That her love for him had never ebbed. Never died.
Swallowing, she took in a deep breath.
You can do this, she encouraged herself.Just focus on the excavations. Just breathe through each day.
NATURALLY, TELLING HERSELF to focus on the excavations and ignore Alis as much as possible was rather different than actually accomplishing said goals.
Theoretically, Chrissi and Alis were to see one another sparingly.
In reality, they both lived in the same castle and worked at the same excavation site.
Often, Chrissi would be snugged into her bedchamber of an evening, listening to the crack of Alis’s laughter as he drank whisky with a visiting friend.
Or she would be passing his study and hear the rumble of his voice speaking with his factor, Mr. McIntosh.
And each evening, as was proper, they would dine together. It would have set servants’ tongues to wagging had she avoided the dining room altogether and taken a tray in her bedchamber.
Mr. McIntosh would always join them for dinner, for propriety’s sake, if nothing else.
But Miss Rollins and her mother were frequently in attendance. Or the vicar and his wife. Or any assortment of local gentry who Alis counted as an acquaintance.
It was torture, pure and simple.
To witness Alis happy and content in his life. To endure the crackle of his wit and the intelligence of his mind.
And worst of all, for Chrissi to imagine herself within it. To see clearly what her life might have become had she been willing to forgive and accept the terms of marriage Alis had once offered her.
But that future had been lost nine years ago when she had chosen to turn her back on him and marry Stephen instead.
A choice she now recalled almost daily.
Would the horror and pain of those days ever cease to haunt her? How long would she pay penance for her rash decisions?
True to his word, she and Alis communicated mostly through notes about their work.
We uncovered a row of eleven cut stones today, she wrote to him on the third day of their excavations.At the moment, they do not appear to be sloping toward an entrance, but we are in early days yet.
His replies were always thorough, his notes detailed.
As with his personality, Alis dove in head-first:
Excavations today have uncovered another seven stones, continuing along the line you began. Troweling around the base of the stones revealed seventeen pottery sherds and various animal bones. Given the depth of the finds, I presume them to be of medieval origin, not from an earlier primitive time. But I await your expert eye.
His faith in her expertise soothed her battered ego. He had even included drawings of the pieces of broken pottery, the sherds illustrated with exacting precision.
However, when Chrissi had agreed to stay, she had not thought to prepare herself for the gut-punched ache of his handwriting—confident but neat, as her father had once described it.
With each missive, she found herself staring at his notes for minutes at a time—the sight of his bold letters evoking the lazy hum of cicadas under a drowsy Tuscan sun, herself curled into Alis’s side as he wrote.
This was why working with him was doomed to failure—the enterprise held a thousand memories just waiting for the right moment to pounce. For the wrongs between them to spill out, sharp as knives. Or the beauty of what might have been to snatch the air from her throat.
For example, on the fifth day of their excavations, Chrissi caught sight of Alis helping field hands restack a section of stone fencing a rambunctious bull had knocked down. As he often had in Italy, Alis shed his coat and waistcoat, preferring to work in just trousers and shirtsleeves.
Mesmerized, Chrissi stared at the shadow of biceps flexing beneath the lawn of his shirt, the muscles bunching between his shoulder blades as he hefted a large rock. And suddenly, she was remembering what those arms had felt like around her, how the dips and ridges of his back had moved under her palms.
Who knew how long she would have stared if a worker hadn’t cleared his throat at her side.
How was she to manage it, this constant onslaught of memory?
