Thalia’s head whipped around, wide-eyed as she noticed him at last.
A moment later, her gaze flitted back to the open window, her thoughts as loud as if she were screaming them.
Henry walked toward her with his hands up, before she had herself a third, altogether more fatal accident. After all, what would people think if, in the span of a few days, his wife fell down the stairs and survived, only to then tumble out of an upper-story window? Then again, maybe they would just think she was mad, taking crazed matters into her own hands.
CHAPTER 4
“I… heard an animal in distress!” Thalia blurted out, the cold wind cooling the sudden heat in her face. “I hoped to rescue it.”
Henry did not need to know that the animal in distress was her, and that if he had arrived just five minutes later, he would have entered an empty room. There was a ledge just below the window, wide enough to accommodate her, with plenty of stone embellishments along the walls to use as handholds.
The construction and layout of the manor might have been unfamiliar to her injured memory, but there was a part of her that seemed to know that if she just followed that ledge, she would find a way to get down to the ground. An instinct.
As if I have escaped this way before, though if I have been here for four years, I guess it must not have been a successful escape.
“I hear no creature,” Henry said, close to her now, a hand extended though she was not certain if he meant to pull her back from the windowsill or push her right out.
“You must have scared it,” she replied.
Her heart quickened at his proximity, her entire body responding to him in a manner that confounded her: her breath shallowed; her blood seemed to rush faster in her veins, roaring in her ears; her stomach twisting into knots, while that heat continued to radiate through her face and down her neck, her skin prickling.
It is fear,she mused, suspicious of her reaction to him.I must have been scared of him before; that is why I am shaking, why I cannot breathe.
“Get down,” Henry instructed in a voice that was not at all gentle. “Either you will fall and face certain death or you will catch your death of cold, perching there.”
When she did not immediately obey, he swept forward and scooped his arms beneath the bend of her knees and around her upper back, and lifted her off the sill himself. An intimacy of touch that stole what little breath she had left from her lungs, for she had never been held by a man before.
Not that she could recall, anyway.
Too shocked to protest, her throat tightening as her heart raced all the faster, she did not have to endure the surprising embrace for long. Henry set her down almost as quickly as he had picked her up, as if his only concern was getting her away from the window.
I suppose it would not look too good if I were to fall to my death, now, would it?she mused angrily, if only to prevent herself from thinking about the way he had picked her up with such casual ease.
“If I must lock these windows, I will,” he said gruffly, taking a step back as if the proximity made him just as uncomfortable. “Do not lie to me about animals in distress, Thalia; it is beneath you. You were attempting to escape, but, wife, youwillstay here until you are entirely recovered.”
Thalia hurried to wrap the two sides of her housecoat tighter around herself, keenly aware that she was wearing a dress beneath; it would not help her argument if he saw that she had dressed for an escape.
“At first, I sought fresh air,” she tried again. “Then, I heard a noise. I thought there might be an abandoned nest or that a… cat had got stuck somewhere. In my condition, do you think I would try to climb down the side of a manor?”
“I do, actually,” Henry replied, his eyes narrowing as he searched her face. Perhaps, looking for the wife within the woman who had no memory of him. “I think the situation has made you more reckless.”
His turn of phrase gave her pause, as she looked at him in turn, hopelessly trying to decipher the expression on his face. “More reckless than what?”
“Pardon?”
“More reckless than what? Was I reckless while I knew you?” she pressed, aware that this was what she had wanted earlier: an opportunity to have an audience alone with her husband, to ask whatever she desired to ask.
Considering her plan of escape had already been scuppered, she figured she might as well gain some information. Knowledge was power, after all, and if she could learn about the missing four years, maybe her memories would start to return.
Henry shrugged. “That is a complicated question.”
“As you have informed me that I am not going anywhere, it appears I am in no rush,” she retorted. “I have all the time in the world to hear your answer.”
“It is a matter of perspective,” he replied stiffly. “What I would call reckless, others might call reasonable. But this is not the time for such a discussion. You are supposed to be resting.”
He moved as if he meant to usher her back toward the bed, but if she spent one more minute lying there, staring at the unfamiliar canopy, willing her brain to function properly, she would trulylose her mind. As such, she veered away from him and sat herself down in the chair that belonged to a lovely writing desk.
My writing desk…
