Her mouth snapped shut.
“After Grahamstown and the type of military service I’d transitioned into, I was considering selling my commission and returning to England.” His gaze darkened, and a feeling long lost trembled through Artemis. “And every time I thought of England, it was you I saw.”
Artemis’s voice refused to surface.
“Then a rifle shot tore through my horse, and my memory goes in flashes from there.” The way the words emerged, grim and matter-of-fact, sent a chill through her. “But you, I remember.”
She felt too stirred up to say anything reliably. Oh, what a day for revelations. The last ten years had unraveled in fewer than ten hours, like a ball of yarn. But the thing about an unraveled ball of yarn was that when one wound it up again, it would never be the same. Never as neat and tidy.
“But I’m not the only one who knows loss and grief,” he said. “You know them, too.”
Her heart might’ve stood still in her chest, and she wouldn’t know it.
“What you suffered from the loss of Dido wasn’t insignificant.”
Oh.
Dido.
He would think that, wouldn’t he?
And, yes, she had suffered loss and experienced grief over Dido.
But Artemis had suffered other loss and grief, too.
Her first loss had been him, of course.
But there had been the second loss, too, shortly thereafter.
The loss she kept tucked deep inside and shared with no one.
And for a slow, devastating instant just now, she’d thought he was speaking of that loss.
But he knew nothing of it, did he?
“Dido,” she began and stopped, praying her voice wouldn’t fail her. “Rake warned me not to get my heart involved with horses.Horses will break your heart.He said it over and over, and I didn’t listen.”
“But that’s who you are, Artemis.”
“And who is that?” Less and less, she was sure.
“Someone who leads with her heart.”
“Sometimes,” she began, wondering at herself for the confession she was about to make, “I wish I wasn’t.”
“Do you?” The question, low and resonant, brushed across his throat like warm velvet.
“It would result in less heartbreak.”
He nodded, as if she’d given the answer he’d expected. “Aye, but it would result in less joy.” He hesitated. “And love, too.”
Artemis went very still.
Was she speaking of joy and love and …heartbreak… withthisman?
Thisman who had once been the source of all three?
Oh, this ball of yarn was completely unraveled now, wasn’t it?
