“Others consider me unique.”
“—if not quite daft yet. But that will come with age, I’m sure.”
An indelicate snort escaped with her laughter. “You’re an ogre.”
“Second of all, if you do havethe sight, then why are you so terrible at cards? Indeed, you’re the worst cards player I’ve ever encountered. You don’t know how to bluff. I can tell your hand by the way you move your nose.” He surprised her by reaching out and tweaking her nose.
“You do not!”
“You wriggle it like a rabbit wriggles his. One wriggle for a good hand. Two for a bad hand. Three when you’re holding a pair of aces. Four when–”
She tossed her reticule at him. “Fine, I shall never play cards with you again.” But her mirth faded the moment the words were out of her mouth, for she realized that she wasn’t ever going to do anything with Brynne again. He would be out of her life within hours.
“Oh, Brynne!” She scooted to his side of the carriage, determined to sit beside him even though he was big and his shoulders so broad that he took up most of the space. She threw her arms around his waist and hugged him tightly. Her breaths were short and ragged as she struggled to hold back tears.
She inhaled the tantalizing scent of him, salt and spices and soft ocean breezes.His wonderful scent.“Never is an unbearably long time.”
He refused to hug her back.
She felt his muscles tense. He certainly had a lot of them. “I’m sorry, Brynne.”
She blushed and moved back to sit across from him, already missing the heat of his big body pressed against hers, even though she had been doing all the pressing while he’d been wishing he were anywhere but trapped in the carriage beside her.
She picked up the blanket that had slipped to the floor when she’d leapt to his side and tucked it around her legs once more. “Truly sorry. I’ll do my best to control my daft impulses when in your presence. You bring them out in me. You know that, don’t you?”
“My fault. I’m in foul humor today.” He glanced out the window and then banged once sharply on the roof to signal their driver. “There’s an excellent inn just over the next hill. Stop there,” he called to the driver.
“Aye, Master Brynne. I know it well.”
As the coachman stepped up the pace, Brynne eased back and met her gaze. “Are you hungry, Lettie?”
“Not very,” she said, now staring at her toes. Brynne had a way of looking at her, his expression a mix of heat and protective affection that always confused her. At times, she sensed that he liked her as more than a friend. But he was also eager to leave England and start a new life, one that did not include her, so she couldn’t be that important a friend.
He, on the other hand, meant everything to her. How could she manage a bite when he was about to walk out of her life? “But I don’t mind if we stop. You need to keep up yourstrength for your sea voyage and the monsters and storms you’ll encounter when you sail to theedge of the world.”
He sighed. “I’ll be sailing to Charleston harbor on a well built schooner that will be accompanied most of the way there by several English frigates.”
She wanted to say more about his voyage, but Jeremiah was still forcing images into her head. Wolf. Roses. Battle.
Not just any battle, but a big, bloody one with bodies of knights and foot soldiers, dead and dying, strewn across a green field that was now stained in hues of red. Her heart pounded in alarm. Perhaps the clue about the War of the Roses wasn’t meant to take them back in time. What if it was meant to warn of hazards that lay in Brynne’s future?
Was Brynne headed toward danger?
Was Brynne going to die?
The rain startedas a misty drizzle at first, but was coming down in buckets by the time Brynne stepped down from the carriage and assisted Lettie into the bustling Towton Inn. The scent of stew, possibly a lamb stew, assaulted his senses in a good way. He was hungry, and the aroma of that stew and freshly baked bread, still hot from the ovens, mounted a second assault on his senses. In a deliciously good way.
The innkeeper, a thin and harried-looking man, came rushing up to him as though he were someone of importance. The earl’s carriage had fooled him, no doubt. “Mr. Fenwick at your service, my lord,” he said while bowing and scraping and rambling on about every amenity offered at his inn to a respectable gentleman and his wife.
Brynne knew by the subtle glances he was already receiving from the serving maids that the inn also offered their gentlemen guests certain amenities that were decidedly not respectable.Discreetly offered, of course, for this was one of the better inns along the road to Wrexham.
But men were men.
And business was business.
“My lord, your wife must be cold and tired,” the innkeeper continued, fixing his attention on Lettie whose pert nose and soft cheeks were an adorable pink from the cold.
“She is,” Brynne spoke up before Lettie had the chance to blurt that they weren’t married, just traveling together, a circumstance that would get them promptly kicked out. His stomach growled. Damn it, he was hungry and wanted whatever the inn’s kitchen had to offer. Food, that is. Not the accommodating female staff.
