Chapter 12 #2
She had been from the moment their eyes first met in this very building, though she had dressed the feeling in more respectable garments.
Admiration, gratitude, attraction, regard.
But it was love, plain and inescapable, and it had chosen the most spectacularly inconvenient moment to announce itself.
Verity rose to her feet with care, steadying herself against a tree trunk when her legs proved unreliable.
Braccus heaved himself upright beside her, and Eirin fell into step on her opposite flank, while Ronan trotted ahead with his nose to the ground.
The three hounds accompanied her with the easy coordination of a military escort, and Verity found that she no longer needed to steel herself against their proximity.
Some new communion of spirit had passed between them, a recognition, perhaps, that she was no longer a stranger to be observed with mild tolerance but something more. Something that belonged.
She hoped, with a fervor that bordered on prayer, that Lady Blackfen was right about their being fated for one another.
Because at this moment, the notion of things turning out well seemed highly improbable.
She was a woman of modest birth who had given herself to a nobleman who harbored a secret that could destroy his family, his reputation, and everything he had labored to protect.
The obstacles between them were not the ordinary trials of courtship but something altogether more daunting.
And yet her heart refused to be daunted.
She made her way across the grounds with the lantern held before her, the moon riding high and white above the treetops.
The night was still relatively young. She judged it to be no later midnight, which meant it would be some hours before Lucien returned.
She did not pretend to understand the particulars of his transformation, but she suspected he would not come home until the moon began its descent toward the horizon, until whatever wildness claimed him had spent itself and released him back into his human form.
She would wait. What else was there to do?
The great structure rose before her, its windows dark save for the faint glow of a lamp in the servants’ passage.
The stone fa?ade appeared different to her now, not merely grand but watchful, as if the house itself were a living thing that had been observing her approach and had reached its own conclusions about her worthiness.
The hounds followed her in without hesitation, their nails clicking against the floor.
Their presence was a comfort that transcended the practical assurance of protection.
They were a link to Lucien, a living thread connecting her to the man she had left somewhere in the darkness.
They understood what he was and loved him without condition or reservation.
She climbed the staircase to her chambers, and the wolfhounds ascended with her, an extraordinary procession that would have drawn startled exclamations from the household had anyone been awake to witness it.
Braccus took each step with the ponderous gravity of a bishop processing up the nave, Eirin bounded ahead to investigate the corridor, and Ronan pressed himself against Verity’s skirts as if he feared being left behind.
As she tried to sort out what this meant for her future, Verity discovered that the answer was disarmingly simple.
She did not care. She did not care that Lucien carried a curse or a gift or whatever name one might assign to his extraordinary nature.
She did not care that the world would call her mad for loving such a man, if the world ever came to know the truth.
She did not care that every convention of her upbringing, every sermon she had heard from her father’s pulpit about the natural order of God’s creation, suggested that she ought to be terrified.
She loved him. The realization was not a thunderclap but a quiet settling, like snow accumulating in silence until the landscape was transformed beyond recognition.
She loved his gravity and his gentleness. She loved the careful restraint with which he moved through the world, as if he feared that any careless gesture might reveal too much. She loved the man, and she had looked upon the wolf and had not turned away.
Whatever came next, they would face it together. If he would have her, if he could trust her with the truth he had guarded so fiercely, she would stand beside him.
Verity pushed open the door to her bedchamber and stepped inside.
The wolfhounds arranged themselves about the room without prompting.
Braccus across the threshold, Eirin by the window, and Ronan, with an audacity that surprised them both, leaping onto the foot of the bed to curl himself into a tight ball upon the coverlet.
Verity regarded him with a weary smile. “Make yourself comfortable,” she murmured, and was rewarded with a thump of his tail.
She set the lantern upon the table and sank onto the edge of the bed, her fingers working at the snow-dampened gown to remove it.
Exhaustion crept through her limbs with the slow persistence of fog rolling in from the moors.
The events of the day pressed upon her. The revelations, the terror, the astonishing clarity that had followed.
She felt wrung out, as if her emotions had been laundered and hung to dry in a stiff wind.
A soft knock at the door caused Braccus to raise his enormous head, but the hound did not growl. Instead, his tail gave a single measured wag, which Verity took as a favorable endorsement of the visitor.
The door opened to reveal Lady Blackfen, wrapped in a silk robe of deep garnet, her silver hair unbound and trailing over her shoulders like moonlight upon water.
The dowager surveyed the scene with bright, birdlike eyes.
The wolfhounds arrayed about the room, Verity seated upon the bed in her disheveled state, Ronan sprawled across the coverlet with the proprietary air of a creature that had claimed its territory and dared anyone to dispute it.
A slow smile spread across the old woman’s face.
“Ah,” she said, with the satisfied air of a woman whose predictions had been vindicated. “The hounds have come to you.”
Verity opened her mouth, but no words emerged. She was not certain which of her many questions ought to take precedence, and the effort of selecting one proved beyond her depleted faculties. The countess did not seem to expect a response.