“Hush,” Gabriel replied.
By the fifth button, she’d become so taut, and yet so trembly, she felt like she might implode. By the seventh, when Gabriel inserted two fingers between boot and her bare leg to hold the boot’s flap steady, she had forsaken breathing altogether. After he had all nine buttons secured at last, he withdrew those fingers, stroking them against her calf as he did so. The tension in Elodie abruptly snapped, setting her nervoussystem into cascade like a fey line. She closed her eyes, the breath shaking out of her.
“All right?” Gabriel asked.
“All right,” Elodie managed to reply. Decidedly quivering, and knowing her face was flushed, she dared to look at him. His face was lowered, hands blotching red as they gripped his knee.
“We should get on,” she said. “It will be evening soon.”
Gabriel cleared his throat. “I just—in just a moment,” he answered, his voice rough.
Elodie regarded him as she would any thorny problem: enchanted rosebush, explosive cactus, arrogant sod of a husband. But his eyes were hidden beneath his lashes, and his shoulders hunched as if he strove to control something wild inside himself. Elodie, being the intelligent and insightful scientist that she was, concluded he was upset by the dirt he’d got on his fingers from her muddy boot. Taking a handkerchief from her skirt pocket, she lifted one of the hands off his knee and began to clean it.
Gabriel jolted as if she’d attacked him with pumice instead of delicate lace and lawn. “You needn’t do that,” he said, although he did not pull away from her grip.
“Pish tosh,” she replied amiably. “Sit still.”
The injunction was unnecessary: he was so stiff, even his breath did not seem to stir. Elodie, conversely, now felt like she was turning to hot pudding. Perhaps this had been the “other problem” Motthers had tried to warn her about: the risk that she’d end up sitting alone with her husband in the middle of the enchanted Welsh countryside, caressing his hand minutes after having come apart merely from him putting her boot on her foot. Had she known it would happen, she’d almostcertainly have…well, undertaken the assignment just the same, but at least first polished her fingernails.
She’d always considered her hands ugly although capable, the fingers too blunt, the nails too often broken during fieldwork to justify pampering them. Whereas her feet needed care after continually wading through bogs and rivers, her hands were hardy.
But now, as she touched Gabriel’s own strong, olive-skinned hands, her fingers seemed delicate, feminine, in a way they never had before. And Elodie was surprised to discover that tending to him made her feel as quivery as when he’d buttoned up her boot, but with aneven deeperlevel of satisfaction. Not only her body was aroused, but her heart.
Suddenly Gabriel made a strange, broken sound and yanked his hand from her, simultaneously rising and whirling away. Elodie stared up at him gobsmacked.
“Where the bloody hell is the village?” he demanded, shoving a hand through his hair.
Elodie dared not reply at once, or else she risked suggesting a location that was neither physically possible nor dignified. Blast the man and the way he made her spin between love and anger so exhaustingly. Dragging calm from the corners of her brain, she took a deep breath, then pushed herself clumsily to her feet.
“It’s there,” she said in a clipped tone, pointing east-southeast despite the fact that Gabriel had his back to her and couldn’t see the gesture. Dôlylleuad crouched in tree shadows by the riverbank, almost a mile away. It had the quality of a fairy-tale illustration: pretty, quaint, a little blurred through a diaphanous haze of fading sunlight. The sky beyond it was purpling with a promise of night.
“I need wine,” Gabriel muttered as he turned, still facing away from her, and began to stomp toward the village. Then he stopped abruptly and glanced over his shoulder. “The ankle.”
By which, Elodie supposed, he meant,How is it?
“Fine,” she said acidly, and took a step.
Pain shot through her foot.
Which is to say, herotherfoot. Looking down, she discovered she’d trodden on a jagged stone. With a hissed curse she looked up again—
And Gabriel was gone.
Chapter Fourteen
Weeds are plants that belong where they grow,
it’s just that we don’t want them there.
Blazing Trails, W.H. Jackson
“Well this isa fine muddle!” Elodie declared as she turned in a slow circle to confirm that Gabriel had indeed vanished completely from sight.
It is worth noting that her tone was not annoyed but excited, for a muddle was a rare thaumaturgic event—vanishingly rare,as it were, she couldn’t help but think with a chuckle—and this an exceedingly fine example of one indeed.
Setting her hands on her lips, Elodie blew a wayward strand of hair away from her face as she tried to discern whether it was she or Gabriel who had inadvertently walked into a puddle of magic. Either way, there could be no denying this was her fault. As soon as she’d noted the haze of sunlight, she ought to have appreciated that such a thing was unlikely on a cold autumn afternoon and that instead it was a muddle’s perimeter. And she’d almost certainly have done so if only Gabriel hadn’t infuriated her so much.
Which, come to think of it, made this situationhisfault.
