Chapter 7 #2
She broke free of the forest just east of the bridge, stumbling down a steep embankment toward the mist blanketing the water.
She plunged her feet into the shallows, gasping from the snap of the freezing water, bending over to rub the muck from her ankles.
Her hem was mangled, and she shook her head; she had to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
Yet Violet turned from the stream quickly, knowing she shouldn’t dawdle.
She had to get back to the house and send someone after the rider, even if their lead was significant and the search hopeless.
Her laughter drew a noise from the wider part of the stream, well beyond the bridge and the banks, and she stood straighter, watching a large shape cut across the water, slicing through it with almost eerie precision.
Several deranged thoughts crossed her mind, including that she could be witnessing the first shark to ever reach the placid waters of Warwickshire.
The shape reached the clump of reeds poking up from the waterline across the bridge from her, and through the mist, she watched it rise up and resolve into the shape of a man.
The mist held him briefly in a gauzy tousle of ivory streamers, maintaining his modesty for the amount of time it took Violet to realize she was gawking at a naked person.
And not just any naked person, but Mr. Alasdair Kerr.
My God, she thought, covering her mouth with one hand and her eyes with the other. What a structure.
She heard an intake of breath, then his snorted laugh, and finally the rustle of clothing. Peering between two fingers, she discovered that he had managed to tug on his breeches. Thank God.
And yet, a twinge of regret.
The obliging little beads left behind after his swim drew her eye to every bulging contour of his chest, every dark hair, every angle chiseled into his sides.
“Miss Arden,” he called, taking a few steps toward her until his toes were back in the water. He had found his spectacles and perched them back on his nose, squinting. “Are you quite well?”
“No!” she squawked. “I…” She wiped both palms down her face and went to stand on the other side of the stream from him.
Her cheeks burned until they hurt. It pained her to think he could draw this kind of reaction from her.
“There’s been a fire at Pressmore,” she stammered.
“I went after the culprit but lost him in the woods just there.” Turning, she pointed.
“A fire?” Mr. Kerr hurried back to his pile of clothes and grabbed his shirt, tugging it over his head in one efficient movement. Though it eased the heat in her cheeks, Violet couldn’t help but feel a bit sorry at the loss of such a sight. “Is everyone accounted for? Is anyone harmed?”
Of course he would deeply feel the gravity of such a thing.
“N-no,” she answered, moving toward the bridge.
“But I must return there right away and tell the family what I saw.” In her haste, her steps were bungling, and she slid, then slipped, tumbling down the shallow embankment until she caught herself awkwardly on her right foot.
The surge of pain flickered up her leg, and as soon as she put weight on the foot again, she found it too tender to bear her.
“Ooh!” she exclaimed, hissing. She hopped forward, then grabbed the post of the bridge for support. “Never mind that, I mustn’t be delayed.”
“If there is a criminal lurking in the woods, then I insist that you allow me to escort you home.”
Violet’s hackles raised at his tone: commanding, certain, leaving absolutely no room for argument.
Yet when he appeared again through the mist, marching across the bridge, there was genuine concern written across his face.
He pulled on his boots and jacket, then nodded toward the silhouette of the estate in the distance.
“Please,” he added, seeing her expression. “Set your distaste for me aside. You should not be alone. More than that, you appear injured, Miss Arden.”
“It’s nothing,” she assured him, then risked a look at her right ankle, which had rapidly begun to swell. To prove her capability, Violet began limping and then jumping on her good foot across the road and away from him. Ow, ow, ow.
“Am I to stand and watch you hop and hobble clear across two fields?” he asked, stifling a laugh. “Madam, I cannot allow it.”
The pain made a similarly compelling argument.
Violet sighed and stalled, gesturing him forward with a souring expression.
How odd—he had been devoid of emotion during their last encounter, and so the sound of his laughter now came as if from someone else entirely.
It dragged her back to the past, to this same bridge but sunnier days and rosier smiles.
Her chest throbbed at a loss she could not tally or define, and it worsened as Mr. Kerr came to her, coughed nervously into his ham hock of a fist, and bowed his head.
“With your permission?”
