“Getting foxed.”
“No! The earring. The women.”
“Being me. You’d better turn back now or risk ruination.”
“No.”
“Then be useful.” He shoved the wine bottle at her.
She took it, sipped a bit as the gravel of a garden path crunched beneath her feet. She breathed deeply in the fresh evening air. It felt good to run off with him like this. Always had. The garden was summer wild around them. She’d have to sneak out here early tomorrow morning to paint it.
“I do not want company, King,” Remmy said, walking backward and pointing the decanter at her.
“I do not particularly care, Ives.” She lifted her skirts to catch up.
She drank deeply from the wine bottle as they rounded the back of the house, washing away the sight of her mother’s back, and followed him all the way toward the woods behind Crossvale Court and down the path that led to the lake. On one side of the lake, the woods extended, curving and hugging the edges of the water, they followed the curve withouta word. When she saw flashes of gray through the trees, she knew where they were going. The last place she’d been here before leaving. Sitting on that rock six years ago, she’d felt lost, powerless.
She was neither of those things now, no matter her changing circumstances.
She shot off ahead of him, lifting her skirts and leaping on top of the large rock they’d claimed as their own decades ago.
She spun around to face him, holding her arms out wide. “I claim this continent for Tessa King!”
“You can have it,” he said, lifting one boot to the top of the boulder and leaning toward her. “A welcome home present.”
She swiped his brandy and gave him the wine. She uncorked the decanter and drank deeply from it, too.
He lifted a brow. “You drink spirits?”
“When it pleases me.” As it did now. She took another large swallow. If only figuring out what future pleased her was as easy as choosing a drink. Brandy or wine? Wife or companion? Neither seemed to fill her up or make her quite as giddy as the brandy did. At least she had her friend by her side to help her through it, the same as he always had been.
Chapter Three
Tessa beamed down at him from on high, and Remmy almost toppled face-first into the dirt. He’d thought her changed yesterday in the evening shadows. But the late afternoon sun revealed the truth—she’d transformed entirely.
When she’d left, she’d had tear streaks on her cheeks. She’d been the kind of girl to say scandalous things, then look over her shoulder, scared someone had heard her.
Now she lifted her face to the sky with a miraculous grin and seemed to dare the universe to challenge her.
Remmy might have been grinning madly, too. Difficult to tell, as his face was growing fuzzy. He’d downed two drinks before Tessa had begun to unravel his plan in front of everyone as loudly as she could. Likely that was why he’d decided to drink more.
He poured more wine down his gullet and joined Tessa on the rock. The navy of her skirts shifted to a brilliant cobalt in the light of the dying sun, and her flushed cheeks were merry apples of joy.
Her eyes, though… heavy, shadowed, tired.
He hefted himself up on top of the boulder and sat with his legs over the edge, swinging. He took a drink of the wine, and she sat next him, skirts brushing trousers as they’d always been. Nothing had changed but the length and color of both.
She drank the brandy, he the wine, as the day died around them.
“Did your mother even look at you?” he finally ventured.
“Not once. And Father kindly begged me to become invisible.”
“If I could take back what I did, with the painting, the competition?—”
“Do not say it.”
“—I wouldn’t.”
