Chapter Six
Julia kept their pace slow and allowed Sax to pull her close as they strolled toward the shore and the coastal path. After they had gone a bit of distance from the Old Plough, she stopped and faced him.
“Pretend to adjust my ribbons. Do not turn and look, but Pickett just followed us from the pub.”
“Pickett! It was him this morning, then? He’d swaddled himself in a disguise with a scarf and low hat.
Frankly, I’m surprised he had the courage to come after me himself.
” Sax shook his head. “That arse nearly did prod me off that cliff. He caught me completely off guard.” He touched her cheek. “My thoughts were full of you.”
“You nearly frightened me out of my wits until you caught your balance.”
“He nearly got me, but I had reason to fight,” he said softly. “I had a chance with you.”
“A chance?” She grinned. “You’ll be forced to save my reputation if we don’t stop swooning at each other. No chance, then, to get away.”
“Forced? I’ll be dragging you to the altar as soon as I am free and Merritt has decreed a decent enough interval has passed.”
“Let’s foil the plan to assassinate you, first. Then we will race each other to the altar.”
He laughed. “Very well, then.” He paused. “But how did you recognize Pickett?”
“Let me start at the beginning.” She told him everything as they strolled.
“Eva’s here? I’ve only just learned she’s not at her father’s.”
“I suspect she plans to reveal herself after your demise. If she convinces everyone the pair of you were reconciling, it will lend weight to her story of carrying your child.”
“Hell and damnation. I never would have guessed they would go so far.” He gave her a look of approval. “You are right about one thing. We must stop them now. What if they go after you? Or my sisters?”
“They know that tactic has been successful against you once.”
Unconsciously, he started to move faster.
Julia tugged on his arm to slow him. “We must give Belmont a chance to get settled near the spa rooms and into a place where he can watch—and intervene.”
“You believe that’s the place that will tempt Pickett to try again?” he said, gazing ahead.
“The spa closes in the afternoon as visitors get ready for the evening entertainments. The cliffs end directly after the rooms, there is plenty of open space beyond the manicured gardens, and a drop directly into the sea.”
“But what of you? Surely he doesn’t intend to send you over the cliff, as well?”
Julia raised a brow. “Would you put it past either of them? But truly, I think we can believably set you up as vulnerable bait. Pickett was clearly following you this morning. He would have seen our encounter was… volatile. We can make an argument look natural enough. I can stalk away, duck into the garden, and wait.”
Sax pulled her off the path for a moment. She stood beside him as he stared out at the water, the shore, and the last of the sea bathers.
“The last thing I want to do is to argue with you,” he said. “Yesterday, I stood in this very spot, not knowing if we would ever be together again. Now I just want our lives to begin anew.”
She spun around to head back to the path.
“There is something we must discuss. Something we might yet argue about,” she flung over her shoulder.
Was Pickett watching? She surreptitiously scanned for a sign of him.
A group of chatting strollers followed a hundred feet back. Had he hidden himself among them?
Sax hurried after her. She allowed him to catch her up. “There’s no need for such a discussion,” he said, low and urgent. “You know I felt the same depths of despair when I left. Do you think that I would berate you for anything done in the throes of pain?”
“You should. I do.” Julia shook her head. “Not for anything I did, for nothing dire came of it. But for how disconnected and irrational I let myself become.”
He looked skeptical.
“Yes. That look. That’s exactly what I deserve. Me! The logical one, the one who always lectured you on forethought and strategy. I lost all that. I lost myself.” Her shoulders drooped. “You were gone. Then Merritt was gone. I was alone with my distant, disapproving father.”
“I heard the whispers,” he said eventually, as they began to climb the hill toward the spa rooms. “A fortune hunter. A foiled elopement. I didn’t credit the rumors.”
“You should have,” she said bluntly. “They are true.”
He blanched but shrugged. “I left you behind, told you I had to dedicate myself to another woman. I would never judge you.” His steps slowed again. “But I don’t know if I have the strength to hear it.”
“You must,” Julia said quietly. “There can be no going forward without it. You used to know my every thought. Knew what I was feeling almost before I did.”
“As you did with me.”
“I won’t accept less than the harmony we used to have.” She sighed. “You need to hear how foolish I was.”
Sax heaved a sigh too. “Very well.”
Julia walked a little farther, gathering herself before she began.
“I had seen him in local society before. You might even have done so. He was a school friend of the squire’s son and often spent holidays with their family.
He paid me no mind while you were about, of course.
But afterward, seeing me in my misery, he saw his chance. ”
Sax gave a moan, but Julia continued. “I scarcely heeded him at first.” She grew quieter.
“But then we began to hear the rumors of what was happening in Merritt’s marriage.
Father refused to make a visit. Too many essential race meetings, of course,” she said with a roll of her eyes.
“I begged to be sent on my own, but he refused. I began to grow a little frantic. Obsessive, even.” She sighed. “A prime victim for a fortune hunter.”
“He promised to take you to Merritt?”
“Yes.” She swallowed. “I cannot lie. It was pleasant enough to be courted. A huge relief to feel as if someone was actually looking at me again, without seeing through me. I tried to feel something for him, but it was no use. It was too soon. And he wasn’t you.”
