Her eyes skimmed the landscape. “Spring comes so late this far north. It’s nearly June, and yet the trees are only now budding. It was summer in Sussex when I boarded the train.”
“True. But give it two weeks, Chris. The heather will turn green with new growth and gorse will paint the hills in lemon-yellow flowers.”
“The very color of hope.”
Alistair hated the wistfulness in her tone.
“Has hope been in such short supply, then?”
She shrugged, eyes dropping back to his handkerchief still wound around her fingers.
“I haven’t—” she began, chest heaving again. “I h-haven’t the funds toleave.”
He had suspected as much, but it still sent a bolt of anger lancing through him.
“I am sorrier than I can say that your husband and father left ye nothing. That was a right damnable thing to do.”
“It was.”
“The funds from this excavation are important to ye.”
“They are, but I was also excited for the work. To conduct an exploration of this magnitude is every archaeologist’s dream.”
He grunted. “Ye should have been born a man, Chris. Ye would have taken the world by storm.”
The words were true enough, though Alistair would forever be grateful she was a lusciously curved woman.
“I would have,” she sniffed, dabbing at her eyes once more. “I still might.”
Helpless admiration swelled at her indomitable spirit. “There is the Chris I know.”
Even as he spoke, the very air changed around him. An energy vibrated along his muscles as if a long-dead part of him was slowly awakening.
A sensation he had only ever felt in Chris’s presence.
And in that moment, he knew.
He had to convince her to stay. He couldn’t send her back to Aunt Eunice’s rackety garret. To live with hunger and hopelessness.
“If I double the amount I proposed to pay ye, then would ye stay?” he asked. John McIntosh—his steward, orfactor,in Scottish parlance—would surely berate him for the expense, but Alistair knew he could afford the funds.
Chris froze, the handkerchief half-raised to her face.
Her gaze skewered him.
“Why would you do such a thing?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do. For yourself. For me.”
They stared at one another as wind rippled the grass around them.
She still has that shard of gold in her right iris, he thought. A wee hint that her soul was lightning struck.
“It isn’t pity if that is what ye be thinking,” he continued.
She laughed, a sharp crack of sound. “I would hardly care, even if it were pity. Pride is the privilege of those with full stomachs and more than a handful of gowns to their name.”
Alistair hated the reality her words implied.
