“Itisfinished.”
“You have no right.” She stepped toward him, arms tight at her sides—and he had a faint memory of a younger Meg with wild hair and patched trousers, raising a kitchen ladle over her head.
She had swatted at him twice and missed.
He couldn’t remember why, unless it was the time he scooted the candle too close by accident and she lost part of her braid in flames. Or the day Maryanna Hopkins landed a surprise kiss on his cheek on the church steps after Sunday service.
“If you were any measure of a man at all, you would tell me.”
“So ye think ye can persecute me into it, do ye, Meg Foxcroft?” He’d been grieved so long, missed her so, that he’d forgotten how blasted infuriating she could be. How impossible. How quickly she could get his blood heated. “Fine.” He motioned to the cottage door.
As she nodded and marched inside, he tried not to think. Everything would have been so different. She would have begged him to paint the walls red before he ever cleaned the chimney. She would have flounced about the yard. Pointing at things. Gathering stones to frame her garden. Peeking in the windows and squealing. And running up to him, every few minutes, to throw her arms about his neck and tell him it was wonderful.
The ashes burned his throat as he followed her inside.
His steps were heavy.
If God was of the mind to take memories, He should have taken them from them both.
Lord Cunningham had likely arrived to the empty breakfast table. The realization should trouble her. She was wicked to forsake him and disappear when, at this very moment, she was supposed to accept the offer of becoming his wife.
His wife.For him to touch, possess, keep forever. Her skin crawled.Our Penrose Abbey. Ours.
“Joanie.” Tom must have motioned the girl outside, for she gave a shy smile to Meg, curtsied, then slipped from the cottage. The door groaned shut.
All of Meg’s nerves sharpened. She had a sense of being trapped—like she’d been with Lord Cunningham after the accident when he’d kissed her.
But Tom did not so much as look Meg’s way. He grabbed Joanie’s broom and went to work, sweeping hard at an old bird’s nest, dirt, and flurrying ashes on the floor.
Meg took a step back, covering her nose and mouth with a handkerchief. She waited.
He swept.
Silence.
“Are you so contrary as to make me ask again?”
He gave her a quick side glance. He wore a soot-stained white shirt, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows, the sweaty cotton sticking to his back. The outline of his muscles, the strength and veins of his neck, gave her heart a tiny plunge.
She stared out the window—to the sloping green hills, the crab apple tree—anywhere but at Tom McGwen. “Well?”
“It happened to ye the spring before I came.”Swish. “Ye were twelve.”Swish. “Sent on an errand to deliver valerian to Mrs. Whalley, who was suffering another of her headaches.”
Discomfort zipped up Meg’s spine. Her mouth dried. “And?”
“It was dark on yer way home. Ye cut through the alley between the cobbler and the wine merchant.” The swishing halted. His lips pressed, his face angled farther away from her, as if he were as afraid to look at her as she was him.
No. Do not tell me.She took a step back—
“A lad named Tobias Graham followed ye.”
No.
“He hurt ye. Someone heard ye screaming, and he ran before …” Tom cleared his throat. “He ran before he took all of yer innocence.”
“Does everyone …” A knot wedged in her throat. “Do they all know this of me? In the village?”
“Nay. The man who found ye was a sexton at the church. He carried ye to yer uncle, swore himself to secrecy, and even helped yer uncle in paying Graham to board the next ship out of Juleshead. He never came back.”
