Chapter 6
CHAPTER 6
T he horse, Lady Crane, was waiting for them outside the next morning, saddled and bridled, just as Ardruina had said, but it still shocked him to see the creature. His clothes, too, had been cleaned.
“How?
Ardruina’s smile was sad as she helped him into the saddle. “I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you.” Her tattered, black long coat flared out behind her, the hem only a few inches from the ground. Within the fabric’s folds, a metallic gleam drew his eye to the curved blade at her side—a sickle.
“What’s this for?” he asked, pointing at the blade.
She swung up behind him, fitting them neatly together, and clicked her tongue, spurring the horse into a canter. “Bushwacking.”
A simple, believable answer, but uneasiness prickled beneath his skin.
That morning, while he brought up food from her root cellar to fix them both breakfast, she donned her riding leathers again, the same ones he met her in. The way she layered and tucked and tied, it was like watching her put on armor. And it made him wonder why.
Considering how they took pleasure in each other’s company and how Ardruina yanked him into bed after, tucking him tight against her body, where he stayed from dusk until dawn, he would’ve thought the intimacy they shared meant fewer walls and barriers.
He was probably getting ahead of himself.
Everything about Ardruina was a mystery.
Why she dressed the way she did and lived deep in the woods without modern conveniences and had a horse that was more ghost than domesticated animal. Why she spent five minutes checking the green ribbon in a mirror and had enough strength to pull a full-grown man out of sucking bog mud and seat him on the saddle of a moving horse. Why he never saw but had always felt her presence.
Too many unlikely and impossible things combined. Maybe he wouldn’t believe her if she told him. Or maybe he already knew something preternatural was afoot. Something out of a fairytale or folklore. But he wasn’t scared, just sated and happy and ready to save Dead Man’s Hollow, because the sooner he did that, the sooner they could continue what they started.
Theodore was naturally curious. Years of visiting the bog, turning over rocks, picking up critters, nurtured that instinct. But preservation and conservation shaped him, too. Knowing when to leave something be. To not take what wasn’t freely given.
“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,” he said, threading his fingers through hers, the leather of her glove warm and soft. “But if you did tell me, you might be surprised by what I’m willing to believe.”
She tilted his head back, kissing him slow and deep, and smoothed a hand under his shirt, across his belly. “I like you,” she murmured against his lips.
He reached to cup her cheek. “And I like you.”