Epilogue
Seraphina had gone too far.
The realization arrived with the cruelty of an obvious truth delivered too late.
One moment, the path had been there beneath her boots.
Narrow, root-threaded, reliably winding south along the edge of the wood.
And the next, it had simply ceased, swallowed by a tangle of bracken and twisted oak roots that rose to her knees and gave way to nothing she recognized.
She stopped. She turned in a slow circle, scanning the treeline in every direction, and felt the first cold prickle of genuine alarm settle between her shoulder blades like a blade laid flat.
Winter had stripped the oaks to their bones, and the bare gray lattice of branches offered no landmark, no orientation.
The wood looked identical in every direction.
She had meant to go no farther than the old gamekeeper’s pond and back, a circuit she had walked a dozen times since Alistair had given the sisters the freedom of the estate.
She had received that freedom with an appetite she could not conceal, walking every day regardless of weather because she could, because it was hers to do.
Today, apparently, she had walked too far.
She chose a bearing, southwest she thought, and pressed forward through the bracken with her skirts already damp from the knees down.
The sky had been sullen since morning, and she had noticed it and chosen not to care, which was, she acknowledged now, characteristic.
Arabella would have checked the clouds. Genevieve would have stayed indoors with a novel, and Juliet would have produced a meteorological analysis and declined on actuarial grounds.
But Seraphina had looked at the iron-gray ceiling pressing itself over the moors and felt it as a personal challenge, because years of confinement had left her with a relationship to open air that bordered on the desperate …
a visceral need to move, to be outside the walls, to answer to no one.
And see where that had gotten her.
She was, she reflected, going to be absolutely sodden before she found the drive, and Arabella was going to say nothing about it whatsoever, which would be considerably worse than if she said something.
The wind had risen, and when she looked up, the clouds had descended to the color of old iron … weighted, close, and charged with the electric stillness that preceded—
Thunder.
It rolled through her chest before it reached her ears, low and close enough to matter. Not distant-theater thunder. Overhead. Immediate. A crow launched from its branch with an affronted clatter, and she felt a single cold drop strike the back of her neck.
Then the sky simply opened.
One moment, the wood was merely threatening, and the next, she was standing in a cascade of water that hammered through the bare canopy with a violence that shocked her. Her hat was useless in seconds.
Run.
Instinct overrode every ladylike constraint her grandmother had spent years installing, and she gathered her skirts to her knees and ran, boots slipping on wet leaf litter, catching herself against a tree trunk, bark biting into her palm, then pushing off harder.
Lightning cracked to the northeast, and the thunder that answered was not a two-count away.
The kind that reassembled the nervous system.
Think, she told herself savagely, between ragged breaths. Think.
The drive. If she bore east, she would find it eventually. It ran north to the main entrance, and if she could reach it, she could follow it home. She corrected her bearing and ran harder.
Her lungs burned. Her skirts were lead.
She heard the horse.
Hooves on gravel, iron on stone, crisp and cantering, close and coming closer from the north. The drive. She turned toward it and ran harder through the last stand of trees, branches raking at her face and sleeves.
She broke through the treeline at exactly the wrong moment.
A big bay horse bore down, dark with rain and moving fast, and there was one frozen instant in which she perceived all of it: horse, rider, hooves, gravel, and the absolute certainty that she had stepped directly into the animal’s path.
The bay shied violently, all four feet leaving the ground, a snort tearing from it that was almost human.
The rider pulled up hard, hands firm and decisive, bringing the beast around in a tight spraying arc with the unhesitating sureness of a man who had ridden through worse than a half-drowned woman materializing from the undergrowth.
The horse stopped.
Seraphina stood in the center of the drive in the pouring rain, chest heaving, skirts plastered to her legs, her hat hanging from one pin at an angle that suggested it had resigned. She breathed. She was upright. Nothing was broken.
That, she thought, with the distant clarity of having just survived several seconds that might reasonably have concluded otherwise, was 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.
And Seraphina had one vivid, inconvenient second of noticing him before propriety could reassert itself.
Tall, broad at the shoulder in a way that tailoring could suggest but not fabricate, with the build of a man who worked out of doors rather than posed in drawing rooms. His overcoat was excellent but not fashionable, quality over signal, and his deep brown hair, darkened further by rain, was cut slightly longer than the prevailing fashion, water running from it now across a brow and jaw that were—
She redirected herself firmly.
He was striding toward her, overcoat open and flapping, hatless, rain streaming freely down the clean line of his jaw.
His face was controlled, but there was something brisk and certain beneath it that made her feel, even in her current state, that the situation was already being competently managed.
“Lady Seraphina.” His voice was low and authoritative, clipped at the edges in the way of a man whose patience was intact but had recently been tested. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” The word came out more steadily than she felt. “I apologize for—”
“Later.”
He was already moving, already reaching for her, and Seraphina had the odd sensation of being managed with the same brisk economy he had applied to the horse, without unnecessary ceremony.
His hands came to her shoulders as he stripped the sodden pelisse from her back with two skilled movements and dropped it to the gravel. The cold struck her at once, driving through her gown’s wet fabric with a thoroughness that stole the breath from her lungs. Then his overcoat came around her.
Heavy wool. Thoroughly warm. The warmth of a body, not of a fire, immediate and absolute, soaking into her frozen shoulders with a relief so sudden it was almost painful.
The garment enveloped her past her hips, entirely too large, carrying the scent of rain and leather and clean linen and something else beneath it.
Something warm and indefinably masculine that her traitorous senses cataloged before she could tell them not to.
She closed her eyes for one involuntary second.
Do not, she told herself. Do not.
She opened them. He was looking at her as though he were accustomed to assessing difficult situations and had determined that she required a moment before further action.
His eyes were an unusual blue, the color of flint in certain lights, and they were entirely focused.
She found this simultaneously reassuring and unsettling.
Not the unfocused social regard of a man looking at a young woman and seeing her station and her face and not much else.
He was actually looking at her. At the situation. At her.
When had anyone 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 formulated one, he had bent and slid one arm behind her knees and the other at her back, and lifted her.
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, was lifted off the ground as though she weighed approximately nothing.
She did not protest.
She was entirely incapable of protesting.
Not because he had incapacitated her, though the removal of the question of whether she could walk a quarter mile on frozen, shaking legs was a considerable relief, but because some part of her that she had not consulted had decided, without reservation, that this was acceptable.
She knew who he was. Alistair’s man, the new steward, or man of business as she had heard them say, which struck her as a distinction worth understanding.
He had arrived with Alistair, had spent the intervening days closeted over maps and ledgers when not riding the estate, and was not, in any sense she had yet discovered, like the previous steward.
Nathaniel Beckwith was perhaps in his early thirties, with the kind of face difficult to date because it had never, she suspected, been notably young. 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 social performance.
Which irritated her, because she was accustomed to the anxious deference of male servants who did not look on her directly.
She was not accustomed to being regarded as a problem worth taking seriously.
She was not sure what to do with that.
He murmured to the bay, then spoke to her.
“Hold to me,” he said.