No matter what you decide, I fear you have my heart, now and always.
Your servant,
I.R.
He wasin fact certain of none of these things except that he loved her.
He did not know how to parse the origins of this love. It seemed to him that it had always existed and had merely been waiting for the two of them to claim it, the way that the land now called Pennyroyal Green had existed for eons before any humans settled and named it.
The force of his conviction, his willingness to win at any cost, would make the rest of what he’d written manifest, surely. He could not stop to think of any of the “hows”; he could not now afford to consider what Fanchette might feel, let alone his father. It seemed to him that he was saving his own life, so all other considerations were necessarily secondary. When he had what he wanted and needed—Isolde—he would deal with the consequences, one by one.
He re-read the message. It struck him as stilted and formal. He was maddened that he could not seem to translate the true contents of his heart into words.
But Isolde knew his heart. She had felt it thudding against her cheek, after he’d kissed her.
He folded and sealed it with a press of his ring.
The last of the assembly-goers would be home by eleven, at the latest, he was certain.
Suddenly it seemed like kismet that she had told him that a red-headed boy named Dougal slept next to the Sylvaine’s kitchen fire, for he knew precisely what to tell a footman to do.
Isolde heard her own shallow,swift breathing as if another person sat next to her on the bed. In her hands she held a letter; a sleepy and confused but thrilled Dougal had brought it to her door moments ago. It was just past eleven; she hadn’t slept at all; her entire family had gone to sleep hours ago.
With a trembling finger she traced the “R” pressed into the red wax seal.
Finally, she gathered the courage to break it.
She tenderly smoothed out the letter in her lap.
The words slowly filled her like sunlight.
She breathed out very slowly. Then closed her eyes and basked in the glory of knowing that she was loved.
She pictured herself running to Isaiah in the dark, a valise thumping against her thigh. Throwing herself into his arms, her lips meeting his lips. Making love with him again and again in a Scottish inn, their bodies passionately entwined. Returning triumphantly, scandalously, to Pennyroyal Green as Mrs. Isolde Redmond, chasing giggling green-eyed children in that beautiful rose garden at the Redmond house, waking next to him every morning.
For those few minutes, she allowed herself to live an entire lifetime with him.
And then she pictured Isaiah alone in the dark near the trees, his fragile, complicated heart filled with hope, and her eyes welled with tears.
“Oh, Isaiah,” she whispered.
She wept for how brave he’d been to bare his heart.
And for the mad fairy tale he'd written.
Because she knew it was impossible. The Redmonds would forever see her as evidence of Isaiah’s perfidy. Isaiah would surely grow to resent and despise her for tempting him to betray his father. Her family would always be made to feel inferior. His own family would suffer grave social consequences if he jilted the daughter of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Isolde knew in her bones that she and Isaiah would never know peace together.
Why, then, did it feel like blasphemy to deny the pull of what felt like her destiny? She loved him.
Not only that: she knew definitively now that she could not ever,everbring herself to hurt or shame Jacob. Because she loved him, too, whether or not he’d stopped wanting her.
And while defending her was Jacob’s very nature, Isaiah was struggling totransformhis own nature. To shake off the shackles of his history and forge something new…for her.
This seemed to her the very definition of courage.
But she didn’t think he would have ever dared done this in the daylight. Which is why he wanted to run away in the dark.
