Chapter 17
Meg arrived the very next morning, this time with her hair uncurled and whipped back in one of the braided buns he’d seen her wear before. She wore a blue-and-white-striped dress and worn apron, as if she’d borrowed clothes from one of the Penrose scullery maids.
The first thing she did was bustle to the cottage windows. She measured their length with a notched paper tape.
“What are ye doing?”
“If Lady Walpoole is going to torture me with accomplishments, I might at least use them for something practical.” She spun. “Yellow, I think. Do you not?”
“Dinnae matter to me.”
“I suppose you would leave them bare if you had not someone to sew them for you.”
He shrugged, grinned.
Her lips widened, but she whirled back around before he caught the full sunbeams of her smile. Something inside him shook. Seeing her here, measuring his windows, talking to him, her hair bonnie.
He had not slept last night.
The words had pierced him, like a fish hook catching in his flesh. “I am being watched.” Her imagination likely. Or the men who wanted her dead. The men Tom was supposed to have found, stopped, and locked away by now. “This was different.”
Urgency branded him, a hot iron to his soul. He needed to do something. What? Hunt down the brothel where Elisabeth with the forgotten name was said to have died? Read Mrs. Musgrave’s letter again?
The dead had no tongue.
And the dead were the only ones, right now, who had any hope of snuffing down the lies concerning Mr. Foxcroft. Och, and they were lies. Were they not?
The old man’s face shaped in Tom’s memory. The receding white hair, wiry eyebrows, jerky movements, and inability to look anyone quite in the face. He was strange, the old goat. He’d always been strange.
But Meg had loved him.
In some ways, Tom had too.
“Where is Joanie?”
“Still making hats.” Tom grabbed his rusty shears from the mantel. “Ever trimmed bushes before?”
“I think you would know the answer to that better than I would.”
“I dinnae know everything about ye, lass.” Tom nodded her outside. The four bushes planted outside the cottage were faded, drooping, and lopsided. Only a few wilted flowers bloomed among the branches.
“Go to clipping as ye see fit.” He placed the shears in her hands. “Like this.”
Snip.
Her hands were soft in his, jarring his senses.
Snip, whack.
“Your instructions are far less precise than those of Lady Walpoole.” Meg removed herself from his grip, her cheeks pinkening. She’d blushed at him so seldom before. Little he’d done had ever taken her by surprise.
She’d known him too well. What he thought before he spoke. What mischief drove him to nonsense. Anyone else would have discouraged him or scolded him, but she had matched his folly and been a culprit in all his impish trouble.
“You may finish your work in the garden,” she said. “I can manage here.”
“I’ve a better idea.”
“Oh?”
“It is hot, ye love to swim”—he swooped the gardening tool away from her—“and there’s a stream half a mile away just waiting for the likes of us.”
“The likes of us, indeed.” She resumed trimming the bush, this time snapping them with her fingers. “I hardly think so.”
“Why?”
“The fact you need ask such a question speaks detrimentally to your character.”
“Ye know nothing of my character.”
“I know enough.”
He would have dismissed the comment as more of her cursed defiance, but something about her voice stilled him. The brittle rasp. The downward pull at her lips.
He frowned. “Ye are serious.”
“I think you should work on your garden.”
“Whatever ye’ve heard, ye’re wrong.” Was that her opinion of him? Ire wetted his palms. If he knew who had whispered lies in her ears, he’d cuff the sense out of them. Tom seized her hand. “And we’re going swimming, lass. If I have to drag ye there and dunk ye in myself.”
If she had realized one thing about Tom McGwen, it was only how impossible he was. That, and how impossible it was to remain angry with him.
The stream was flanked on both sides by ancient, gnarly trees. Bracken, gorse, and tiny wildflowers mingled with the grass, and the water caught blue reflections from the sky. Tom had kicked down the growth and now sat pulling cotton stockings from his feet.
She wasn’t certain what about him disarmed her.
How he could enrage her, then amuse her, then endanger her, then comfort her, all in the span of one heartbeat. He was complicated.
Lord Cunningham she understood. She knew enough of his past to forgive his failings; she comprehended his tragedies enough to condone his obsessions; and despite everything, she still found him pleasing. She wished to marry him.
Except she did not.
“Dinnae tell me ye need help with that.”
The niggling twitch in her chest gave way to distraction. “What?” He nodded to her feet. “Yer shoes.”
“What about them?”
“Ye forgot how to take them off, did ye?”
“No, I did not forget.” She loosened her shoelaces deftly. “Look away.”
