Page 10 of The Earl She Once Saved

She had chosen Roland. She had married his brother, given him the name Rafe had once imagined finding for himself, and lived beneath Roland’s roof while Rafe searched for a woman who had apparently forgotten him.

Verity rose. “You are correct in one particular, Colonel.”

Her voice was quiet, though her color remained high.

“You have taken nothing from me yet.”

She left the room without another word. Rafe watched the door close behind her.

The woman in the field hospital had held his hand through the night as though she would not permit death to have him. The woman at Edgeworth looked at him as though she wished she had.

Chapter 3

That morning, Verity was in the saddle before Rafe had finished objecting.

“… hardly work for the lady of the house, and if the weir has gone entirely, there may be …”

She gathered the reins without listening. Her mare stepped sideways, impatient with the cold morning and with men who stood talking when there was somewhere to go.

Rafe looked up at her. “Verity.”

She frowned. “I heard you.”

“That was not the impression I received.”

“It was not intended to be.”

She touched her heel to the mare’s side. The last thing she saw was the brief tightening of his mouth before the yard disappeared behind her.

She did not look back. There was no need. She had scarcely passed the gate when she heard another horse upon the gravel.

Verity urged the mare onto the field road where the ground ran firmer along the hedges. A thin rain had fallen before dawn, leaving every branch black and shining, and the air smelled of wet earth, crushed grass and the faint sweetness of new wheat. Beyond the eastern fields the sky lay low over the hills, colorless as old pewter.

Behind her came the steady percussion of another horse. It was not close enough to crowd her, nor far enough to be forgotten.

She turned from the road through a gap in the hedge which would have looked like nothing more than a break in the hawthorn to anyone who did not know the estate. The mare took it without hesitation.

Rafe followed. Verity heard the scrape of a branch against his coat. She almost smiled.

The drovers’ track rose beyond the second field, narrow and deeply worn, then dropped sharply between two stone walls toward the lower meadow. She had taken it in every season, in summer dust, winter ice, spring mud deep enough to swallow a boot.

Rafe remained behind her. He was not gaining. Neither was he falling back. He was simply there and it was extraordinarily irritating. Worse even, because after two days of refusing herself the indulgence, there was nothing upon the empty track to prevent her from remembering his face on the lawn and the moment she had known him.

For one absurd instant, she ceased to be a woman approaching thirty with tenants waiting upon her decisions and creditors’ letters filed neatly in the study. She was twenty again, an army surgeon’s daughter who followed her father, tired beyond speech, with her sleeves rolled above the elbows and blood dried beneath her fingernails … and he was dying.

Not Rafe Thornlow.

Not Roland’s brother.

Not any name at all.

He was only a wounded officer brought in near midnight with half his face covered in blood and a pulse that was quickly weakening beneath her fingers until she was certain she would lose him. He drifted between sense and darkness until morning. Each time he surfaced, he came back to her. Once, his fingers closed so tightly around hers she felt the bones grind together.

Don’t go.

She remembered that. She wished she did not.

She remembered the feverish warmth of his palm and the lamplight moving over the sharp planes of his face. She remembered washing blood from his temple while guns sounded somewhere beyond the field hospital. She remembered him saying things men said when they believed death had already entered the room and was only waiting to be acknowledged.