She glanced up at him, and repeated, “I won’t leave,” she said. “I will not.”
He nodded. “Let me pull the carriage up the street, Lady Sarah. Away from the fire.”
She nodded but refused to enter until the carriage was parked a little distance away.
Alano and Tim were pressed into service to help extinguish the blaze. Edmunds stood by the horses. “Go and help. I know you want to. I’ll sit in the carriage.”
“I’d rather take you home, Lady Sarah.”
How very odd that the image of Kilmarin came to her at that moment. Kilmarin, with its jutting towers and sprawling mass.
“There is time enough for that,” she said, not wanting to admit that she really didn’t want to see Chavensworth at the moment.
She would have to sleep where Douglas had slept, gripping his pillow. When she cried, it would be silentlyand alone, where no one could try to give her comfort.
There was no comfort to be found.
“If you’re certain, Lady Sarah,” he said.
“I am,” she replied, wishing he would just leave her. “Go.”
She glanced over her shoulder to see an otherworldly scene: black shadows and licking orange flames, clouds of great white dust, and above it all, a clear ebony sky.
She reached up and opened the carriage door, taking great care when folding the steps down. Slowly, she placed her foot on the bottom step, then the next, reaching out to pull herself into the carriage. Once there, she rearranged her skirts with the decorum she’d always been taught. Her dress was ruined, of course. The fabric was torn in two places and the whole of it covered in that odd gray dust.
Nevertheless, she sat with ankles crossed below her skirts and hands folded atop them. Somewhere, in the night, she had lost her bonnet. But then, she’d also lost her husband. All in all, a bonnet wasn’t that important. Not like a husband.
She closed her eyes and willed herself not to cry. There would be time for tears for years and years into the future. For now, all she had to do was get through this night. How many more hours were there until it was morning? She needed to know so that she could count them off in her mind. If she had some goal to strive for, she might be able to make it without screaming.
The door to the carriage abruptly opened.
“What in the name of all bloody hell are you doing here? I nearly killed you, you daft woman! Have you no sense?”
She stared at Douglas, incapable of responding. All she could do was take in the sight of him, covered insoot, his black hair sticking up in spikes, his face covered by dust. His white shirt was ripped, and there was a bloody scratch on his right cheek.
Her heart was beginning to beat again, expanding from the shrunken, shriveled little mass it had been for the past thirty minutes.
She flew out of the carriage and advanced on him like a demon, beating him with her hands, hitting that beautiful chest with her clenched fists, so furious, so enraged that she didn’t care what she was saying. Nor did she give a flying farthing that people’s attention was no longer on the blaze but on her—Lady Sarah Eston having a fit.
“You blew yourself up, you bloody daft man,” she screamed.
“Sarah!”
He grabbed her wrists with both hands and held them away from him.
“You could have died! You could have died!”
“I had all I could think of without you being in the mix,” he shouted. “I could have killed you, Sarah Eston. Did you never think of that?”
She lowered her head, her rage passing, but slowly. Several long minutes passed while she strained to regain her composure. He released her wrists, and she stepped back, still breathing heavily.
“Ah, love, I could have hurt you,” he said softly.
She looked up at him. “You sound very Scottish,” she said. “Why is that?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, in full view of anyone who chose to look in their direction, he pinned her up against the side of the carriage and kissed her—gloriously, wondrously. All she could do was hold on to him and moan when he deepened the kiss.
She slid her hands across his chest, reached out to grab his shoulders, then smoothed her palms down his arms. She wanted to feel all of him, to reassure herself that he was actually there. He wasn’t a figment of her desperate imagination. This wasn’t a dream in which she was given her greatest desire. He was actually there, holding her, kissing her.
