ONE #2
She could hardly stay and continue with the excavation now . . . what with Alistair being Lord Farnell. Working together would be impossible, no matter how desperately she needed this situation. She bit back the encroaching tears, refusing to add weeping to her list of humiliations.
Besides, surely at some point, Alistair would remember her.
Maybe once she was cleaned of mud and speaking of antiquities, some spark would ignite in his dark eyes—eyes her dreams still remembered all too clearly and frequently—and he would say in that puzzled way of his, head tilting to the side, “Ye seem a wee bit familiar, Mrs. Newton. Have we met before?”
And how would she reply?!
“Why, yes, my lord. I do believe we were betrothed once upon a time. Handfasted, even . . . in Florence, Italy. It was rather idyllic, what with Florence and the kissing and handfasting and all. Do you not recall?”
Awkward did not begin to describe the scene. To have to explain to him what they had once been to one another. Or what she had assumed they had been.
Instead, she watched from her bog—mud-covered, cold, and miserable—as Alistair shrugged out of his tailored coat and gold-embroidered waistcoat, handing them along with his hat to Fiona for safekeeping from the muck.
With confident movements, he wrapped one end of the rope around his chest and ordered his men to tie the opposite end around a nearby pine.
The men obliged and then held on to the rope, bracing their feet on the path as Alistair slowly walked backward down the slope, trusting the rope and his men with his weight.
Alistair had always been agile and sure-footed. Another detail Chrissi was annoyed to remember.
“Almost there, Mrs. Newton.” He still faced the slope, but his voice was calm and assured. “Unfortunately, ye will need to cling to my neck in order for my men to haul us both up. Can ye manage that, do ye ken?”
“Yes, Ali—my lord,” she replied, hating how his Christian name clung to her tongue.
He stopped mere inches away from where the bog began, feet braced against the solid embankment. Keeping one hand on the rope, he reached back with the other, beckoning her forward.
Inching on her knees, Chrissi wrapped her hand around his forearm, allowing him to pull her from the mud with a squishy pop.
Gracious, she had forgotten how strong he was. The coiled power in his arm, the muscles bunching and pushing against the sleeves of his white linen shirt.
“Now, wrap your arms around my neck,” he ordered.
“The mud . . .”
“It will wash out. This is the only way to get ye up the slope. Ye will need to hold fast.”
Swallowing, Chrissi did as he ordered, looping her arms around his neck and clinging tight.
She might as well have dipped her head into a witch’s potion labeled Remembrance of Lost Love.
Wave after wave of memories washed through her.
The distinct smell of his cologne—warm ambergris with hints of sandalwood and citrus.
The tiny brown mole on his right earlobe, the very one she had loved to nibble.
The stubborn curl at his temple that poked outward, no matter how much pomade he applied.
The faint bump in his nose caused by a tumble from an oak tree when he was nine.
“I’ve got ye,” he said, words gruff, face half-turned toward hers.
Only then, when he clutched her to him—when every finger of his right hand pressed into her midsection with scorching heat, when their noses practically touched and his breath was a puff of air against her own lips—did recognition finally flash.
He froze, head rearing back and eyes flaring wide. His jaw sagged and his hold on the rope slipped.
They both lurched backward before he secured his grip, steadying them and pulling Chrissi that much tighter against his chest.
“Chris?” he rasped, her name a surprised gasp of air.
“Alis,” she replied with a nod.
They had always laughed at their nicknames—Chris for her, Alice for him. A humorous swapping of their genders.
She felt only slightly relieved that he had recognized her. Her vanity would have liked the moment to have occurred much, much sooner.
But his current reaction was gratifying.
He stared. And stared and stared.
The arm holding her trembled. From emotion? The heft of her body? The lingering weight of his treachery?
“Shall we heave yous up?” a voice called from above.
They both looked to the farmhand holding the rope.
“Aye,” Alistair croaked.
Reflexively, his right arm tightened around her.
“Cling tight, lass,” he breathed.
Chrissi nodded, not quite trusting herself to speak.
Gracious.
Surely the last time she had experienced so many emotions in such quick succession had been that final disastrous day of their disintegration.
She breathed in the scent of him . . . this former beloved, this long-ago traitor.
This Scot who had always completely overset her world.
Alistair scrambled up the embankment, every muscle in his body vibrating with tension.
Chris.
He was holding Chris.
His Christiana.
Though . . . hardly his anymore.
Mrs. Stephen Newton.
He had learned, years ago, that she had married some unnamed gentleman. The news had sent him careening, downing far too much whisky and shouting angrily at the silver moon, casting aspersions on womankind in general and her head specifically.
It had not been one of his finer moments.
Time had (mostly) healed the gaping wound of her loss.
Alistair had never known or even wanted to know the identity of her husband—not wishing to torture himself by imagining her life with another.
Now . . . he knew. Chris had married Dr. Stephen Newton—an elderly colleague of her father’s at Oxford and easily thirty years her senior. Why had she married him, of all people?
Scratch that.
Alistair knew why.
She had gotten her wish, in the end. To work and publish alongside her husband, feats she had definitively accomplished.
And as she had always been listed as Mrs. Stephen Newton in publications with her husband, Alistair hadn’t sussed her true identity—that Mrs. Stephen Newton was, in fact, the former Miss Christiana Rutherford.
And now she was here, in his arms.
His body more than remembered the womanly curve of her, the slope of her waist and arch of her neck. Her touch seared, a scalding brand of familiarity that hurt more than it healed.
He didn’t want this. Not now. Not at this juncture.
She was his painful past, not his hoped-for future.
Reaching the top of the slope, he released her perhaps a bit too abruptly, causing her to stumble. But, as ever, Chris righted herself instantly. That had always been her way—chin up, shoulders strong.
“Thank you, my lord.” She gave him a wan smile. “I most certainly did not intend to make such a dramatic entrance today.”
The crisp vowels of her English accent washed over him, bringing with it memories of Tuscany that clung like sun-drenched honey—delicious and cloyingly sweet.
Chris racing ahead of him through a wisteria-draped loggia along Largo Leonardo da Vinci in Fiesole, skirts snapping as wind whipped her laughter.
Chris carefully brushing dirt off a wee Etruscan funerary figurine, narrating the find for him to scribe in their field notes.
Chris curled into the curve of his arm in a lamplit stairway, bosom hitching as she arched upward to touch her lips to his.
How he had loved her. Even now, the thought of that heady summer set his heart to racing and yearning ribboning through his chest—
No.
He had grieved her loss and moved on.
He refused to revisit the brokenhearted boy he had been.
And now . . .
He studied her. Categorically, she appeared a mess. Given the mud caking every inch of her person, it was a wonder he recognized her at all.
And yet, beneath the grime, he could discern the stubborn clench of her jaw, the hollow slash of her cheekbones. Gone was the round softness of girlhood, that gentle air of hope and childlike exuberance that had clung to her shoulders like magic.
No, like him, time had altered and changed her.
It was for the best.
She had her life. He had his.
Now . . . they simply had to untangle themselves from this debacle.