The words tore free of him before he knew he meant to speak them, because his body had already surged forward. Every instinct drove the same command—take her, pull her back, get her clear.
His hand closed around hers. The contact was almost delirious—warm, real, unmistakable. Her fingers tightened in his, as though she had been waiting for his touch, as though the joining itself had always been the way of things.
Relief surged through him, sharp enough to steal his breath. He drew back instinctively, already turning his body to shield her, to pull her clear of the heat rising at her spine.
But she did not come.
Her hand had not slipped from his. But the pull went nowhere, as though the force of it had been swallowed between them. He braced, tightened his grasp, set his weight into the motion.
She swayed toward him—no more than a breath, a fraction—and stopped. Her arm stretched, the line of it taut between them, but her feet remained where they were. Planted as though sunken through the floor.
His chest burned with the effort. Confusion tore through him, wild and unreasoning. He pulled again, harder, desperate now, and felt the answer in his bones. He could take her hand, but he could not take her away.
He could only take what was meant to meet her.
“Let me,” he said again, and now the words were stripped of argument or pride. Not command. Not rescue. A request shaped by necessity alone. “Let me stand behind you. Between you and the fire.”
For a heartbeat, she only gazed at him, wonder in her eyes and pain on her brow. Then, wordlessly, she nodded.
He stepped—not toward her, butintothe narrow margin she guarded. Into the place that answered only to surrender. And gave his body, the only shield he could offer her. He wrapped himself about her, cradling her back in the cave of his chest and arms, covering her tender neck with his own cheeks.
The heat struck him at once.
Flame bent toward his body as water bends toward stone, divided not by force but by presence. The air thickened, burning his breath as it entered him; his skin flared with pain so immediate it erased every other sensation. He set himself there without thought, shoulders squared, chest pressed into her, knowing with a clarity that left no room for fear that retreat was no longer possible.
This was not escape—not for her. But it was salvation, all the same. All would be right… all would be well once the flame had exhausted its wrath on him.
Darcy tore himself awakewith a cry already in his throat.
It ripped free of him, raw and ungoverned, dragging his body upright as though the bed itself had rejected him. His lungs seized; breath came in a harsh, scraping rush that burned all the way down. Fire clung to him still—on his skin, in his hair, along his hands where he couldfeelit, unmistakable and alive. He clawed at his nightshirt, half-mad with the certainty that it must be smoking.
The room reeled. Darkness. The low gleam of banked coals. No flame. No wall. No Elizabeth.
And yet the heat would not leave him.
His hands shook violently as he pressed them to his arms, his chest, his face. No thick dusting of broken plaster, no burns. His skin was whole. Unmarked. Still, the sensation lingered—an echo too sharp to be dismissed, as though his flesh remembered something his eyes now denied.
“God—” The word came out hoarse, broken.
He dragged in another breath and another, forcing the rhythm back by sheer will. The air smelled wrong to him—too clean, too cold. He could have sworn there was smoke.
Ashape loomed at the foot of the bed.
Darcy shouted again, the sound tearing loose before thought could intervene, and lurched back against the headboard—
Only to meet the steady, unblinking gaze of Brutus.
The dog stood with his forepaws planted wide, head lifted, ears forward, every line of him intent. He did not bark. He did not move. He only watched Darcy with an attention so focused it might have been accusation. Or vigil.
Darcy clutched the coverlet with a strangled laugh that ended closer to a sob. “Damn you,” he breathed, dragging a hand down his face. “You great brute.”
Brutus’s tail thumped once against the floor.
Footsteps thundered in the corridor. The door flew open, and it was all Darcy could do not to scream again.
“Sir?” His valet stood framed in the doorway, half-dressed, eyes wide. “We heard—are you unwell?”
Darcy swallowed hard. His throat burned. His heart still battered against his ribs like something trying to escape.