He laughed.
“I am quite serious, sir. Look away or I shall not get in at all.”
“I’ve seen yer ankles before, lass.”
“Well, you shall not see them now.” She waited until he’d tossed both shoes over his shoulder—who knew if he’d ever be able to find them again in all this grass—and rolled up the legs of his trousers. He started to pull the shirt over his head.
Her blood flow spiked. “You will leave it on or I shall never see you again.”
“Och, Meg, yer temper.”
“It is not my temper. It is my sense. Now keep it on.”
“Fine.” He pushed up the loose sleeves of his white shirt, slid closer to the water, and splashed in.
Only then, with his back turned, did she remove her shoes and stockings. She followed his lead by tossing them over her shoulder. What was she doing?
She should never have come today.
Not twice in a row.
She’d awakened early, and in the predawn light, the empty halls of Penrose Abbey had seemed so excruciating. The crossed swords on the walls, the stagnant smell of old syringas in a vase, those solemn ancestral paintings in their golden frames.
With numbing boredom, she’d crept to Lady Walpoole’s chamber. Soft snores had drifted out into the hall. Much like rumbles of thunder, promising another rainy day.
On impulse, she’d raided a maid’s wardrobe, badgered a footman into escorting her, and ran to the one person she should be running from. Yet … was not discovering her past more important than studying the Latin alphabet?
Up to his waist in the current, Tom shook water from his hair. “Ye coming, or do I have to run up and catch ye?”
She scooted closer to the edge, dipped in a toe. “It is cold.”
“Come on, ye ninny.”
“Do you always resort to insults?”
A clapping sound, then water splashed over her in an icy shower. She squealed and shivered, just as his hand grabbed her foot. He tugged. She slid.
The stream swallowed her and a shocking burn stung her nose as water rushed up her nostrils.
She flailed and broke the surface, gasping, retaliating …
laughing, despite every fiber of her body demanding she not.
“You wretched, wretched fool.” She hurried more water into his face.
“You have no right to sling and toss me whenever you please.”
He wiped his eyes. His lashes stuck together—like the shirt clinging to his carved chest.
“Ahem.” She cleared her throat. To get the water out of her lungs of course. “If you are finished, I am ready to leave.”
“Nay.” He grinned. “I’m not.”
She glanced about them—the babbling water, the silent trees, the overwhelming vastness of isolated countryside. How many times had she been alone with him in her life? Had it been this way before?
The world feeling so small.
Him so big.
Them so … close.
“Ye have questions.” He lowered into the water, pushing it away from him with muscled arms, his gaze trained on her face. “Ask them.”
“I liked flowers, did I not?”
“Thistles and daisies.”
“Did I bake?”
“Aye.” A chuckle. “Not well, but aye.”
“Did I do anything of great significance?” She curled her toes in the cool mud. “I mean, I must have sung or played something or been fair at some form of accomplishment.”
He lifted his shoulder in a shrug.
“Surely I was good at something.”
“Ye weaved baskets. Sometimes.”
“Was I proficient at it?”
His narrowed eyes dashed her anticipation. She sank deeper into the current, the water lapping against her chin and rushing through her dress in cold waves. “What of my character?”
“Ye’ve been listening to wagging tongues.”
“You evade the question.”
“Nay.”
“Then tell me.”
“There is nothing to tell.” She expected his face to color, for signs of remorse or guilt to contort his face.
But his eyes still smiled, firm and certain, with that glow which seemed so brimming with animation.
“Ye were blameless. Ye were good. To people. To yer uncle.” The nub in his throat moved. “To me.”
“There was talk of nighttime excursions.”
“They were innocent.”
“One who has no shame does his deeds in the light.”
Tom blew air from his cheeks. “It was yer uncle. He fussed about …”
“About what?”
“Our getting married.”
“So you stole me into the night.”
“I dinnae expect ye to understand.” Lines of frustration formed on his forehead and he waded closer. He sank face to face with her. “Maybe it wasnae right. Ye’d know better about that than me. But there wasnae shame in it, lass. If ye believe nothing else I’ve told ye, believe that.”
Emotion whirlpooled inside her. She was surprised to find she did.
They stayed too long.
Meg forgot her demands that Tom return her, and she wasn’t certain he would have listened anyway. The stream had carried them downward as steadily as Meg asked her questions.
Every answer fascinated her. She inserted colors, places, names into the empty chambers of her mind, until the space felt furnished and lived in.
’Twas a strange feeling.
A good one.