“At no time did I say, he couldn’t speak English. I said he didn’t like to speak English.”
“A dance of words, Joshua, making me a fool.”
He towered over her. “I could say of course to that notion, if you consider yourself foolish, but I know you wouldn’t find that agreeable.”
Oh, he called her foolish!Juliet pushed him. Arms flailing, he splashed into the water. He stood up roaring with laughter, and combing loose wisps of his dark hair off his face, the water dripping from his face down to his chest.
“I remember the last time you surprised me by dumping a bucket of cold water on my head. This time there will be retribution.”
“Ha!” She turned to go back to camp. “Is a cougar troubled by a mouse?”
Water sloshed behind as she took a step. Arms of steel wrapped around her and dragged into the water. He drew her up to him, holding her tight in his embrace, as if shielding her with his body against the world, against all the torments, fears and loneliness.
Cocooned within Joshua’s arms, Juliet drank it all in—the man, the millions of ways he moved her. God, he was warm. And strong. Too strong. His dark lashes swept down veiling a mischievous glint in his eyes. She pushed a finger in his chest. “You are a son of a motherless goat.”
He laughed, pretended to slip and she grabbed around his neck. “Where is Lady Faulkner?”
Juliet pushed away from him, swam a few strokes, keeping out of his reach, the water cool and soothing.
She looked behind, transfixed by the droplets dribbling down, down, down. She raised her eyes to Joshua’s face. For an infinite moment their eyes locked, and Juliet forgot her fears, forgot England, forgot to breathe.
But what lingered in her mind was what had damaged him. She wanted to understand his secrets. “What is written in the letter?”
“There will be no discussion—” His voice was low, his tone firm. Ominous.
His moods were like the winds, ever shifting. “I do not judge,” she said softly.
“I was to be married to the love of my life.”
He was to be married? He had a sweetheart? At Tionnontigo, he had told her did not have a wife and she wondered of his anger at the time when she’d mentioned the subject. Had the woman jilted him? Found him wanting? “Why did you not marry?”
The ensuing silence punctuated only by the thundering of the falls seemed to go on forever. He simply stood there, eyes glazed with chilling hate. His big hands flexed and fisted as if he wished to twist someone’s neck.
Juliet took a step toward him. “Oh, Joshua. I’m guessing for whatever reason, she called off the wedding. I cannot begin to fathom your grief.”
Her voice seemed to snap the cord of his patience. A foul oath burst from him and he waded from the water.
She ran up the steep bank, grabbed his arm and swung him to face her. The lines in his face hardened and, without warning, he reached out to touch her cheek. Juliet stood her ground. His hand lingered, lightly traced the line of her jaw.
“So many words get lost. They stay in my throat…lose their courage. I want to ignore it, but how can I hide from something that will never go away?”
“I assumed there’d be one great love in my life. Sarah. For ages, I reasoned she was the only one, yet a flame-haired beauty with her omnipresent smiles makes me crawl out from beneath a fog of guilt and forces me to come alive, makes me want more of which I have no right.”
Sarah? Juliet gasped. What nightmarish agony had the woman put him through?
“She is dead.”
Joshua suddenly hauled her close against his pounding heart. His emotions were out of control despite his efforts to grapple them into submission. He didn’t tell her Sarah had been murdered by some sick bastard…couldn’t say the words. Not yet.
Juliet, whose face had shone like the sparkling sun, and whose laugh, like the happy sound of falling waters, looked at him questioningly.
Unable to quell the urge, he reached out and gently touched her flaming red hair, like he did every night when he had held her in his arms, when she was asleep and did not know he gazed upon her.
“Stay with me. Do not go away.”
Joshua put his finger on her chin and lifted her face, studying her as if a rare butterfly had landed on his fingertip. She was a threat to his necessary isolation, yet she stole into his soul. He would hold her, and that would be all.
Even as he touched his lips to hers, he told himself to resist. Yet his thirst for her dominated all rational thought and caution winged upward, vanishing like embers in the sky.
