He chuckled again, tilted her head away from the sky and toward him. Better. “Oh, I’ve no doubt you can do anything you set your mind to. And it looks like you set your bloody mind to lying down, opening your mouth, and taking the time to die a rather prolonged death, raindrop by bloody raindrop.”
She sat upright, pulled her knees to her chest. “It’syourfault.”
“I’m sure it is.” He studied her from the top of her head to her toes and everywhere in between. “Are you sure you’re uninjured?”
She winced. “Perhaps a bit bruised. I fell.”
“What are you doing out here?”
“Being terribly silly, I’m afraid. More than a little melodramatic as well. But sometimes a lady needs to act a fool. On her own. Just for a little while.” When he didn’t contradict her, she said, quietly, her voice so very still and careful, “Selena told me.”
Ah. There it was. What happened next?
“I-I know,” she said, emotion clogging her voice. “And I-I was wrong.” A sob ripped from her, as if old wounds had cracked open and were wailing ancient sounds imprisoned long ago.
He gathered her into his lap. “Shh. Shh.”
“I’m so very sorry. I did not know. I did notknow.” Her shoulders heaved, and she hid her face in his chest, cried into his warm, wet skin as he stroked a large hand up and down her back. “I hate being wrong. And I wasmean.” The last word a wail.
“Shh. Shh.” His body wrapped around her, giving her everything it possessed—warmth, protection, comfort.
“I thought I had a right to be mean, but… but—” Another wail, this one muffled by her face pressed against his chest. She wrenched out of his hold and stumbled to her feet. When he surged after her, she held out a palm. “No. No. I just… I need to think.”
“Can we think somewhere else?”
Lightning flashed across her face. Anger howled there like a ripping wind. “How could you not tell me! Seven years, Richard Clark! Seven! I could have fallen in love with you! Iwas fallingin love with you! You could have told me about Selena and Daniel, and we could have avoided… And this”—she flung her arms out wide, then brought them together, palms up, between them, nearly crossing the distance between their bodies—“could have been different.”
He hung his head, slicing his hands through his hair, and droplets flung everywhere. When he looked up at her, she ensnared him, her green eyes holding him tight, passing on her rage. “Do you think I didn’t want to? Do you think I enjoyed watching you hate me? It was not my secret to tell, but hers. And in the end… Hell, Beatrice, in the end, it’s better you hate me than I abuse the trust of the cousin you love so completely.” He turned from her. Couldn’t take seeing her pretty face contorted in anger—at him—one moment longer. “That was my solace. Knowing that if you knew, you would not hate me at all.”
“Richard…”
He waited for more. Was disappointed. “I thought only of two things. Getting Selena away from my scoundrel brother as quickly as possible and getting Martin away from a woman who was so unsure about her feelings for him, she was willing to kiss another man. It sounds so logical now. So reasonable when spoken aloud. It did not feel that way back then. It felt red and raw. Like a sacrifice of the body.” He swallowed, said quietly, “And the soul.” It had felt like grief clawing out his heart.
He turned around. She was holding herself, shivering, her face a graveyard.
“Bloody hell. You cannot stay out here longer.” He scooped her up into his arms.
“Where are we going? The house is that way.”
“Myhouse is this way.”
“Your—” Her voice a squeak that broke off as he hitched her higher, more securely in his hold, and she wrapped her arms around his neck.
“It’s closer. You may berate me all the way there if you like. Have at it, hellcat. I can take it. But this is the direction you’re going as long as you’re in my arms.”
She went very still. And then her heart, nestled so close to his own, began to race. She controlled it with several measured breaths, then laid her head on his shoulder, and closed her eyes.
He carried her, ignoring the eventual burn in his arms, the sting of rain in his eyes, all the way to his small cottage. He stopped only once they were dripping on the floorboards of the entryway and set her on her feet.
Somehow, her arms remained around his neck. Small miracle. A welcome one.
“You can stay here until it stops raining,” he said. “I’ll start a fire in the?—”
Parlor. He’d meant to say parlor. But when she stretched up on tiptoe and kissed him, every word he’d ever known spiraled out of reach. She tasted of rain and something essentially Beatrice. The sweetest taste. It could become an addiction. As could the small of her back where his hands fit perfectly.
Rain could wash away so much that muddied the world.
So could truth.
