He would choose the disgust over the pity any day.
Anyway, as far as this morning routine went, he much preferred the swimming to any other part of it. His body adrift in the indifferent currents of frigid saltwater was the sole hour of the day when he felt himself to be the man he remembered himself to be.
He hadn’t been much of a swimmer before his injury, but one day while his leg was healing, a nurse appeared at his bedside and asked if he could swim. A surge of bitterness had welled up inside him, so powerful its expulsion could have blown the building apart, but he’d held it dammed deep and gave a single nod, though he hadn’t the faintest idea what his body could still do. Pride moved his head, not certainty.
Her eyes softened with understanding—really, her eyes understood too much, and he could hardly stand it—but half an hour later, which had involved much grunting, sweating, and gritting of teeth, he was in the back of a horse cart, trundling across the rugged land. He’d kept his eyes closed against the wide crystalline-blue sky for the duration of the journey.
He could no longer stand the sky, either.
His nose had caught the scent before his eyes opened to it—the sea—and his heart threatened to lift out of his chest.
Before—his life was now cut into two parts,beforeandafter—he’d never given much thought to the sea. He’d taken it for granted, as did everyone in good spirits and good health. But improbably, he was alive in theafter, and the mere sight of the sun glittering across its fractious surface had him experiencing a human emotion other than bitterness or frustration or seething anger in months.
The nurse tossed him a smile over her shoulder, and that was the moment he felt it—that he could go on living.
He wouldn’t call it a will to live, but rather an acceptance of remaining alive.
He supposed that was something.
His career and entire future had been ripped from him when that bullet tore through his horse. He’d been physically crushed, scarred, and trapped that day, but in all the days since, a tighter trap had closed around him—one that seized his mind and cast it into darkness. A propensity for it, in fact.
Still, his injury wasn’t the first time the future he’d expected had been snatched from him.
The ghost who had just disappeared into the woods …
He’d once thought he had a future with her, too.
As the initial shock of the encounter wore off—perhaps he should have expected as much. England was only so big—his brain began to catch up to what he’d actually seen.
Lady Artemis—established fact.
A one-eyed, three-legged sheepdog.
An angry mother cat.
A basket of rambunctious kittens.
A basket of rambunctious kittens.
If he’d ventured to predict an encounter with Lady Artemis, it would have been in the context of a lord’s grand ballroomor a lady’s elegant drawing-room soirée. As unlikely as either prospect was, considering he had no plans to return to London or society, they existed within the realm of distant possibility.
The point was this—Lady Artemis Keating should not have been in these woods at this hour of day.
Madness yet remained open as a possibility.
A sudden, sharp spike of pain streaked through his right thigh up to his hip bone. He’d been standing still too long, and his leg was barking its displeasure. His remaining good foot in the lead, he moved forward, the action a constant negotiation with his right leg. What had once been natural—movement—was now an intentional choice.
He could count one small blessing.
Lady Artemis wasn’t here to witness him in motion.
He snorted.
Witness him in motion.
An elegant turn of phrase for something that was anything but.
An image skittered across his mind—herin his arms, whirling around a sparkling ballroom, lighter than air.
