“Did you continue out of fear he’d force you to wed me?” he asked.
“No.” Her gaze flitted away. “And you? You never truly answered the same question.”
“No.” He kept his answer simple.
Fear of wedding Julia hadn’t been part of the equation.
Even if the rector had bodily dragged him back to Southford, Rayne was certain Markham would never insist on marriage…not if Markham could think of any other way to preserve Julia’s reputation.
Curiosity. Excitement. The force of Julia’s enthusiasm—those had been the primary movers. The wild way her dark eyes flashed. The unspoken demand he take up her gauntlet and give his all. The sense he would eventually resolve the conundrum she embodied, despite having bungled everything so far.
For better or worse, they’d set out on this journey, and everything in him told him they must finish, no matter what he must confront on the way.
And if he told her even half the truth, she’d probably laugh…or cast herself from the speeding carriage.
He studied the ceiling. “I’d hate to disappoint Edmund Alistair Cabbage, after all.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her deflate.
“And you, of course,” he added softly. “I’d hate to disappoint you.”
She did not reply.
Maybe she hadn’t even heard.
He fixed his gaze on the blur of passing trees—stark, bare, and wet with the winter rain. He wished he understood the mechanizations of her mind. But they might as well have been written in Middle English.
But he couldn’t criticize, could he? Because it wasn’t sense that made him reach across the carriage, beckoning her to rest against his side, any more than it was sense that made her respond with a sigh and then settle her head against his shoulder.
And it certainly wasn’t sense that encouraged him to thread his fingers through hers and then rub his thumb back and forth across the line down the center of her tiny palm.
“You’re welcome, by the way,” he said.
“I didn’t thank you,” she replied.
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Chapter Eight
Under the weight of all she could neither define nor speak, Julia suffocated in wordless stillness.
But was the silence crushing?
Or was Rayne the instrument of her slow asphyxiation?
Rayne, mysterious.
Rayne, mercurial…changeable as the sentiments he’d roused in her heart. First, infatuation. Later, loathing. And now?
He curved and pulled like a hook, a question mark, a query without an answer, all the while comfortingly stroking her palm.
He could be caring in one moment—lending her his shirt, easing her chills with a warm, steady embrace, pillowing the jerks and sways of the moving carriage with his body. Then, in the next moment, he could become fire…or ice.
Perhaps that was why she felt as if she must hold her breath. Purposely, she exhaled, watching out the window as the passing leafless branches scratched the low-hanging clouds.
Funny thing was, both when she’d decided to pose as Rayne’s footman and when she’d decided to return to the road this morning, her aversion to long carriage rides hadn’t factored into her decision.
Not once.