He took her arm again as they climbed. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“In the end, I was using him as much as he was using me, and that is what makes me truly ashamed.”
“He convinced you to run away with him?”
“Oh, he tried with Father first. Asked for my hand in time-honored tradition. But would the Earl of Hollidge give his daughter to country gentry? Without even a stake in a racehorse in exchange?” She snorted.
“Father ran him off. And that’s when I agreed to elope—on the provision that he take me straight to Merritt once we were married. ”
“I’m surprised you just didn’t take off on your own.”
“A woman alone, traveling such a distance? No matter how capable, I would have been noticed and remarked upon—entirely too easy to track.”
“You wouldn’t have had to trade your entire life for the chance.”
Her gaze dropped. “You were gone and out of my reach. And that was where I failed, for I just stopped caring about myself, or my own future. In the end, it didn’t matter what happened to me.
” She lifted a shoulder. “I was weak. I couldn’t rally.
Merritt’s pain was the only thing that pulled me out of that whirlwind of despair.
If she hadn’t needed me, I don’t know how long I would have lingered there, lost. Or what other foolishness I might have done. ”
Sax held his silence for a moment. “They said your father caught you before you’d been gone long.”
“He did. I wonder now if that scoundrel even tried to hide our passage. Father tracked us down and confronted us on the same day we left. And my would-be hero promptly accepted five hundred pounds and promised never to return to Suffolk. My father watched him go, then told me he’d known I was stupid, but hadn’t expected me to be cheap.
” She shrugged. “In any case, it all worked out, for Father didn’t wish to waste a Season on spoiled goods, so he sent me to Merritt anyway.
” She paused. “I was right to wish to go. I believe my presence kept her husband from indulging his worst behaviors, and when he got himself killed, I was there to help. We healed. We read so many plays.” She grinned.
“And we began to plot what we would do after her mourning was over.”
“And then your father died, too.”
“Yes. Kicked in the head by a temperamental racehorse. A fitting end. But it was then that Merritt and I were truly free. We traveled a while, then we found Shoring, and Merritt found Belmont.”
“And you found yourself,” Sax said quietly. “You said so. You battled your way back. You found the calm and peace you needed in order to move on.” He stopped. “But now I am asking you to go back.”
Julia surged forward, leaning into the climb as the last stretch of trail grew steep.
“Almost everyone takes a carriage the long way around to the spa rooms, largely because of this last, sheer bit. But I love it.” She spread her arms wide.
“It makes me feel as if I am climbing straight into the sky. Into possibility.” Turning around, she walked carefully backward as she stared over his shoulder.
The group behind them had turned back. A lone figure was left. He turned to stare out to sea.
Julia gave a slow nod as she met Sax’s gaze. “That’s what we are doing. What we will do. We will move into the future, into all the possibility we felt that first day, when we battled so grandly and bonded so thoroughly.”
“Yes.” He crossed the distance between them and swept her up into his arms. “We will reclaim the future we were meant to have. Together.”
She threw her head back as he crested the top of the climb.
Their follower was still at the bottom of the last hill.
Sax carried her farther into the last space before the end of the cliff tops.
The spa rooms, with their manicured gardens, stood to the left.
Past them, and also to the right, stretched the cliff edges, covered in short grass and dotted with low-growing wildflowers.
She scarcely registered any of it, though.
She was sliding against his hard body until her feet hit the ground.
He settled one hand at the small of her back, the other at the back of her head.
She sighed as he fanned hot kisses along her throat, to her jaw.
He reached her mouth and her senses flooded.
She kissed him back thoroughly, with naked enthusiasm—because she was never more truly her honest self than when she was in his arms.
Lurching higher onto her toes, she asked for more. She felt starved for him, but not broken. Not any longer, for her soul was mending with each moment they clutched each other close.
Sparks were igniting all through her. His hand slipped upward to cup her breast. He drew his thumb teasingly over her bead-hard nipple. She drew a shuddering breath as her head fell back—and she caught a glimpse of movement at corner of her eye.
She stiffened—and his body went tense, too.
Her eyes on his, she stood straight and pushed against his chest, stepping away. “In the garden,” she whispered. “He just slipped behind the spiraling boxwood.”
For a moment, she wondered what she could do. The damned butler had stolen her hiding spot. But it came to her in a moment. “We cannot,” she declared loudly to Sax. “You know we cannot. You cannot ask it of me.”
“I have to,” Sax pleaded, playing his part.
“You made your choice. You are bound to her.”
“She doesn’t care for me,” Sax said clearly. “She loves another.”
“I am sorry, then, for you both. But I won’t be your other.”
He moved toward her, but she darted back, throwing up her hands.
“No. This must serve as our end.” She backed away. “I promise to remember you fondly, for all my days. Goodbye, Sax.”
Turning, Julia darted back down the path. She didn’t go far, though, before she hiked up her skirts, threw herself down onto the ground, and crept back up, until she could peer over the crest of the hill.
Sax, playing his part perfectly, had moved closer to the edge of the cliff. Stalking back and forth, he stared out over the water. She waited only moments before Pickett crept out from the edge of the gardens. Crouching, the man moved on silent feet toward Sax.