She pulled away until he released her, and she scrambled back to her own space.
“Forgive me,” Rose said stiffly. “I’m behaving like a child. Of course, you’ve long since healed, and it’s all in the past.” The confusion clamoring in her brain, however, was nothing compared to the topsy-turvy feelings of her heart.
Or maybe it was simply the peculiarity of how intensely her body had reacted to Finn, despite how her heart no longer yearned for him as it once had.
“Nothing to forgive,” he muttered.
“No,” she agreed, keeping her own counsel. Perhaps not. Not anymore. Holding on to her pain over his betrayal was pointless, and she would make an effort to root it out.
“Do you know that William and I ...? What I mean to say is that William has gone abroad, and we are no longer engaged.”
Finn nodded, and she appreciated the fact that he didn’t gloat, nor did he offer condolences that they both knew would have been quite false.
They sat in silence again for a few minutes. Rose wondered what he was thinking. For her part, she was still amazed that she was part of this dangerous adventure. What would Charlotte say about her abduction? She almost smiled at the idea of telling her how she untied Finn and, hopefully, how they escaped.
“You’re practically grinning,” he accused. “Are you enjoying this?”
“No,” she shook her head. “Certainly not, though it is rather exciting and will make a good story. It’s precisely something my sister-in-law would get up to.”
Finn shook his head, and she could barely see his face in the dusky light.
“I don’t think we got ‘up to it’ so much as got dragged into it, though I think it’s time to get ourselves out of it.”
She glanced around. “Shall we venture out? It sounds very quiet now.”
He looked at her askance. “The walls supporting this building are three feet thick. We can’t hear footsteps outside.”
However, at that instant, they both clearly heard a door slam back against its framing in the direction from which they had entered. Someone had pushed open the iron door with great force.
Rose’s heart started pounding double time, precisely when she’d been lulled into nearly forgetting why they were sitting on the floor in the middle of the shipyard’s Ropewalk having a chat, as well as engaging in other marvelous activities.
“Now what?” she whispered into his ear.
“We wait,” he said tersely.
In about a minute, the footsteps echoing through the building sounded nearly abreast of their hiding place, and Rose held her breath.
“We’ll find them,” they heard a voice close by. “They haven’t left the yard. I’m sure of that.”
Gilbert, she mouthed to Finn, who nodded in agreement.
“And when we do?” came another voice, unfamiliar to her.
“Accidents happen every day at the Ropewalk. Dangerous place to be,” the master builder concluded.
Whoever was with him laughed.
Gilbert didn’t. He sounded deadly serious. “As the authorities will see it, if that little miss wasn’t here illicitly meeting her beau, she would not have suffered the same fate as him.”
“Which is?” asked the other man.
“The slicer will swing down and take off both their cursed heads.”
Rose nearly gasped aloud, managing to stifle it with her own trembling hand. She stared silently into Finn’s eyes.
“Perhaps they were locked in an embrace,” Gilbert added, warming to his invented tale, “and didn’t notice the rope slicer had broken free of its mooring. They died painlessly.”
“Will they?” the other man asked.
