“Lass, wait.”
“I told you. I do not wish to speak of it. Not when I have nothing to prove any of this is true, and what little mind I do have left is confused more than it is sane.”
He blocked her on the outskirts of the garden, hands in his pockets, eyes drilling into her. “Prove what?”
“It has only been the past days. Perhaps a sennight. I cannot rid myself of the feeling.” Her shoulders slumped in confusion. “I think I am being watched.”
CHAPTER 17
Meg arrived the very next morning, this time with her hair uncurled and whipped back in one of the braided buns he’d seen her wear before. She wore a blue-and-white-striped dress and worn apron, as if she’d borrowed clothes from one of the Penrose scullery maids.
The first thing she did was bustle to the cottage windows. She measured their length with a notched paper tape.
“What are ye doing?”
“If Lady Walpoole is going to torture me with accomplishments, I might at least use them for something practical.” She spun. “Yellow, I think. Do you not?”
“Dinnae matter to me.”
“I suppose you would leave them bare if you had not someone to sew them for you.”
He shrugged, grinned.
Her lips widened, but she whirled back around before he caught the full sunbeams of her smile. Something inside him shook. Seeing her here, measuring his windows, talking to him, her hair bonnie.
He had not slept last night.
The words had pierced him, like a fish hook catching in his flesh.“I am being watched.”Her imagination likely. Or the men who wanted her dead. The men Tom was supposed to have found, stopped, and locked away by now.“This was different.”
Urgency branded him, a hot iron to his soul. He needed to do something. What? Hunt down the brothel where Elisabeth with the forgotten name was said to have died? Read Mrs. Musgrave’s letter again?
The dead had no tongue.
And the dead were the only ones, right now, who had any hope of snuffing down the lies concerning Mr. Foxcroft. Och, and theywerelies. Were they not?
The old man’s face shaped in Tom’s memory. The receding white hair, wiry eyebrows, jerky movements, and inability to look anyone quite in the face. He was strange, the old goat. He’d always been strange.
But Meg had loved him.
In some ways, Tom had too.
“Where is Joanie?”
“Still making hats.” Tom grabbed his rusty shears from the mantel. “Ever trimmed bushes before?”
“I think you would know the answer to that better than I would.”
“I dinnae know everything about ye, lass.” Tom nodded her outside. The four bushes planted outside the cottage were faded, drooping, and lopsided. Only a few wilted flowers bloomed among the branches.
“Go to clipping as ye see fit.” He placed the shears in her hands. “Like this.”
Snip.
Her hands were soft in his, jarring his senses.
Snip, whack.
“Your instructions are far less precise than those of Lady Walpoole.” Meg removed herself from his grip, her cheeks pinkening. She’d blushed at him so seldom before. Little he’d done had ever taken her by surprise.
