Prudence was silent for a moment, then stepped closer, lowering her voice. “You seemed distracted. Has something happened?”
Emma thought of the dawn, of the sketchbook, of the touch that still burned on her skin. She thought of the stories, the possibilities, the terrifying freedom of being seen for exactly who she was.
She shook her head. “Nothing at all,” she said, arranging the roses with unnecessary vigor. “It’s only the wedding. It’s all rather…much.”
Prudence touched her arm, a brief, grounding gesture. “If you need a moment, take it. You’re no good to anyone faint from loss of blood.” Her words were light, but there was an understanding in them, an acknowledgement of Emma’s unrest.
Emma smiled, grateful. “I’ll manage.”
Prudence gave her a last, searching look, then swept from the room, already scolding a footman for tracking mud on the hall runner.
Left alone, Emma examined her thumb. The cut was shallow, but the blood had already stained the petal beneath it, a vivid scarlet bloom on a field of white. She stared at it, transfixed, until the stain began to spread.
She reached for a napkin to blot it, but stopped herself. She let the blood seep, let it mark the linen, let it stand as evidence—of pain, of longing, of a part of herself she could not, would not, deny.
Outside, the sound of the sea drifted through an open window, a persistent call to freedom.
Emma pressed her thumb to the tablecloth, leaving a perfect, crimson print.
Let them gossip, she thought. Let them talk. She was not afraid of thorns, or of bleeding.
She was only afraid of never feeling that spark again.
Chapter 4
The lie she’d told Prudence soured on Emma’s tongue as the afternoon wore on.
It was not the wedding.
It was the woman.
Amélie. Her name was a secret prayer, a blasphemy Emma kept tasting on the back of her teeth with a restless tongue.
To escape it, she’d sought the familiar solace of a horse between her knees and the wind in her face. Dressed in her sturdy riding habit, she urged her borrowed mount along the Brighton cliffs, the turf thudding a frantic rhythm beneath them. The salt spray misted her cheeks, cold and sharp, a welcome sting against skin that still felt feverish from a single, fleeting touch.
She galloped as if pursued, not by a physical foe, but by the memory of Amélie’s hands. Capable hands. Hands that held charcoal with the same delicate precision with which they might hold a lover. Emma imagined them sketching the curve of a landscape, the line of a jaw, the fall of light on a woman’s throat. Her own throat.
The thought was a hot, coiling thing in her belly, both shameful and exquisite.
She urged the mare faster, the wind tearing the pins from her hair, whipping strands of it across her face. The world dissolved into a blur of gray sky and churning sea. Faster. She had to outrun the image of that small, private smile, the one that had not been for the room, but for her. A smile that had seen through the callused, practical shell of Emmaline Goode and found something else beneath. Something breakable.
A sudden explosion of color and frantic noise erupted from the gorse to her right. A pheasant, panicked and iridescent, burst into the air with a deafening whir of wings.
The mare, already on a razor’s edge, screamed and shied violently. One moment Emma was one with the animal, a creature of speed and wind; the next, the world spun on a sickening axis. The sky was where the ground should be. She felt a brief, terrifying weightlessness, a desperate scrabble for purchase that found only air, and then a brutal, bone-jarring impact.
She landed on her right side, her shoulder taking the brunt of the fall against the rocky earth. A sound, a wet, grinding crack, echoed inside her own skull. A bolt of white-hot agony shot from her shoulder down her arm and up into her neck, stealing her breath and her sight. For a long moment, there was nothing but the pain, a blinding, all-consuming universe of it.
The world swam back into focus slowly, gray and tilted. The taste of dirt and blood filled her mouth. The wind, which moments before had felt like freedom, was now a cold, indifferent hand against her cheek. Her horse, its panic spent, stood a dozen yards away, trembling and blowing, its reins trailing on the ground.
Alone. She was alone and injured. A wave of fury at her own weakness washed through her, momentarily eclipsing the pain. She was Emmaline Goode. She did not fall. She did not get thrown. She did not lie helpless on the ground like some swooning maiden in one of Felicity’s romance novels.
Gritting her teeth, she pushed up with her left hand, trying to rise. The movement sent a fresh wave of fire through her right shoulder. A strangled gasp escaped her lips, and the ground tilted again, nausea churning in her gut. She collapsed back, her head hitting the turf with a dull thud. The pain was a living thing now, a clawed beast settled deep in her joint, digging in with every shallow breath she took.
She lay there, defeated, listening to the cry of the gulls and the relentless crash of the waves below. Humiliation a bitter bile in her throat.
The sound of hoofbeats, slow and deliberate this time, cut through her pained haze. She twisted her head, wincing, and saw a figure on a large black gelding emerge from the morning mist.
Oh no. A man.
