“Have a care what you offer, Pen,” she teased. “Wales is full of fierce women. Have you not heard of Jemima Fawr, hero of the Battle of Fishguard?” At his scoffing look, her eyes widened. “It was but two years ago! When the French troops landed at Llanwnda, she and a group of women caught and captured a dozen French soldiers, armed with nothing but a pitchfork. The soldiers had been drinking, but still. She locked them in a church for the night, and the next day the French surrendered, and that will teach any foreigners who try to invade Wales again.”
“She sounds fearsome indeed,” Pen agreed.
She plucked at the fringes of her shawl. “I heard she was awarded a lifetime pension by the crown. If only I could do something as brave or noble, and be granted St. Sefin’s as a result.”
Finally, an opportunity to be useful. “Have you sent word to the solicitor yet? Would it do to approach this lord and ask him to lower the price?”
She looked away, evading the question. Did she not have the courage to face an English lord? He could help with this. “I mean—”
“Stop,” she said suddenly. “I mean, stop the horse. Here.”
He turned the horse off the road, where the verge disappeared into woodland. The ground was violet in every direction, a carpet of fragrant bluebells. Gwen scrambled down from the trap and ran into the midst of them like a nymph of the wood.
“I can distill these into perfume,” she called. “The women pay for it. Come help me gather, Pen.”
He looped the reins around a tree limb while the horse took the opportunity to munch the red clover growing along the road. But at the edge of the patch he paused, arrested by the delicate fragrance. Something stirred in the fog of his head.
“Bluebells,” he said. A memory formed. The shape of her standing in a room—not a room he recognized, but she was wearing that dress, that shawl. “I know that scent.”
She turned her head, arms outstretched but frozen, as if she were a woodland fairy caught at frolic by human eyes. “Do you remember something?”
Yes. He had been struck by her, her beauty, her anger—she was angry with him about something. And he remembered bluebells.
He opened his mouth to say all this when some inner voice warned against it. He’d never in his life, he would guess, been a man who listened to his inner voice. But this time he did. It cautioned him to say nothing. If he asked how he knew her from his former life, then this idyll—driving together, playing for a dance at Pencoed Castle, the closeness that was growing between them, and their cozy rhythm at St. Sefin’s—all would come to a cold and violent end.
He moved toward her. “You always smell of bluebells. I love that scent on you.”
He wasn’t certain she would yield to him, not even when he slipped a hand about her waist. But when he laid a finger beneath her chin she tipped up her head to kiss him, and he fell again into that new land where every color was brightened, every sense apprehended more beauty, where the world seemed shot through with wild joy. Or perhaps that pulse was his heart hammering as she curved against him in surrender, slipping her arms around his neck, pressing her body into his.
He groaned with pleasure and kissed her deeply, tasting hawthorn blossom and her own delicious warmth, a well he wanted to drown in. He kissed her endlessly, their bodies fused, a dance of lips and tongue that was like delirium, while his hand slid up her side slowly, fingers skimming her ribs and the shape of her stays beneath, sliding beneath her arm, then closing over one perfect breast. Her heart pounded as wildly as his own.
But she stopped and pulled away, as if she felt her nipple piercing his palm as sharply as he did. “Bluebells,” she muttered, her eyes huge grey-green pools.
“Yes.” He tried bending his head, but she turned her chin, then peeled herself from his arms. He stifled a groan of disappointment and frustrated desire.
“We’ll be late if we stop to gather bluebells,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow, would she consent to lie with him? Perhaps here in this very field. He could strip her naked, lie her down on a silken carpet of purple-blue blooms, and every part of her would smell, and taste, of bluebells. His arousal bobbed in agreement.
“I was hoping we would wrestle,” he said, his voice thick. He took a moment to gather his composure before returning to the trap and helping her climb in.
She looked ahead, a flush climbing her cheek. Her throat knotted as she swallowed. At least he had the satisfaction of knowing she wasn’t unaffected by that deluge of a kiss.
“Tell me why I love the scent of bluebells,” he said. That image of her in the room, staring at him with wide accusing eyes, seemed burned now into his brain. Had she known him in his former life? And if she did, why had she said nothing about it?
Had she forgotten meeting him, while he remembered her, even though he could remember literally nothing else?
He took the reins and urged the horse to walk on, giving her a moment to compose herself. He sensed she would not be entirely truthful.
“They mean humility, for some,” she said, watching the road ahead. “Everlasting love, for others. There’s an old superstition that you aren’t to pick bluebells or bring them into your home because they are beloved of fairies. You can call a fairy by ringing a bluebell, but a bluebell patch like this is thick with magic.”
Oh yes, he felt that. Thick with magic.
“But you can pick bluebells,” he said. She was lying. Or withholding. Why? “Because you are a fairy?”
“Because the bulbs help pass water and stop bleeding,” she said. “But don’t eat these plants, mind! They’re poisonous.”
A woman who handled poisonous plants fearlessly. Who faced life and all its injuries and losses, fearlessly.