Violet nodded, unable to meet his gaze.
“If you can forgive the state of me, that is,” he added, a bit red in the cheeks himself.
“The state of us.”
“Indeed, I thought a spirit of the forest had come upon me; I did consider swimming away and abandoning my clothes altogether.”
“Oh, no, sir,” said Violet, grinning and indicating her swollen leg. “You were never in any danger. I had only come to wash away my mud boots. I don’t know how you stand to be in the water this time of year. You should be a block of ice!”
She flinched as he reached toward her, but it was just to carefully pry away a glob of wax that had dried to her throat. The quick, crisp release of the hardened wax was almost pleasurable.
“Wax,” he told her, seeming to lose his train of thought before gathering it up again.
His eyes had changed color, his breaths coming faster, rasping his voice.
The air sizzled around them, charged, as if a tempest gathered just for them on this otherwise clear day; Violet felt it through her entire body.
“I weathered all manner of far more dire dares swimming the River Cam. My contemporaries at Cambridge were determined to give the waterman the challenge of a lifetime.” He shook his head and stared away from her at a distant memory along the stream, a thought hidden in the lightening fog.
Coming back to himself, he glanced down and plucked a leafy twig from her hair, flicked it away, then carefully stooped to scoop her into his arms. He did as much with no trouble, for she seemed to be merely the burden of a single folded blanket. “This look rather suits you.”
“Does it?” Violet wanted to roll her eyes but couldn’t decide if he was having fun at her expense.
“Yes. It’s more how I remember you,” he said, his voice softening. “A Peaseblossom among the hollyhocks. Certainly, the shrieking from the other day was familiar—”
“Shrieking?” Violet tensed in his arms.
“—and how you and I were the most hardheaded of the bunch. How you loved endlessly quoting speeches at us…” he went on, frowning, looking at her askance as he carried her into the swirling mist. “ ‘She is but little, but she is fierce.’ ”
They broke away from the water’s edge, angling toward the charming stone path that picked its way up to the house proper. “So much for a Cambridge education, Mr. Kerr. The line is: ‘And though she be but little, she is fierce.’ I can shriek it if that will help you remember it better.”
He was silent for a moment, then laughed. “Exactly so.”
“Ha! Is that what you think of me?” she asked, finding that his golden eyes had not veered from her face.
And the intensity of it…She was suddenly grateful for the cold, worrying she might melt like a candle left in the sun under the scrutiny of those eyes, and that was to say nothing of the heat radiating from his chest. Renaud—no, the Frenchman, as he must now be known—was all sharp angles.
They had never embraced to this extent. Don’t think of the word embrace, you idiot, this is purely functional.
But how could one not feel the alluring texture of the man through his sodden, sticking clothes, the unexpected cushioning softness of his chest and arms?
Violet’s eyelashes dipped, and she scolded herself, demanding her body reject the urges that flooded through her at his touch.
Remember who he is, the things he said.
“I don’t know quite what to think of you, Miss Arden,” he replied, shrugging her.
It was becoming very hard to remember. Violet quickly changed the subject. “Do you ever wonder if we’re still in these fields somehow? Catching frogs, and playing, and not a care in the world…Still there, but we just can’t see it.”
In her desperation to change the subject, she hadn’t considered most genteel company would find such an observation incredibly bizarre. Mr. Kerr only frowned, drawing his heavy brows down as if giving the question real merit.
“Like an underpainting.”
Terrible. She had wanted to like him less, not more. How bothersome to entertain that her first conceptions of him were incomplete. Well. They couldn’t make the rest of the journey in silence, not when her head had begun blasting out so many questions. “How did you come to know so much about art?”
“A friend at Cambridge ran in the right circles. He brought me around to the right exhibitions, made the right introductions, and then I had some success discerning nascent talents in London. Lady Edith enjoyed the idea of me filling the house with art of the apostles and so on, so I was sent to Madrid, Florence, Vienna…”
Florence! Violet almost moaned with jealousy. “Yet you never considered learning the art yourself?”
“Maybe I did, briefly, but I doubt anyone would take interest in how I observe the world.”