“Your self-esteem, perhaps. Your heart remains untouched.”
“Does it?” He turned to her, eyes gleaming with an oddly golden light today, like tiger’s eye. “Perhaps I find your cruelty refreshing.”
Her heart skipped a beat, and she told it very firmly to stop.
“We barely like one another,” she reminded him.
“As I have told you before, that is no longer true. You may not like me, butIlikeyou. You may deny it all you like, but there’s no hiding from the truth.” He turned her, leading her around the house to the back garden, where chickens fluttered and pecked in a vegetable patch, which sported the winter vegetables of leek, winter cabbage, and sprouts. “Now,” he said, stopping by the gate, “let me introduce you to Doris.”
With a squawk, one of the chickens abandoned the soil she was pecking in and ran headlong for them. Oliver opened the gate, beckoning Emily inside, and bent to greet the bird. He stroked her head and picked her up, cradling her in his good arm. Her feathers were brownish bronze, and she had beady black eyes.
“Hello, Doris,” Emily said, removing her glove so she could better run a finger along Doris’s clipped feathers. “She likes you,” she said to Oliver.
“That’s what one gets for feeding the chickens. I also have it on excellent authority that Doris loves everyone. She’s an anomaly among chickens—she enjoys being held.”
At the sight of Oliver crouching in the dirt, holding a chicken of all things, speaking about them as though he were intimately acquainted with them, made a lump form in Emily’s throat. “Have you kept chickens before?”
“Not in the slightest, but John has been keeping me apprised.” He grinned up at her from where he crouched. “And I haven’t been spendingallmy time with you, you know. Sometimes I’ve even been helpful.”
Who was this man? Certainly not the same one who had taken her to Gretna Green. “Did you enjoy helping out?”
“On occasion, when it involved chickens and pigs and horses. I used to steal away into my father’s stables all the time. Asked the head groom to take me on as a stable hand. He never did, but he let me pretend sometimes.”
“You wanted to be a stable boy?”
He shrugged, and Doris fluttered in protest. “It seemed a simple occupation. Every boy loves horses—and very few like expectations.”
Oliver did not strike her like every boy. His childhood could not have been happy if he’d sought solace in the stables.
“If I could be a farmer’s son, I would be,” Oliver said, letting Doris go.
She nudged his shoulder. “You like mud that much, do you?”
He laughed, nudging back, and her stomach fluttered the way Doris’s feathers had. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s brave Clarabella and see how the road is doing. I think the snow is melting.”
Yes, the snow. The road. Soon, they would be leaving here, and all these confusing emotions would stay behind. All this was merely a product of their proximity; once she had some space and time to herself, she would come to her senses.
Back around the other side of the house, Oliver checked the gate to the pigpen was closed, and led her down the driveway to the road. As before, spread between the hedges, the dent where Oliver and his carthorse had passed a few days prior now partially refilled.
This time, however, there was the steady drip, drip, drip of melting snow. It would not be long now until the road was passable enough for them to walk it, if they so chose. Not that much longer until other vehicles could potentially pass by.
Their adventure was nearly at an end.
Oliver took her bare hand in his; she’d failed to replace her glove. She’d always hated her hands—scrubbing sheets and pots with their caustic soap always made her skin chap and crack, but he touched her as though she were made of glass.
Even Marlbury had not made her feel delicate before.
She ought to pull free, but it had been such a long time since someone had comforted her, she couldn’t quite bring herself to retreat from his warmth. She was a cold hearth, and now finally there was fire.
At what point was this wrong?
She closed her eyes.
“Emily?” he said softly.
She was relieved to be returning home—Isabella needed her, and she needed to find her equilibrium again. No more handsome gentlemen and long-forgotten desires.
“I expect we’ll be able to leave tomorrow,” she said, pulling her hand free. Something in the region of her chest hurt, and she steadfastly didn’t look at his face. What she needed from him now was his levity, an assurance that he felt nothing at the prospect of them parting. Then she could convince herself that she, too, felt nothing.
