Page 6 of The Earl She Once Saved

The dog looked up at Rafe. Her gaze followed his and hardened.

“Sergeant.”

He obeyed, though with the air of an animal yielding to authority rather than agreeing with it. He crossed to her side and sat against her skirts.

Rafe looked from the dog to the woman. He had learned her name years ago, after searching through hospital records and surgeons’ lists with a desperation he disguised as gratitude. He found traces of her father, then nothing. By the time he returned to England, Dr. Calder was dead and his daughter disappeared into a world that seemed determined to conceal her.

He had known Roland had married, if the hurried line sent to headquarters could be called knowledge. His brother named no bride, only a fortune and the satisfaction of having secured it. By the time Rafe learned there was a Lady Edgeworth, Roland disappeared and the army carried Rafe farther south. It never occurred to him that the nameless woman beneath his brother’s title might be Verity Calder herself.

“Verity.” Her name emerged more softly than he intended.

Her expression did not alter, but her fingers tightened in Sergeant’s coat.

“Colonel Thornlow.”

The sound of his own name in her voice sounded almost like an insult.

“You remember me,” he replied instead of a greeting.

It was not a question. He had seen the answer before she could prevent it. Her eyes met his. For a moment the wind seemed to fall away.

He saw her again beside the narrow cot, bending over him while the canvas walls shuddered under distant guns. He remembered the cool pressure of her hand upon his brow, the roughness of her fingers when he had caught them, the way her voice had led him back each time fever pulled him under. He remembered waking before dawn and finding her asleep in a chair beside him, one hand still resting upon his wrist to feel the pulse.

He remembered everything.

“I have not forgotten the hospital,” he revealed. “Nor the night you spent keeping me alive.”

Something moved in her face. It was smaller than before but no less real. For one suspended moment she was the young woman in the lamplight again: exhausted, stubborn, but infinitely gentle with a man she had no reason to save.

She knew him. She knew him exactly.

Their eyes held, and Rafe felt the years between that night and this one narrow into nothing.

Then she looked away. It was not a retreat. It was a decision, executed with the deliberate finality of a door closing. When she faced him again, nothing remained.

“I tended a great many wounded men, Colonel. You cannot expect me to recall every one of them.”

The words struck cleanly. That, he supposed, was their purpose.

He had been shot, cut, burned with fever, and once struck from a horse hard enough to lose two days of his life. None of it prepared him for the calm with which she erased the nights he carried through every year since.

He searched her face for some sign of falsehood. She gave him none.

“Of course,” he said.

Her hand remained upon Sergeant’s head. The gesture was gentle, though nothing else about her was.

“You have returned to Edgeworth.”

“I have.”

The house rose behind her, severe and watchful. Several windows stood open to the wind. Smoke lifted steadily from the chimneys. The lawns had been cut, the gravel newly raked, and the gutters repaired since he had last seen the place. Age had touched it, but neglect had not.

“My solicitor believed you might come,” she informed him.

“I wrote to inform you of my arrival before I reached England.”

“I am afraid I was just learning of your arrival.” There was no reproach in her tone.