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After a moment’s hesitation, he wiped his hands on his breeches and picked up his coat where it lay nearby. Slinging it over his arm, he said, “All right, then. Lead the way.”
She set an unhurried pace across the ridge, and he followed.
“Mind the path,” she told him, guiding him around the edge of the bog. He’d been away so long, she worried he might forget where to step. On the surface, it merely looked like a patch of damp land, dotted with scrubby patches of heather. However, beneath the unthreatening wreath of loam lay a spring—the source of the stream that flowed down these slopes and straight through the heart of Buckleigh-in-the-Moor. Peat and muck covered the spring two yards deep, and this bog was the sad end of many an unsuspecting creature with the bad fortune to misstep and become mired.
As they turned down the slope, the waters gathered and funneled into a steady trickle, draining the layers of surrounding peat. The ground was firm and safer now, and they walked two abreast as they followed the winding, ever-widening stream.
From his easy gait, Meredith could sense that much of the angry tension in his body had dissipated. Good. Back at the cottage site, he’d been so tightly wound and obviously hurting, she’d been afraid for him. Or afraid for the rocks.
“It’s been years since I walked this way,” she said. “But it looks the same as it ever did. Has it changed any, in your view?”
“The landscape? No.” He gave her a playful look. “But my companion’s a damn sight lovelier than before.”
Her cheeks blazed with a blush so fierce not even the cool breeze off the stream could soothe it. To say her adolescence was awkward rather understated the matter, but still … it burned her pride to know he remembered. “I know, I know. Back then, I was all freckles and bone.”
He laughed. “You were, but that’s not what I meant. Even freckles and bone, I’m certain you were lovelier than my horse.”
“Oh! Different companion. Yes, I see.” To disguise her embarrassment, she forced a laugh. “But that was a beautiful horse. My father still reminisces about that gelding. Finest beast he ever kept, he says.”
Rhys lapsed into silence.
Meredith breathed with relief. It seemed her secret was safe, then. She’d followed him along this route many times as a girl, always taking great pains to remain hidden from view. It hadn’t been too difficult—she’d been a reedy little thing with wild hair, always dressed in faded homespun. She’d likely blended right into the moor like a clump of gorse.
Even as they followed the path, she measured the distance by the old landmarks that had been her hiding places. The boulder standing sentinel atop a crest, the bowl-shaped depression where the river took a sharp curve, the twisted hawthorn tree surrounded by heather in its full violet bloom.
Skylarks spiraled in the sky above them. The further they walked, the closer they drew to a destination familiar to them both: the waterfall that tumbled into a steep gorge, gathering in a secluded pool beneath. That pool had been Rhys’s escape in his youth, during his breaks from school. Meredith’s escape, too, though little he knew it. She’d followed him many a summer afternoon, watching in secret while he stripped bare and plunged into the cool, clear water. At the time, the pull had been youthful infatuation and simple curiosity. But she’d grown into a woman since those days. As they drew nearer to that hidden pool, true desire swirled and eddied in her blood.
“Enough about me,” he said. “Tell me more about you.”
This was a new development, too. Logically, a vigorous young man on the brink of seventeen had taken no interest in a spindly, underdeveloped pest of a girl. But Rhys noticed her now. As they walked, he asked her questions about her father, the inn, her life over the past fourteen years. Meredith wasn’t used to talking about herself. While tending bar, she was always the one listening. She would have thought there little to tell, but nerves loosened her tongue, and somehow she found plenty to rattle on about. Rhys walked beside her, silent and attentive, taking care of her in small ways. Steering her around a rock, helping her over the crossing when the first bank grew too steep to navigate.
“And Maddox?” he asked.
“What of him?”
He kicked a small stone out of their path. “How did that happen?”
“How did I come to marry him, you mean?”
He nodded.
“After the …” She paused, then decided there was no use talking around it. “After the fire, my father’s convalescence was prolonged. For several years, the Ashworth estate paid him a pension. I took care of Father, and we lived well enough on the annual amount. But then the money stopped coming, around the same time the vicar’s living dried up. I was eighteen and frantic. I didn’t know what to do, but I needed to find some way of bringing in food, or we’d starve.”
Meredith didn’t like remembering those desperate times. A lump formed in her throat, like congealed porridge—which was what they’d eaten, sometimes twice a day. In her distraction, she neglected to choose her steps carefully. Her foot landed awkwardly on the path, and she stumbled.
Rhys’s hand shot out to grip her elbow.
“I’m all right,” she told him, steadying herself. “Thank you.”
He didn’t release her arm, however. Rather, he slid his hand down to capture hers. When she gave him an inquiring look, he merely said, “Go on.”
So they walked on hand-in-hand, wading through a bank of ferns. The whole moor greened up around the stream, and the banks were saturated with rich color, slick with moss. The fertile aroma of wet earth clung heavy here, too strong for even the wind to scrub away.
“I went to Maddox,” she said, “to offer my services as a groom in the stables. I knew how to do a stablehand’s work, of course. You know I practically grew up in the Nethermoor stables, and Father taught me everything. To show Maddox I could do a man’s work, I went dressed in men’s clothing—breeches, boots.”
Rhys chuckled. “And how did that work?”
“Not as I’d hoped.” She smiled to herself, remembering the way Maddox had searched her appearance with those rheumy blue eyes of his. As though he were mentally sifting through decades’ worth of life as a male, trying to recall the perspective of a virile man in his prime.
