A door crashed, and the sound of feet was hurrying their way.
While Belle was frozen in place, Henry snapped back to his side of the table. His head hit the boards again, and his spine collided with the rim of his chair, but he felt no pain. His mind was wholly and entirely fixed upon that one sensation.
What it had felt like to have his lips brush hers, to have velvet meet silk.
That one brush of heaven that had been far, far too slight.
Belle's lips still tingled even after she had gone to bed that night.
At twenty years of age, some might have expected her to be more experienced in the ways of romance. That some village boy should have claimed her interest one summer or at least held her hand. Nothing of the sort, however, had ever happened to her. Perhaps because she was too interested in playing in the fields with the animals or wading in the stream. She hadn't the time to dress prettily or weave flowers into her hair like the other girls. Perhaps it was the time she spent helping her mother? Or the sheer fact that she was not pretty enough for the boys to be interested?
Belle had never really thought upon the oddity with any great time.
Now, however, she thought about it a lot.
Just what had made her so detached from the boys in the village? Why had she never caught any of them glancing her way? And why, therefore, had Henry looked at her as he did beneath the table at dinner?
Burrowing further beneath the bedsheets, Belle drew her hand up to her chest. She stroked the folds of the handkerchief now wrapped around her finger.
What was different about Henry to suppose that he would look at her like that? In the way a man looked at a woman?
Even in her innocence, something in Belle's core being had recognized the way that Henry was staring. It had noticed the heat and responded to its urging. With every inch of space he had disintegrated, leaning closer to her, she had felt an unfurling sensation in her lower belly. A tremble that had run down her back and a quiver that shook through her middle. The heat from his hand had warmed her through, the gentleness of his touch only begging her to seek more. She had snuggled into that touch as if she were a cat looking to be petted, and he had not been disgusted.
The harsh words that had led them to that moment were all but forgotten, whisked away in the untapped passion of what followed. Belle could no more summon those hurt feelings than she could summon sleep.
Surrendering to her daydreams, Belle flopped onto her side and rearranged the blankets. She punched the pillow beneath her head into a better shape and looked out the open window to the starry sky beyond. The moon was bright but somewhere beyond its frame. She had its light but not the glowing orb itself.
That was how she felt about Henry, she realized.
That she had his light, his teachings, and his warmth. Even if he was not in the same room.
Thinking back to that first day when she had been so nervous to simply put one foot in front of the other, she remembered his promise.
"I will be your anchor," he had said.
Her anchor, her moon...
Based on the stories she had been told and tales whispered by the older girls, Belle knew what to call such a feeling. She knew what it meant when you enjoyed a man's company when with him then yearned for it when apart. She knew how a girl waxing lyrical about the moon and how its light was an ever-constant was a girl that had become lost to her emotions. She knew what it meant when a man had become your first thought in the mornings and your last before slumber.
The conclusion of such feelings was obvious, even to a chaste little girl like Belle.
Simply put, she was falling in love with Henry Munro.
11
After only five days of Arabelle Fisher-Henderson being in residence, Henry felt sure that he had aged a year. One glorious, pressurized, infuriating year.
Despite all his active attempts to sway his thoughts and emotions in the opposite direction, Belle was no less on his mind now than she had been beneath that dining table two nights ago. She was with him when he was awake, she was there when he tried to sleep.
Now, however, his thoughts had turned in a determinedly romantic direction.
He pictured the estate his parents had owned, the land that was still technically in his name. It was a hundred times smaller than the Henderson castle but a thousand times larger than the shack she had lived in with her mother. He imagined the two of them there, taking down the dust sheets and raising a fire in the kitchens. He had thought over the horse traders he knew in the South, wondered what kind of animal Belle might like to own. Would she prefer something sweet and tame like a rabbit? Or wild and free like herself? On one very long night, when he had been given the privacy of complete darkness, he had even dared to think of what it might be like to truly kiss her. To be the only man that could claim that right...
Knowing that such events were impossible did not stop them from flooding his imagination and, at nearly a week since her arrival, Henry was stubbornly resentful of his own self-torture. He had taken to walking about the castle grounds just before sun-up, welcoming the biting cold as it slapped sense into his mind and chilled the tips of his fingers. It was a punishment for his own wayward thoughts but never seemed to help.
As such, on the sixth morning of Belle's presence, Henry was in a foul mood when guests arrived at the gate. Near a half-mile from the castle's front doors were a wide set of wrought iron portways.
They had been bolted every since he had arrived on the estate.
