Epilogue
Seraphina had quite literally gone too far this time.
The realization landed with all the cruelty an obvious truth carries when it arrives too late to matter.
One moment there had been a path beneath her boots, narrow and root-threaded, winding its reliable way south along the wood’s edge.
The next, it simply ended, swallowed by a tangle of bracken and twisted oak roots rising past her knees into nothing she could recognize at all.
She went still. Turned in a slow circle, eyes scanning the trees on every side, and felt the first cold prickle of real alarm settle between her shoulder blades.
Winter had picked the oaks down to their bones, and the bare gray lattice overhead offered no landmark, no sense of direction whatsoever.
Every direction showed her the same wood.
The old gamekeeper’s pond and back had been the whole of her intention, a circuit she had already walked a dozen times since Alistair granted his cousins the freedom of the estate.
She had taken that freedom with an appetite she could not disguise, walking out each day regardless of weather simply because she was able to.
Today, apparently, she had walked rather too far.
She picked a bearing, southwest, and pushed forward through the bracken, her skirts already damp from the knee down.
The sky had been sullen since morning, and she had noticed well enough and simply chosen not to care, entirely in character for her, as she now admitted.
Arabella would have checked the clouds first. Genevieve would have stayed in with a novel.
Juliet would have produced a full meteorological analysis and declined to venture out on actuarial grounds alone.
But Seraphina had glanced up at that iron-gray ceiling pressing down over the moors and taken it as a personal challenge, because years shut indoors had left her wanting open air with something bordering on desperation, a physical need to move, to stand clear of walls, to answer to no one at all.
And here she stood, for all her trouble.
Thoroughly soaked she would be, she reflected, well before she ever found the drive again, and Arabella would say not one word about it, which would prove a good deal worse than if she said something outright.
The wind picked up. Looking skyward, she found the clouds had sunk to the color of old iron, heavy and close, charged through with that electric hush that gathers just before—
Thunder.
It rolled through her chest before her ears ever registered it, low and near enough to truly matter.
None of the distant, theatrical variety of thunder.
Directly overhead. Immediate. A crow launched off its branch with an affronted clatter, and one cold drop struck her squarely on the back of the neck.
Then the sky simply opened.
One moment the wood had only threatened rain. The next, water hammered down through the bare canopy in a cascade violent enough to shock her thoroughly. Her bonnet surrendered within seconds.
Run.
Every ladylike constraint her grandmother had spent years drilling into her gave way to pure instinct, and she gathered her skirts to her knees and ran, boots sliding on wet leaf litter, catching herself hard against a tree trunk, bark biting into her palm, pushing off harder still.
Lightning split the sky to the northeast, and the thunder that answered arrived without so much as a two-count’s grace.
The kind of thunder that rearranges a person’s nerves from the inside out.
Think, she told herself savagely, between ragged breaths. Think.
The drive, that was the thing. Bear east and she would strike it eventually, since it ran north to the main entrance, and once found, it would carry her home. She adjusted her bearing and pushed harder still.
Her lungs were on fire. Her skirts had turned to lead.
She heard the horse.
Hooves striking gravel, iron against stone, crisp and cantering, drawing closer from the north. The drive, at last. She turned toward the sound and drove herself through the final stand of trees, branches clawing at her face and sleeves both.
She broke through the trees at exactly the wrong moment.
A big bay horse came bearing down on her, dark with rain and moving fast, and one frozen instant gave her the whole of it at once.
Horse, rider, hooves, gravel, and the absolute certainty that she had put herself directly in the animal’s path.
The bay shied hard, all four feet clearing the ground at once, a snort tearing loose from it that sounded almost human.
The rider hauled up hard, hands firm and decisive, wheeling the beast around in a tight, spraying arc with the sureness of someone who had ridden through worse than a half-drowned woman materializing straight out of the undergrowth.
The horse came to a stop.
