“Is anyone there?” she called.
Seth walked out of the darkness, and her previously light heart sank into her stomach. She’d hoped it might be Dando’s friend Cornelius. Almost anyone would be better than Seth. Once upon a time, he’d been one of the men who would jeer at Susannah, follow her, try to get her alone.
I make him hate himself, so he hates me.
“Susannah Beasley.” He turned her name into a sneer.
She didn’t want to ask Seth for even the smallest thing, but the music called to her.
“May I leave my horse and the cart here? Just for half an hour.”
Seth said nothing, only looked at her the way many men looked at her. It was equal parts contempt and revulsion and appetite.
She could threaten him with Dando, but she didn’t like to do that to her brother. Despite her, the people of Much Wemby liked Dando, and she would not burden her brother with more than she already had.
Finally, Seth spat on the ground near her boots and jerked his head in a nod.
The green was lined with torches, and people milled about, drinking and laughing and talking over the music. But most were either dancing or watching the dancing. Susannah was delighted when she was almost immediately swept up into a Scotch reel by Will Skinner, one of the miller’s sons.
Will was a flirtatious boy, a scoundrel in the making, and he must not care what the village would say about him tomorrow. He might even think her a safer choice than the girls his age, most of whom were besotted with Will and hoped to spring a parson’s mousetrap on him.
Even in her boots and her ordinary dress, it was wonderful to dance, to weave in and out, to meet in the middle and kick and tap and jig up and down to the fiddles. And Will appeared to love dancing as much as Susannah did. He was smiling and sweating and leaping with such vigor. She had to laugh at him and his capers. She was having all the fun she had wanted for Dando.
Weave and turn and hop and join hands and turn?—
Her eyes caught on a pair of eyes. They were shadowed by an impressive forehead, but she knew their color. Pale blue.
Her startlingly handsome gentleman was standing with the spectators, watching her. He was definitely watching her. She kept moving, but she whipped her head around to keep seeing how he watched her.
“Turn the other way, Miss B,” Will said.
“Yes,” she said, but she kept turning the wrong way despite that.
Will must have taken note of where she was looking.
“So he came, after all. And he’s your fellow?” He grinned and winked. “A stranger coming in and immediately taking up with the prettiest girl in the village. I won’t have it.”
“Stop it, Will.”
She was not embarrassed by the lad’s good-natured teasing. Will could not embarrass her when she had withstood so much shame over the years, but she didn’t want to have this moment ruined by a joke. She wanted to remember a man—a man who knew nothing about her—looking on her with desire.
Because desire was what she had seen in the gentleman’s eyes. And that was no joke.
“Sorry,” Will said.
“It’s fine,” she said, but it wasn’t because in the seconds she had taken to curb Will’s tongue, the gentleman had vanished.
Thankfully, the dance ended just then, and she ran towhere she had last seen him. She pushed her way through the crowd, searching, but he was nowhere to be found. He had come, and he had gone, and she was just Susannah Beasley again.
She made another circle of the green, looking for a golden head, burnished in torchlight. No luck. The fiddlers struck up another tune, but she was no longer in the mood to stay at the fête.
She had tasted something sweet, and she wanted to keep that flavor in her mouth, undiluted forever. To savor being a woman wanted without scruple by a man who seemed to want for nothing.
She got through the crowd spilling out of The Swan and walked towards Dando’s forge. She would circle around it to the back of the inn’s stables, get Beramo, and go home.
She turned the corner, and he was there. Inevitable, incendiary.
She found herself against the outer wall of the forge, and he hadn’t put her there, she hadn’t gone there, the wall had come to her, to hold her up, to keep her round legs from shaking, to save her from sinking to the ground.
