“No?”
“Surely, you have earnings saved from your career in the army,” she said. “And then you have other monies, too.”
Other monies?What was she on about?
“Couldn’t that be used to fund her season and dowry?”
“While I was pursuing my career in the army, Stoke squandered all the monies I sent home, along with Gwyneth’s dowry. I returned to England to find my family without a penny that didn’t rightly belong to a creditor.”
In silence, Artemis mulled this over.
For some reason, he wasn’t finished. “Stoke is an utter waster, and I’m …”
He felt her gaze on the side of his face. “What are you, Bran?”
Perhaps it wasn’t for the best to complete that sentence. It might veer too close to self-pity to say he’d lost his appetite for living—that for years he hadn’t seen the point in being alive except for Gwyneth.
“The fact is,” he began, “Stoke and I do share a similarity.”
“And what is that?”
“We’re both bad at living.”
Artemis blinked. “How can a person bebadat living?”
“Don’t you see it all around you in thehaut tonevery day?”
They topped a subtle rise in the road and straight ahead appeared a solid square, two-story building constructed of local limestone, with a broad forecourt and stables to the side. A lad was going about with a torch and lighting the exterior lanterns for looming nightfall. The sign swinging from a tall post read The Rose & Crown.
“Our coaching inn,” said Artemis.
They didn’t speak again until they entered the stable yard.
“I’ll see to Radish and Pixie.” Bran reached out with his free hand for the mare’s reins.
As Artemis extended the reins, their hands brushed. Really, an insignificant encounter of one leather glove against another.
Then why did it take his lungs five seconds to remember how to breathe?
As if her lungs were experiencing the same difficulty, Artemis startled backward a step. “I,erm,” she began, “I’ll see to securing the rooms.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“Am I?”
“You owe Mr. Scunt his evening meal,” said Bran. “He will be waiting.”
Artemis groaned. When a chuckle escaped Bran, she joined in, too, and that other moment passed.
He watched her enter the inn, leaving him alone with two horses for company and a single thought in his mind.
What had transpired over the last hour?
Somehow, the numbness that had been part of him these last two years had faded. He had no doubt it would return, but now, in this moment, and for the last hour, hefelt.
And these feelings …
They were better.
