Chapter 14 #2
“You are not going to accompany me in my carriage,” he said after a long moment.
“No.” She kept her gaze on Kitty’s retreating figure, blond curls bouncing, Thom’s sandy head inclined toward hers. “No. Thank you.”
She turned to face him then because it would be cowardice not to.
“You prefer the cold wind and the cliff path?” he asked, his expression revealing nothing of his thoughts, his tone mild and polite.
“I prefer my independence,” she said.
“Independence,” he echoed softly. “An admirable quality. So long as one knows where the ground ends.”
The words struck too close. For an instant, the street fell away and she stood once more at the edge of the cliff in her dream—barefoot, the ground dissolving beneath her, his voice the only thing reaching to her in the dark.
His voice. Calling her back.
Her breath caught. When the world righted itself, she found him watching her still, closer than she had realized, close enough that she could see each dark lash and the faintest hint of stubble shadowing his jaw.
His expression was stripped of its rigid neutrality for the barest instant.
What remained was something that left her pulse racing and her mouth dry.
She was aware that if she moved even slightly toward him, the distance between them would become no distance at all.
The moment stretched like spun sugar, pulled to its limit, one breath from breaking.
“Min.”
Her name, spoken in his low, smooth voice. One syllable. Almost nothing, and entirely too much.
He stepped back, not retreating—she imagined him incapable of retreat—but creating distance with deliberate care.
She recognized that, understood it. But she could not say with certainty that she was glad of it.
“Good day,” she said. And then, “Dashiell.” Because he had taken her name without her express permission, and so she took his in return, uninvited. She did not wait to see what he did with that, walking away without looking back.
Behind her, low and brief and unguarded, he laughed.
Still, she did not look back, but held the sound curled inside her, sheltering it as she would a fledgling flame.
Dashiell watched Minerva go, her chin high, her spine unyielding as she made her way along the street.
Three days ago, he had stood on her doorstep, a breath away from pressing his lips to hers, and she had not pulled away.
He had stopped—had made himself stop for reasons that had seemed sufficient at the time and felt considerably less so in retrospect—and she had exhaled that small, involuntary sound that had made him want to pull her into his arms and taste her, slide his tongue into her mouth, scrape his teeth along the pulse at the side of her neck.
The memory of that sound had haunted every moment since. He wanted to be the reason she made that sound again.
He had offered her his carriage, for safety, though that was not the whole of it, not even the largest part of it.
And because she had known that, or at the very least sensed it, she had refused.
He doubted she preferred to walk. Rather, he suspected she believed the cliff path posed less danger than being alone with him.
She was not afraid of him. But she was too honest to pretend that there was nothing between them now.
Watching as she rounded the bend, he thought she would choose the narrow cliff path again rather than the road.
He knew it without question. He disliked the thought of her set against the wind for the length of it, the path close to the edge, the pendant the only thing between her and what waited there.
But he had offered her an alternative and she had refused.
Everything about her was, in the most inconvenient way possible, quite the opposite of what he ought to want.
He headed for his carriage and had taken perhaps ten steps when he sensed someone to his left.
The man spoke, clipped and tight. “Penrose.”
Dashiell turned.
In the shadowed gap between two buildings, Jago Tregian stood, one shoulder braced against the stone, his posture deceptively loose. The set of his mouth, the muscle ticking in his jaw, both suggested he had set himself an unpleasant task. He would not have approached if he had any other choice.
Dashiell regarded him without greeting.
Jago pushed away from the wall and came a step nearer, the movement unhurried and deliberate. Up close, the resemblance was indisputable. The same blond hair, the same pale blue eyes, the straight line of the nose and cut of the cheeks. Jago looked as Jory would have had he been granted the years.
He had not been. He lived forever on the cusp of manhood in the memories of those who had known him and in the gouged-out place where Dashiell’s full memories of that summer should have been.
What Dashiell felt was not grief, precisely. He had never been certain enough of Jory to grieve him cleanly. But the absence of knowing carried its own weight, one that had sat with him for eighteen years.
As their gazes held, a flicker of determination passed across Jago’s features, quick and sharp. Determination, or its grimmer cousin.
“I saw it,” he said, his voice so low that Dashiell had to strain to catch the words.
Around them, the village watched, hungry for spectacle. Dashiell had no intention of feeding their need.
“This morning,” Jago said, then swallowed, the motion quick and unwilling. “There was nothing there. And then there was.”
Jago watched him, waiting. But Dashiell held his silence.
“You’ve seen it. I know you have,” Jago said. “The Lady Jane.”
There was both desperation and a plea in his words, a demand for reassurance.
“I have seen her,” Dashiell said, and at his words, Jago’s shoulders slumped, an indication that he had not wanted confirmation, that he had hoped to be told there was no ship.
“Then it wasn’t just him,” Jago said softly. “My sister—” He looked away, a muscle tensing in his jaw. “He told us he saw it. Tamsyn said there was nothing to it. That Jory had imagined it.” He met Dashiell’s eyes. “She was so certain.”