Willa shook her head. “Prudence wasn’t a reader. She was a madwoman, and like a flash of lightning, nothing could be done about her. You’re not responsible for her actions.”
Alaric grimaced, but then he carefully stood up. “You’re wet and cold,” he said, bringing her to her feet. “We have to make our way to the peat cutter’s hut before it gets any darker.”
“I’m wet, but not cold,” Willa said, following his lead as he showed her how to hop from hassock to hassock. “Thank goodness, it’s warm today.”
When they reached the hut, Alaric helped her inside, leaving the door open so the sun’s last rays shone through.
“Someone is waiting to see you,” he said.
“Sweetpea!” Willa cried, sinking to her knees. “You’re all muddy.” She put the little skunk against her cheek but quickly started blinking and held her at arm’s length.
“She reeks,” she cried. She turned to Alaric. “She’s never smelled like this before!”
“She sprayed Prudence,” Alaric said, crouching down. “That is how I knew Prudence was lying to me, and how I discovered where you left the path. If not for Sweetpea, you might well have had a night in the bog by yourself. How did Prudence get you off the path, by the way?”
“She has a pistol,” Willa said, shuddering.
“Good lord. I am desperately sorry.” His arms wrapped around her. “I left a footman guarding her door, and she’ll be in the sheriff’s hands tomorrow, I promise.”
Sweetpea was trying to get down, so Willa put her on the floor, and the little skunk trundled off with her tail in the air. “What do you mean, Sweetpea ‘sprayed’ her?”
“This odor is her weapon.” They watched as the baby nosed her way out the door and peed before trotting back inside. “I’m glad she didn’t use my pocket for that.”
“Sweetpea has very good manners,” Willa said, laying her head against his shoulder.
Dropping a kiss on her hair, Alaric gently nudged her to the side and investigated the hut. It was the work of a moment to light a peat fire; its smoke banished Sweetpea’s lingering fragrance. He even found a couple of tallow rushes to keep the dark at bay, and three earthenware bottles of clear, cold water likely scooped from the same underground river they had almost fallen into.
“My father’s men will find us,” he said, closing the door so the peat smoke would rise to the hole in the ceiling rather than billow around the room. “This hut belongs to an old peat cutter named Barty, who lives with his granddaughter in the village. As soon as people smell peat burning in an empty hut, they’ll know where to look for us.”
Willa had seated herself on the pile of rough blankets on the pallet, her back against the wall, and was drinking from one of the bottles. The front of her gown was covered with mud, which made his heart skip a beat. She could have sunk into the mire so easily.
But she hadn’t.
His eyes moved slowly up her body, cataloguing her missing shoe, wet sleeves, round chin, smiling lips … happy eyes. He froze for a moment, relief washing over him as if he’d ducked under a waterfall on a blistering African day.
Willa was safe. He hadn’t really taken it in before now.
“I knew you’d come, and you did,” she said. She waved the bottle at him. “Come drink some water. I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired in my life.”
Alaric had never been so joyful in his life. He took one stride and fell on his knees, pulling her to him, unable to speak. His arms wound around her so tightly that she squeaked a laughing protest.
“I’m all right,” she said, kissing his jaw and then his lips. “We’re both safe.”
His throat was closed to words, so he just held her, rocking back and forth. She leaned against his chest until he managed to croak, “I was terrified that I’d lost you.”
She shook her head, and soft hair caressed his cheek. Holding Willa sent another stab of terror through his heart. “You knew I was coming,” he said, forcing the words past that damned tightness in his throat.
“Of course I did.”
That was the woman he loved: she who took whatever happened to her, whatever life gave her, and made the best of it.
“Do you ever cry?” he asked, lowering his mouth and brushing hers.
“Extremely rarely.”
“Why not?”
“When my parents died, I realized that if I were to begin crying, I might never stop. So I decided not to begin.” She ran a hand along his cheek. “Today I knew you would come for me, which made me feel as safe as I used to feel before my parents died, when nothing frightened me.”
