The trees closed in around her, more suffocating than a narrow city alley, and the day’s dim light turned to shadows around her. She whistled while she walked, tried to, at least. Her teeth chattered. Thank goodness she’d brought her muff, and if the wind had not begun to howl so, her hands would be quite warm. But the shadows of the gathered trees grew darker, the wind had started howling, and the snow came faster now, seemingly determined to smother her. A shiver racked her body, and she wrapped her arms tight about her.
She couldn’t go on. Impossible to wander aimlessly like a lost soul. She stopped and scanned the trees, looking for low branches, and—there. Yes. She’d climbed just such a tree as a child, and she did so now with difficulty once she found the courage to bare her legs to the wicked wind to gain greater ease of movement. She went no farther up the tree than she needed to in order to peer out over the canopy.
She saw it immediately—the sharp outlines of a roof, the stout brick of a chimney. A house. Not too far away, either.
She scuttled down the tree and set her steps in the correct direction, each step more difficult than the last. She sang as she walked, though she’d never been very good at it, lifting her wavering, shivering voice to the treetops with the lyrics of a bawdy ballad her aunt had taught her.
Josiah likely knew it. Josiah likely had a lovely deep baritone.
She was not supposed to think of him, but she did not have the control to stop it, so she trudged through the snow-deep woods with a singing Josiah by her side, his teasing smile leading her on.
When she almost stubbed her toe on the gray stone façade of the building, she stopped, stumbled backward, her head craning up. “I made it.” She laughed and ran around the side of the building. “I made it!”
The house sat at the back of a clearing in the woods with gardens on one side and a small stable on the other. It was larger than a cottage and made of the same stone as Apple Grove. She ran to the door and knocked hard, pain exploding across her knuckles from striking her frozen skin on the hard, cold wood.
“Please,” she called out, “do answer the door.”
No one did. She knocked again. And again, calling out each time, but the windows were the dark, dead eyes of a skull. And no smoke curled from the chimney.
“Please,” she said one more time before falling against the door and sinking down its length. She sat there alone on the hard stone entrance to the empty house, skirts sodden around her bent legs, arms wrapped tight, feeling the warmth drain from her body into the wet earth along with her consciousness.
* * *
In the darkness, she wiggled her toes first, glad that the warmth shooting through them was real and not a figment of her imagination. Nor was the warmth everywhere else on her body. It pressed into her, heavy and delicious like silk against the skin.
Very much like silk against the skin.
She opened her eyes. Brocaded material of deep red hung above her, and a fire flickered somewhere nearby. A mountain of coverings—blankets—had been piled atop her, and Josiah sat, elbows on knees, hands clasped as if in prayer, head hung, in a chair beside the bed she lay in.
And she… she was entirely naked. She yelped. Undignified, yes, but a natural reaction nonetheless.
Josiah’s head whipped up, his eyes glittering gems of high emotion—concern, panic, fear. He dropped to his knees, slamming into the floor by the side of the bed as his hands reached for her face, cupped it with gentle fingers and rough palms.
“You’re awake.” His eyes shuttered closed on a heavy exhale.
Georgiana curled her fingers around the edge of the blankets and pulled them up past her chin. “I… I am. And I’m…” She wet her lips. “Ah… I am disrobed. Entirely. It seems.”
“You were soaked through and unconscious. I couldn’t let you stay in those clothes. Even your shift.” He cast a look behind his back, and she followed the line of his gaze to where large swathes of cloth—her clothing—hung over chairs and tables pulled close to the fire. “I did not enjoy it.” He swallowed hard, and she found she could not look away from the bob of his Adam’s apple in his strong, corded throat.
“Where are we?”
He still held her face, and now he pushed one hand into her hair and rubbed the pad of his thumb along her brow. “The estate manager’s cottage. My cottage.”
She tried to remember the house she’d seen through the fog of falling snow and couldn’t quite. Firelight cast quivering shadows on the walls and ceiling as she took a closer look at her surroundings. Everything neat and clean and nice, just like at Apple Grove House.
“It’s lovely,” she said. “What I’ve seen of it so far.”
“It pleases me that you like it.” His eyes roamed her face like she was a priceless work of art, and she risked removing her arm from the shield of blankets weighing her down in order to caress the line of his jaw.
“Josiah,” she said.
His gaze focused on her eyes.
“How did you find me?”
“I heard you singing. Someone singing. Poorly. I prayed it was you.”
“So that you could add a flaw to my otherwise perfect disposition?”
