He breathed her name once again.
And this time, it didn’t sound like an exasperated sigh or a weary complaint, but like a raw confession. A curse. A prayer.
His strong arms came around her, lifting her up on her toes. And his mouth crushed against hers.
There was no snow. No cold. No wind. No darkness. Only a blazing, white-hot conflagration of desire that seem to light up the whole night.
When at last he lifted his head, she felt certain the earth must be scorched beneath them.
A snowflake landed on her cheek. He touched it with the tip of his thumb.
“Well?” she breathed.
“Sweet, darling Nora.” He caressed her face. “I still would have left.”
The rogue.
She gave a cry of outrage and kicked him in the shin. Given the thickness of his boots, the gesture did more damage to her toe than to his shin, sadly. But it helped immeasurably with her pride.
She tried to wrest out of his embrace, but he held her tight.
“Listen,” he pleaded. “You should thank me.”
“I’ll thank you to release me and then leave, as you’ve declared you’d prefer to do.”
“What would our lives be like, if I’d stayed? Asked for your hand, as I knew you hoped. As I knew would please your parents. As I was tempted to do myself.”
He was tempted? Tempted to marry her?
He read her mind. “Of course I was tempted, Nora. Yours was the only family I’d ever known. You can’t imagine how much I longed to make that a permanent connection. But that wouldn’t have been fair to you. You would not want to be married for your family, nor for security.”
She rolled her eyes. “So now you’ve done me a favor. I’m to be grateful.”
“Yes. Would we have been content? I suppose so. Perhaps even happy. But we would never have pushed our boundaries, become our best and bravest selves. I would not be a cartographer. You would not be a writer.”
He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back from him, letting his gaze flicker down her form. “God, look at you. You’re famous. Wanted for speaking engagements all over Britain. It’s remarkable. You’re remarkable. You don’t need me for entrée into salons or exhibitions. You don’t need my admiration, either.”
“But I can’t stop wanting it.” She stamped her bare foot against the snow. Cold prickled through her toes. “That’s what makes me angriest of all. Don’t you see? I’m still that eighteen-year-old girl inside, wanting to be noticed. No matter how rudely you treated me once, or how many years have passed, or how much I’ve accomplished, I can’t stop craving your good opinion. I can’t stop myself from missing you, worrying over you when you’re gone. Wondering what you would think about an article in the paper, or whether you’d laugh at a joke. It’s not a matter of logic, or I would have solved it long ago. The problem is in my heart. I’m still . . .”
“Still what?” he prompted.
“Dash.” She swallowed hard and met his eyes. “Do you really not know? I’ve always been in l—”
Slam.
CHAPTER SEVEN
They were plunged into total darkness.
Dash was disoriented completely. That kiss—and she’d been wrong; “magnificent” didn’t begin to describe it—had muddled his wits. He felt as though he’d been swept up in an Atlantic squall, tossed around a few hundred times in the hold of a ship, and then dumped in the Sussex countryside.
Within a few moments, reason returned and the cause of the darkness dawned on him. Behind them, the cottage door had slammed shut.
Nora gasped. “Oh, no.”
“Don’t worry,” Dash assured her. “The framing’s not level. But it’s only swung on its hinges. That’s not a problem unless the—”
Bang.
The noise shuddered down his spine.
“Unless,” he said, “the bar drops in the latch. Like that.”
Blast.
Blast and damn.
Dash forced himself to be calm. Perhaps it wasn’t so bad as he feared.
Releasing Nora, he strode to the door and gave the wooden panel a push.
His push met with resistance. Firm, solid, unyielding resistance.
Blast and damn and hell. Wretched luck. The bar had fallen squarely in place, and earlier that evening he’d drawn in the string meant to lift it. In doing so, he’d thought to keep them safe.
Hah.
Nora rushed to his side. She rattled the door, finding no more success than Dash had made moments earlier.
She turned and looked up at him, wide-eyed in the dark. Ice crystals clung to her lashes. Her dilated pupils seem to reflect the sense of dark, fathomless doom welling in his gut.
