She chuckled bitterly. “Yes.”
Gabriel was accustomed to seeing abuse. The horses he treated had been beaten or neglected. He was never unaffected by the cruelty, although he forced himself to look ahead, to focus on the treatment and recovery. He only survived the reality of the suffering by embarking on the healing. But how could he facilitate this? Maurice, and Lady Marianne, and Winscombe were realities he couldn’t heal.
“I challenged something he said,” Lady Marianne was telling him. “I challenged everything he said, actually—and in this instance, his dogs felt threatened somehow. One of them lunged and... and he did not call her off.”
“Come down from there,” Gabriel said, her words ringing in his ears. “The mud is not good for a healing wound. It must be cleaned.”
He forced himself to think only of this moment, of what he could control immediately. She wasn’t asking him to leave the forestnow. Nottonight. He needn’t reckon with Maurice this moment. He needn’t reckon with Maurice at all. Now, he need only lift her from the fence, get her out of the rain, tend to her wound.
“I am certainly filthy,” she agreed, bracing her hands on his shoulders. “But have you a tub? Or I suppose any basin would—”
“I have a waterfall.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“There’s a third room inside the cave. A hot spring that falls from a crevice overhead. It’s an underground waterfall. You can wash there.” He’d purposefully concealed the waterfall before, but it would be useful now.
“Oh,” she said.
Yes, he thought.Oh.
The reason he’d not shown the waterfall was because his brain did not need the vision of her wet, or bathing, or without her clothes. He’d been unsettled and aroused since the moment he’d carried her through the woods. To introduce warm water? Splashing? He knew his limits. She’d come to him for help. He meant to send her away. There was no place for—
“I’m struggling to picture what you mean,” she was telling him. “Awaterfall.It does sound rather enticing. After the day I’ve had. But the horses...” She was looking over her shoulder into the misty paddock.
“Forget the horses. You can wash now and we’ll try to sleep. There are only a few hours until sunrise.”
He would not sleep. He would not think of dog bites or waterfalls or the sunrise. He would exist in a state of agony and guilt and longing, and morning would come, and he’d deliver her to Pewsey. She would leave the forest but he would remain.
Chapter Ten
It would never occur to Ryan to simplyshow the manevidence of his cousin’s abuse. Perhaps this had been her error all along. What finally got his attention had not been the damning proof of her letters or even her awkward thoughts of seduction, but evidence of what Maurice had done. Who could have guessed? Not Ryan. She was not a natural victim. She thought to appeal to Gabriel’s sense of decency and duty; in a pinch, his loneliness. But his sympathies lay with wounded horses, so of course she should cast her lot with the bitten and beaten. God knew she had the wounds for it.
After he’d plucked her from the fence, she’d spent a long, mortifying moment fearing he meant tocarry herinside. It was one thing to be borne through the forest for the sake of expediency; quite another to be conveyed about like an invalid. Which she wasnot(an invalid). The dog attack had been terrifying and hurt like the devil, but apparently she’d “been very lucky.” The muscle had not been severed from bone; the bleeding had been stopped before too much blood had been lost. The doctor said she would recover, save an annoying new panic around dogs.
In the end, Prince Gabriel hadn’t carried her. He’d walked silently behind her, reaching around to open the door, jerking his head in the direction of the bedroom. She kept ahead of him, plodding into the darkness.
“Is your, er, waterfall... secluded?” she ventured. She should maintain some sense of decorum, she told herself, even alone in the forest. Even in this cave.
“It’s here,” he said, stepping around her. They’d entered the bedchamber and Ryan was relieved to see the candles were still bright from the earlier tour. He strode to the notch in the wall she’d asked about earlier, holding a candle aloft.
“Careful,” he called from behind the rock. “It can be slick.”
Tentatively, Ryan followed. She was aware of the sound of splashing water, the smell of moisture, and a heaviness to the air. A soft, misty spray tickled her face. The walls of the cave were slicker here, shiny with moisture. It was—she squinted in the candlelight, peeking through the vapor—a little room.
“Keeping a flame can be a challenge here,” he was saying, holding the candle to a lantern hanging from the stone. “It’s the wetness.”
When the wick caught, the light doubled. He stepped away to reveal a small underground waterfall splashing onto a slab of rock. The shower of water fell from a high crevice in a downward stream. The slab behind the waterfall was wet where water poured from above.
Mesmerized, Ryan looked to the floor. Floorboards had been laid like a small dock, extending from the shoulder of rock to the spot where the waterfall splattered into an iron grate. Large craggy stones lay beneath the grate and the falling water ran through the iron bars and drained away.
“Is it a natural spring?” she asked.
“Yes.” He wiped water droplets from his face with his sleeve.
“And the water is warm?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “It’s very warm. This was Samuel’s reason for building out the cave. Warm, running water is a rare luxury, indeed.”
