“Say what you will,” she continued, “but I know who you are. I was led to this forest by your own letter—I’ve already said this—and now here are mine. I heard you pronounce your name as if it was the most familiar thing you’d ever said. You’ve a library of French literature. If that’s not proof enough, well—I don’t mind telling you that you resemble your late father. May God rest him. I’ve met him, remember? I met all of you. When we were children. Your family traveled to Guernsey twice and you were our guests at Winscombe. It was on the last visit that I recall the imposing sight of your father. He was talland broad, with hazel eyes. Just like you. I’m sorry, Highness, butIremember. I’ve found you. I’ve actually managed to find you.”
Gabriel did not feel found—he felt trapped. The storm was behind him. She stood before him, waving his private, personal keepsakes and calling them her own. Perhaps she had written them, but they’d belonged to him. They’d been one of the few things he’d managed to secret out of the palace during the arrest. Why he’d taken them, he couldn’t say. Why he’d kept them, he also could not say.
I took them because I wanted them, he thought, staring at the small, crumbling stack of parchment.I liked to read them. I respected my father’s wish for my future with the daughter of his old friend.
To Gabriel’s young, terrified mind, clinging to the betrothal had seemed like the noble thing to do. He’d been forced to leave behind so much from his old life, but he’d wanted to keep her.
No, not her, he reminded himself,her letters.
And now those letters were being used to unmask him.Shewas unmasking him. Lady Marianne Daventry had found him, and trapped him, and threatened everything he held dear. She’d made him feel homesickness—something he’d not felt for years. It was a roiling, bubbling stew of emotion—too much for a man who subsisted on a diet of very bland, very simple feelings.
“Look,” she continued, “we needn’t commit to anything this precise moment. Not when you’ve just blown in from the storm, wet, stomping mud on the rugs. You’re soaked through. But can you...?”
She set the letters aside and extended her hand tohim. “Give me your coat. I’ve hung my cloak by the fire but there is another peg. I’ll hang it while you see to your boots. I’ve made coffee—I hope you don’t mind. Will you take a cup?”
“Don’t placate me,” he warned, not moving. He thought of how she’d rifled through his things. It was a profound intrusion, and how much easier to dwell on this than on her accusation.
“Forgive me,” she said, retracting her hand. “It’s not my goal to manage you. I’ve only one goal, which I stated even before I knew that you were, well,you. I—” She took a deep breath. “I can acknowledge that everything about me comes as a very great shock. I am not, by nature, a shocking person, nor a bold one. Seeing to wet coats and offering refreshment come much more naturally to me than asking a strange man for help. I am loathe to be a bother to anyone—the man who rescued me from certain doom, least of all—but my family have found ourselves in dire straits. The old betrothal has forced me to hunt you down, but I won’t try to disguise it as anything less than an imposition. To you—that is. A very great imposition.”
“More than an imposition, I’d say, to nose about in the personal possessions of a stranger, to ransack his property.” He eyed the letters on his table. Where had she found them? The desk? The bedside? God, had she been in his bedroom?
“I asked you not to touch anything,” he said, flinging his hat back and forth, shaking off water.
“Yes, you did,” she allowed carefully. “The coffee was a practical matter, just to be clear, and I don’t make a habit of nosing about the homes of strangers. I cannot say why I did it, except that... Iknew? I’dsensed it. Deep down. And thisknowingpropelled me to explore. It’s no excuse, but...”
She trailed off with a shrug and stared into his face. Her expression was forthright, and wary, and (if he was being honest)contrite. Her eyes were a smoky gray-blue; the color of a ribbon of mineral that bisected a chipped rock. It was subtle and cloudy and almost no color at all. And it cut him in two.
“Give me your coat?” she tried again, speaking gently.
He stared at her. He could feel himself wanting to comply. She had this quality—a calmness, an observational air. She seemed disinclined to argue with him. He shouldn’t forget that she’d calmly, observantly pawed through his house until she’d lit upon his identity. Why argue when she simply did whatever the hell she pleased? But even so. She was the opposite of the flash and rattle he associated with most females. Not the radiant sunrise, the cool shade at noon; not the butterfly, the moth. She had been this way, even as a child. And perhaps that’s why he’d kept her letters. Her even, neat handwriting... her earnest, everyday musings... made him feel steady and calm when his world spun into chaos.
She nodded to the coat and he held it out to her.
“This is a fine coat,” she said, plucking it from his arm. “What is the material?”
“Oilskin.”
“Oh, lovely. Is there a craftsman in Pewsey?”
“No.”
“Marlborough, then?”
“No.”
“But did you have it made in London? I ask, onlybecause my sister Diana—you may recall there were three of us girls. I’m the oldest, then there’s my middle sister Diana? She manages the sheep and lands at Winscombe, and she is outside in every kind of weather. She could benefit from a coat like this.”
“Your sister manages your sheep and lands?”
“She has a foreman who answers to her—they manage it together. Our father fell ill five years ago, and he was never much for estate management even before his heart gave out. Diana is keenly interested in it, and we’re so very lucky for it. The grounds and livestock are her purview. I manage the house. Our youngest sister, Charlotte, is in the schoolroom at the moment, but our hope is that she’ll escape the demands of Winscombe and marry. I should say, this isherhope, but we want what she wants. She is very much taken with the idea of a London debut and Season. We’ve an elderly aunt who can sponsor her, but one thing at a time. Forgive me, I’m prattling on. If you’ll hand over your socks and gloves, I’ll set them by the fire to dry.”
His socks were sweaty and gnarled with patches and there was no world in which he would pile them in her small pink hands. But he extended his gloves and she plucked them away. He watched her arrange his disembodied gloves above the fire. It felt like she was stealing sections of his body, one at the time, and priming them to burn. And all the while, he simply stood there and... allowed it.
She turned back to him. “Forgive me, Highness—”
“Please refer to me as Rein.”
“Right.” She sighed. “Forgive me,Mr. Rein, but will you tell me about this house? I’m ever so intrigued. Is it—?” She ran a careful hand along the crevice ofgravel where the timber wall met the exposed rock of the cave. Watching her, he felt the phantom caress of that same hand touching a crevice inside his chest. Her expression looked mystified, and something about that look caused a little inward tickle, like the swish of a feather over his heart.
