“You’re bleeding.” He lifted a hand, but she stepped away from him.
She smeared away the blood herself. She looked anywhere, everywhere, but at the tall shadow edging closer to her.
“Georgina.”
She slipped another step away from him, rubbed her arms with fierceness. “Tomorrow, if you shall be so kind, you may permit me use of a servant and carriage from the hunting lodge. I imagine it best we do not arrive in London together, and though my reputation is likely still uncompromised, I should not like to tempt fate by riding horseback in the company of—”
“You believed me.”
The force of his words, the poignancy, dropped her stomach.
“You believed me and you aided me in something I had no right to ask.” Silence rippled, save for the trees swaying in the darkness and the night bugs chirping and the owl shrieking from some faraway perch. As softly as he’d ever spoken to her came the word “Why?”
She did not know. Agnes would scold that her motivation stemmed from obsession. That this was yet another futile attempt to gain the attentions of the one man who did not praise her beauty and proclaim his heart.
Yet it was more.
Despite every fear and dread, she turned her face back to his. She stared at his outline in the blackness, the broadness of his shoulders, the strength and mystery and determination in his stance—before hurrying to the door without answer.
She closed herself inside the cottage. Perhaps she had merely hoped, even for a day or two, that Simon Fancourt needed her as much as she needed him.
Dew seeped through his clothes, moistened his skin.Have to get back.Running, dodging trees, shedding the animal pelts that weighted him down.Ruth.The cabin loomed ahead, golden in the first light of morning, and the door was open.
Waiting for him.
Always waiting for him.
Ruth, I’m coming.Running inside, slinging his rifle to the corner and praying.Ruth.He need not have prayed with such fear.
She was strong.
The strongest woman he knew.
“There you are.”She waited on the bed, drained but smiling, a tiny naked creature cradled at her chest. John stood close. He hovered over the infant, patted the tiny head, then climbed next to the baby’s mama with gentle curiosity.
“Her name is Mercy,”Ruth whispered.“Because God showed us mercy today and gave us one more miracle to love.”
With a groan of yearning, Simon startled himself awake. “Ruth.” A whisper, but only the dark and shivering trees interwoven with fog stared back at him. He pushed to his feet. Weak morning light settled into the forest—a harsh reminder that this was not the woods he knew so well, where the cabin he loved awaited him.
All the duties, the guilt, the danger shackled him anew as he turned to the cottage door. He stepped inside, but pulled to a halt.
Ruth.
The dream must be haunting him still, because a woman lay curled on the quilts, Mercy in her arms, John on the other side of her. But her hair was not straight and brown, like the forest leaves in the lull of winter.
Instead, the tresses were blond and messy and framing a flushed, sleeping face. He saw her in brushstrokes. Pink, shapely lips. Elegant, defined features. Perfect lashes. Delicate chin. Shadows and light and angles and strokes of a dripping brush against white canvas…
He looked away. Something simmered within him. He told himself it was an ache for Ruth, a longing to return to the dream he’d awaken from and the wife he loved.
Even so, he glanced back at the near-stranger with his children. Tenderness stretched through him. Why was the sight so undoing? So terrifying and yet…precious to him?
Blinking hard, he approached with soundless steps. He crouched next to them—his little ones and the woman who had risked her own safety to protect them—and nudged her shoulder. “Miss Whitmore.”
A sigh of protest, but with the second nudge, she squinted her eyes open. They stayed on him, confused, for several seconds before they widened. She leaned up. “What is the matter?”
“Nothing. It is morning. Time to depart.”
“Oh.” Relief brought her head back onto the quilts. She seemed uncertain what to say and even more unable to glance up at him a second time.