“I might have missed you,” he said, his voice tight. “We never found Horatius’s body.”
Her brows drew together. “And yet you’re certain he’s dead?”
“He died trying to save his horse.”
“A heroic death,” Willa whispered, putting a kiss on his chin.
“No,” Alaric said tightly. “It wasn’t.”
Willa tried to move back, but he tightened his grip and wouldn’t let her slide off his lap. “I want to see your eyes,” she complained.
He bent his head and gave her a lopsided smile. “I’m looking at you.”
Alaric followed the logical workings of her mind by watching her eyes, and he knew her question before she even asked it.
“He’d been drinking, and some fool bet him that he couldn’t take his horse safely across Lindow Moss,” he said, getting the sorry story out. “Horatius knew every path in the bog. If any man could have come through the bog on horseback unscathed, it would have been he.”
“So he died as a result of an idiotic bet, just like my parents,” she said.
“It has made me wary of obvious danger,” Alaric said. “Hence, no cannibals.”
“I’m glad,” she whispered.
She pressed her lips onto his, and heat flared down Alaric’s body. He bent his head to give her a proper kiss. Her lips opened and he dipped deep into the sweetness of her mouth, telling her without words that she was his.
Telling her of fear, relief, and joy, so tightly bound together that he felt as if the knot in his chest would never untwine. He had the sudden conviction that if he could see his own heart, he would see an image of Willa in the middle of it: composed, brilliant, loving, organized Willa.
Or Evie, to give that image the name by which only he knew her. Evie would always surprise him. Frustrate him, probably. Take care of him, because she took care of everyone in her life.
Love him.
Save him.
Chapter Thirty-three
Willa was conscious of a bone-deep weariness such as she’d never felt before, along with dizzying elation. “Do you know that you have never properly asked me to marry you?” she asked Alaric.
He scowled at her. “Damn it, Evie, you aren’t allowed to change your mind. Not about this.”
It seemed that was his proposal. None of her fourteen suitors had demanded her hand. Their requests had been courtly, flattering.
Alaric’s was profane.
It made her laugh.
“Believe me, I had no intention of marriage when I returned to England.” The sentence burst from him with an enraged frustration that made Willa laugh again.
“This isn’t a humorous matter,” he said, running a hand through his hair. If he’d had a hat, it was lost in the bog. “Now I can’t imagine my life without you.”
“You’re framing your proposal with the dispiriting news that you suffer a deficit of imagination?” Willa asked, her smile growing wider.
He dragged his hand through his hair again. “No. I can imagine the world without you in it—my mind showed me that possibility over and over in the last few hours—but it’s not a world I would want to live in.” His eyes were dark with pain. “Damn it, Willa, no one who’s lost a loved one too soon suffers from that particular lack of imagination.”
“I know,” she said softly. “It’s often in the back of my mind.”
“Since Horatius’s death, my imagination readily shows me a world with holes in place of people I love,” he said. “My stepmother might die in childbirth; Betsy might succumb to scarlet fever; North might drink himself into a stupor.”
“Unlikely, but I understand.”
“When I think about your death, it’s not just a hole in the fabric of my world, Willa. It’s the whole damn thing. It’s …”
He seemed to run out of words, just when Willa became most interested. He snatched her up and kissed her so fiercely that she melted into his arms, and stopped thinking.
The voice in the back of her head, the one that never stopped observing and commenting—the unruffled, curious, detached voice?
It gave up.
Stopped.
Went silent.
The only thing that mattered was the strong circle of Alaric’s arms. He didn’t hold her as if she were a fragile crystal statue: he crushed her, his mouth ravaging hers. His tongue demanded she respond—and she did.
When he nipped her bottom lip, she licked his and then gave it a little bite. And another one, because no man should have such a plump bottom lip. While she was at it, she kissed him along the line of his jaw and then nibbled his earlobe.