Her very cold and miserable skin. And God, but her gown was heavy. It felt like it weighed fifty pounds as it molded to her body.
The only positive thing in all this was that Simon still held her hand as he guided her on the way back home. She clung to his strong fingers, and in the moments when they slid against her cold skin, she wished their walk would never end.
Even if they were both going to catch their death from it.
“Bollocks,” he muttered, his words barely carrying back to her over the roar of the wind and the pounding of the rain.
“What is it?” she asked.
He pivoted toward her. The rain had flattened his hair against his forehead and rivulets glided down his angular cheeks. She caught her breath. Wet Simon was also an utterly beautiful Simon.
If he noticed something different in her stare, he didn’t react to it. In fact, he pressed his lips together in displeasure and said, “The little stream you crossed over on your way out?”
“Yes?” she said. There was a small bridge over it, built by her grandfather decades ago, before she was born.
“Well…” Simon trailed off and motioned his hand forward.
She stepped up, squinting through the torrent, and caught her breath. The stream was now a raging river, water pouring over the bridge and cutting off their path.
“Oh God,” she groaned. “We’re going to have to go all the way around to Glassford Hill to circumvent the stream! It will add at least an hour to our journey.”
“No, it won’t,” Simon said, his tone firm and grim. “Because we’re not doing it.”
She gasped as she faced him again. “What are you talking about? If we don’t do it, we won’t get home.”
“That’s exactly right. We aren’t getting home. Not right now.” He squeezed her hand. “You’re shivering, and if we trod all around the estate in this downpour for the next two hours, you’re going to freeze. And honestly, so will I. But I have an idea of where to go.” He smiled, and she noted the expression didn’t reach his eyes.
“Where?” she asked.
He drew her forward and she trotted after him as he took them back where they’d come from, then veered them off the main path and through the wet and miserable woods.
“Simon, where are we going?” she asked again.
“The caretaker lodge,” he said.
She wrinkled her brow. “God, I haven’t even thought of that place in years. It’s been empty since…I think Father was still alive when our last caretaker lived there. How do you even know about it?”
Simon winked over his shoulder at her and she nearly lost her footing at the cheeky expression on his wet face. “I know a great many things.” He laughed, then said, “In truth, we used to come here when I’d visit. When your father was alive, James needed—”
“An escape,” she whispered, completing the sentence as memories flooded her. She winced at them. “I needed one too.”
Simon’s hand tightened around hers. “I wish we’d brought you. Though I doubt you would have been very interested in duke talk and fishing.”
“Fishing I would have been,” she said, noticing that his pace was increasing. It was exhausting, but at least moving kept her a bit warmer. “I loved to fish.”
“Well, next time we all run away from home, I’ll be sure to invite you,” he said.
She smiled, but said, “Next time you run away from home, Graham will be running away fromme. I doubt he’ll approve of my joining you.”
At that Simon’s posture stiffened and he didn’t speak for the next five minutes that he dragged her through the woods. She was beginning to give up hope they’d find the place when they came through the canopy of trees, and there it was.
It wasn’t much. Just a basic two-room cottage that had housed their old caretaker for decades. He had died and their father had not replaced him right away. Once James had taken over the estate, he’d built a far nicer one much closer to the house, since the current caretaker was married to their housekeeper. This old place had been abandoned years ago, and its boarded-up windows and the rusty hinges on the doors spoke to that.
But right now it was better than the finest palace.
Simon released her hand at last, fumbling under a rock by the door. He came up with a folded piece of cloth, which he unwrapped to reveal a key. He grinned at her as he fitted it in the lock and managed to wrestle the rickety door open.
He motioned her inside and she rushed past him, more grateful to be out of the rain than she had ever been for anything in her life. She stood in the very dark room, her eyes slowly adjusting, as Simon entered and then fought to get the creaky hinges moving to shut the door behind them.