Seraphina stood in the middle of the drive in the pouring rain, chest heaving, skirts plastered to her legs, her hat hanging from a single pin at an angle suggesting it had resigned its post entirely. She breathed. She remained upright. Nothing had broken.
That, she thought, with the distant clarity that comes of having just survived several seconds that might reasonably have ended otherwise, had been exceedingly stupid.
The rider dismounted before the horse had fully settled.
He landed on the gravel with a controlled impact, one hand still on the reins, and turned toward her.
Seraphina had a vivid, inconvenient second to notice him before propriety could reassert itself.
Tall, broad through the shoulder in a way tailoring could suggest but never fabricate outright, built like a man who worked outdoors rather than posed in drawing rooms. His overcoat was excellent but hardly fashionable, quality over any show of it, and his deep brown hair, darkened further by the rain, was cut somewhat longer than current fashion favored, water running from it now across a brow and jaw that were—
She redirected herself firmly.
He strode toward her, overcoat open and flapping, hatless, rain streaming freely down the clean line of his jaw. His face gave little away, though brisk certainty moved beneath it that made her feel, even in her present state, that matters were already being competently handled.
“Lady Seraphina.” His voice came low and authoritative, clipped at the edges in the manner of a man whose patience remained intact but had recently been tested. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” The word emerged steadier than she felt. “I apologize for—”
“Later.”
Already he was moving, reaching for her, and Seraphina felt the odd sensation of being managed with the very same brisk economy he had just used on the horse, no unnecessary ceremony wasted on her either.
His hands found her shoulders as he stripped the sodden pelisse from her back in two brisk movements and let it drop to the gravel.
The cold struck her at once, driving through her gown’s wet fabric thoroughly enough to steal the breath clean out of her lungs.
Then his overcoat settled around her instead.
Heavy wool, thoroughly warm, the warmth of a body rather than any fire, immediate and absolute, sinking into her frozen shoulders with a relief so sudden it bordered on pain.
The garment swallowed her whole, well past the hips, far too large, carrying rain and leather and clean linen on it, and something else beneath all three.
Something warm and impossible to name beyond simply masculine, which her traitorous senses cataloged in full before she managed to tell them to stop.
She closed her eyes for one involuntary second.
Do not, she told herself. Do not.
She opened them again. He studied her with the concentration of a man accustomed to difficult situations and unwilling to act before he understood this one.
His eyes were an unusual blue, the color of flint beneath certain light, and wholly intent upon her.
She found his attention both reassuring and unsettling.
He did not regard her with the vague social interest of a gentleman who noticed only her station and appearance. He saw her, and he meant to understand.
When had anyone last done that?
“You are frozen through.” A diagnosis, not a question. “If I may.”
He did not wait for a complete answer. Before she had finished forming one, he had bent, slid one arm behind her knees and the other at her back, and lifted her clean off the ground.
Seraphina Oxley, eldest daughter of the ninth Duke of Oxley, four-and-twenty years old and possessed of a considerable and well-founded opinion of her own competence, found herself lifted as though she weighed next to nothing at all.
She did not protest.
She was entirely incapable of protesting.
Not because he had rendered her helpless, though removing the question of whether she could manage a quarter mile on frozen, shaking legs came as considerable relief, but because some part of her she had not thought to consult had decided, without reservation, that this was perfectly acceptable.
She knew who he was. Alistair’s man, the new steward. He had arrived alongside Alistair, spent his days closeted over maps and ledgers when he was not out riding the estate, and was not, in any sense she had yet discovered, anything like the previous steward.
Nathaniel Beckwith looked perhaps early thirties, with the sort of face difficult to date with any accuracy, because it had never, she suspected, looked notably young to begin with.
A face that thought a great deal and said considerably less, those unreadable eyes filing everything away for later consideration.
He had looked at her twice in recent days.
Not rudely, but with a focused directness she associated with genuine assessment rather than the usual social display.
Which irritated her, since she was accustomed to the anxious deference of male servants who never looked at her directly at all.
She was not accustomed to being regarded as a problem worth taking seriously.