She was an intelligent woman, and she knew as well as he that their situation was dire.
They were locked out of their only shelter. In the cold. Dressed in little more than their skins.
And there would be no one coming to their aid. Not until morning, at least, and by that time, they’d be frozen through.
Blast and damn and hell—those words were insufficient now.
Dash had spent much of the past four years on a ship. He could blaspheme in a dozen different languages, and in that moment he mentally rattled through curses in each and every one.
But for Nora’s sake, he refrained from speaking them any of them aloud.
“Fuck,” she said.
The word hung in the air, sharp and clear as an icicle.
Dash laughed, and suddenly the despair felt a little less. “A lady shouldn’t know that word.”
“A lady shouldn’t use that word,” she corrected. “And I’ll admit, I never have used it before. But what have I been saving it for, if not this moment?”
Fair enough.
He nodded in grim agreement. “Fuck.”
She gave him a smile full of chattering teeth and wrapped her arms around her torso. “At least the next time you find yourself lashed to a mast during a gale off the coast of the Cape of Good Hope, you’ll be able to say, ‘It c-could be worse.” Her dry laugh made a worrisome cloud.
He longed to clutch her to him, skin to skin. Warm her with his body as best he could. But that wouldn’t last long.
The best he could do, rationally, was to find a way inside. Get her near a proper fire.
“Stand aside,” he said.
“What for?”
He didn’t bother to answer. He needed to conserve his energy for action, not talk.
He fell back one, two, three paces. Then he dug in his heel, gritted his teeth—and made a fierce charge toward the door, using his lowered shoulder as a battering ram. When he collided with the wooden panel, pain reverberated across his shoulders and down his arm.
The door rattled, but the latch didn’t give.
He backed up and tried again.
When he collided with the door a second time, Nora gave a choked cry of something that sounded like distress.
“Dash, don’t. You’ll be injured, and that won’t help anything.”
“If I don’t get us inside,” he said, retreating for another attempt, “we’ll both be dead.”
He rammed the door a third time, this time aiming for the hinges. Perhaps they would be more persuadable than the latch. Again, the oaken slab rattled but refused to yield. And again, the pain exploded like buckshot through his arm and down his back.
He growled with frustration.
“George, please.”
George.
She only called him that when she was afraid.
“As entertaining as this is to watch,” Nora suggested, “perhaps we should look for another way in. There was a window.”
He shook his head, even as he walked around to the side. “It’s so small. More of a vent.”
“I think I could squeeze through, if you were to boost me.”
“It’s latched, too,” he said, raising both hands to the shutter and rattling it. “From the inside.”
Dash kicked at a drift of snow. It didn’t help, but it felt good.
He needed to make a plan.
“We’ll go back to the coach. At least it’s some shelter from the snow and wind, and your trunk is there. Perhaps there’s a rug or two for warmth.”
“It’s too far,” she said. “And it’s dark now. The snow has covered our path. We could stumble around for hours.”
“Not for hours. We’d freeze long before that.” He passed a hand over his face. “Jesus Christ.”
He slid her a look. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and there was just enough glimmer of firelight leaking through the cabin’s cracks that he could make her out.
She was so pale. Perhaps it was merely a trick of the dark and the moonlight—he hoped to God that was the case—but her lips looked a deathly shade of blue.
And good Lord, she was still barefoot.
He pulled her to him, roughly, enfolding her in his arms and setting her feet atop his boots. He moved his arms briskly up and down, trying to soothe her shivering.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, burying her face in his chest. “This is all my fault.”
Now that was an uncharacteristic statement. He was really and truly concerned about her. She was going demented in this cold.
“You’re wrong,” he told her. “The fault is mine.”
All mine.
In more ways than she could possibly know.
“No, no. This was my notion. My silly game. Go out and kiss in the snow? With scarcely any clothes on? What a stupid idea.” She lifted her head. “Why didn’t you tell me it was a stupid idea?”