Seven Minutes in Heaven(78)

It had taken courage to be intimate with a man who wasn’t Andrew. Learning to swim was yet another challenge, another way of living with courage.

The rock beneath her was a gray-and-white color, mottled here and there with lichens. After closing her eyes, she smelled more strongly the wild roses growing on the other side of the rock, past the deep water. Under their strawberry-sweet smell, she caught the soft odor of mud and mown grass.

The water lapping on the shingle had little relation to the thundering wave that had closed over her head and taken Andrew’s life. The lake didn’t smell briny, the way the ocean had.

She had been brave as a child. She never imagined herself growing into a coward.

Eugenia turned her head, still resting on her knees, and watched a butterfly alight next to her on the dove-gray rock. Its wings were cream-colored and tattered like cow parsley.

When the butterfly flew away, she told herself, she would walk over to the lake edge and wade in, not too far. Up to her knees was enough for today.

No one floated on their first day in the water. Well, no one except eager little boys.

The butterfly’s wings trembled like a lace curtain in the wind, and it was gone. Eugenia lifted her head.

Ward was standing in the water to his thighs, his right hand holding Lizzie’s, and his left, Otis’s. Both children were floating on their backs, lying on the surface of the water as if they were made of thistledown. His hair was spangled with sunshine, and the water eddied around the three of them in little waves.

Her eyes met his and Ward broke into the widest, most joyful smile she’d ever seen. His hair was plastered to his head and she could see the contours of his skull.

It was a magnificent skull. That very morning she had run her hands all over it, cupped his face and kissed him with every bit of passion she felt.

The truth struck her like a blow: she was falling in love.

Eugenia had never fainted in her life. Not when Andrew didn’t surface, not when they found his body, not when they lowered his coffin into the ground.

No, she saved dizziness, a weightless feeling in her head, the gathering black dots at the corners of her vision, for the moment when her lover smiled at her from the lake.

She came to with cold water dripping onto her face.

“Eugenia,” Ward was saying, his voice low and insistent.

“What happened?” she squeaked, brushing water from her face.

“You fainted,” he said, not loosening his grip on her shoulders. “One moment you were watching us, and the next you slid over in a heap.”

“I thought you were dead,” Lizzie said. “I screamed.”

“I didn’t scream,” Otis said loftily. “I knew you weren’t dead because you didn’t look dead.”

Ward glanced at his brother, visibly registering that Otis was familiar with the sight of a dead body.

“I think we’ve had enough for our first lesson. We shall return to the house for a cup of tea.” He drew Eugenia to her feet and helped her down from the rock.

“Jarvis will have missed me!” Otis said and began running toward the house.

“He won’t have noticed,” Lizzie retorted, but she followed her brother.

Eugenia’s knees trembled as she tried to puzzle out what had happened. She had fainted? Never. She never . . .

But she knew what had happened. The shock of realizing she was falling in love for the second time in her life had made her faint, just as in a bad melodrama in which the heroine collapses in the hero’s arms.

Now her heart was beating as if nothing had happened, yet her whole world had come sharply into focus.

She could smell lake water on Ward, and below that, Ward himself. The man whom she loved. A man who smelled like mud and man and perhaps just a whiff of dead fish.

Although she would never say that aloud, at least when Lizzie was within earshot.

The truth of it had settled into her bones by the time they reached the house.

She was in love.

She loved the bastard son of an earl, an inventor. She loved a man who had adopted his captivating, orphaned siblings along with a pet rat.

She loved a man who had made his own fortune, who had given up a prestigious university post for the sake of two orphans, who made love like a god.

“Are you still dizzy?” the god-like man asked. He had commandeered a coat from a footman and wrapped it around her shoulders, ignoring the lake water dripping all over the marble floor.

Ward looked irritable, which—in her experience—was exactly how men behaved when people they loved were ill.

That idea ran through her mind without warning, but it felt true. Ward was in love with her too, although he would need more time to realize how lucky they were.

They were both alive.

Ward cupped her face in his hands. “I had no idea that the water would frighten you into a faint. Please forgive me, Eugenia.”