After rubbing down the horse with his hands, he settled at a nearby tree and pulled out his flintlock. He yawned but never closed his eyes. “Rest, Eliza,” he said again, as if he’d felt her gaze.
She allowed her eyes to drift shut. She was back under the sparkling blue sea, a mermaid again, breaking the surface once more to kiss the sailor in the rowboat.
They needed provisions. Eliza’s weariness was more than just the trauma and travel—she needed something hot and substantial in her stomach.
Felton could do with a meal or two himself.
But it was dangerous. Had those men known and been waiting for them at Weltworth, or had they only followed them there? Were they being followed now?
For the hundredth time, Felton glanced over his shoulder at the empty road behind them. Every once in a while, a pony cart or a coach rumbled by them, but no dust of lone riders clouded the air.
Mayhap they were in luck. Mayhap the men had sulked in defeat and scurried back to whoever it was who had sent them in the first place.
Images crowded in. Lord Gillingham showing two ruffians into his study. Closing the door. Passing twenty-pound notes into their hands for a job too bloody to do himself.
Would to heaven it wasn’t true. Surely it couldn’t be true.
Turning their mount on to the smaller road to Poortsmoor, he straightened. “We stop at the village, but I think it best we stay together.” After all, they’d done it before, hadn’t they?
Her sigh filled the air without comment. She’d said very little as they traveled. Almost as little as the first time, when he’d snatched her from her beloved cottage and told her things she hadn’t wanted to believe.
They rode into the village in the afternoon hustle and bustle, the air alive with the hum of voices and hammers and livestock. He left the horse at the stables first, then found the Dalrymple Inn.
A curly-haired adolescent scrubbed at the outside windows, while the proprietor swept a billow of dust from the open doorway. He hailed them in, seemed to remember their stay before, and ushered them into the same chamber with the promise of a meal arriving soon.
Then they were alone. Just Felton Northwood and Eliza Gillingham in a room they’d once occupied as strangers.
They weren’t strangers now. They weren’t even friends.
They were something else, something he couldn’t place, something that terrified him more than the two blackguards looking to harm them.
Eliza turned to the window. Circles hung under her eyes, deep and heavy, and her skin wore a pallor so grave it matched the white curtains on the windows. “Tonight, you must sleep,” she said.
He pulled off his dusty tailcoat and tossed it to a chair in the corner. “If those men come back, I’ll not be unready a second time.”
“But you are weary.”
“No more than you.”
“I have slept.”
“There will be time enough for sleep later.” He crossed the room to the washstand, splashed cold water onto his dirty face, and scrubbed away some of the dust. He patted dry with a flat-woven towel. “I want to know what made you run.”
“I already know you do not believe me.”
“Your turn.” He tossed over the towel.
She swept her hand to her cheek, as if suddenly aware how she must appear, then moved to the washstand herself. Between splashes, she told him of Minney, of the things the girl believed and had seen that day at the inn. She told him of strange looks in her father’s eye and hidden letters tucked under the pillows in Lady Gillingham’s chamber.
All things that made it more real.
All things that made it hurt.
With a face scrubbed clean, she glanced back at him. “Maybe it isn’t true. Maybe Minney is wrong.” Her words lacked conviction. Of course they did. Both of them knew what such evidence said against the man.
But evidence was not proof. He knew that more than anyone.
“Felton?”
