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Yet she wanted Guy to see her, with all her terrible flaws. To see her, and still want her.
But as the silence stretched on, a familiar discomfort blossomed and grew. Perhaps he was, indeed, seeing the cracks and flaws. He would remark on them, and hurt her. He would confirm he did not truly want her, and free her from this fierce longing for him.
“How is the light?” she asked, her tone sharper than she intended. “Shall I turn so you can study me from another angle?”
“There aren’t enough angles in the world to see all of you,” he said easily, undeterred.
“I don’t even know what that means. Are you attempting poetry again?”
His voice was warm as velvet. “Looking at you is like looking at the night sky. So vast and varied and infinite, the view changing depending on where one stands, or the hour or the season. One can only ever see a tiny bit of it at a time, unbearably, voraciously, insatiably aware that however wondrous the view, there is always so much more.”
Arabella tried to tell herself that his words made no sense—he was spouting poetry, and poetry never made sense—but this valiant voice of rationality grew fainter and fainter, until finally there were no words, there was no voice.
Wondrously, under the spell of his words, under the warmth of his gaze, she became the night sky. Her soul expanded to embrace it, her mind became deep and infinite and unfathomable, her body became a star, a thousand stars, all shining for him.
This was love, she realized. This was how it felt to love. To love him.
“Then you are the mountains,” she said softly. Her voice came from an unfamiliar place. Perhaps that was her heart, finally making itself heard. “Strong, enduring, sure.”
She had to turn away from him to say this. Her heart, it seemed, was shy. Through the window, the world was dissolving into the fading evening light, but all she saw was his reflection in the glass. “And when you…”
In the distance, something caught her eye. For long seconds, she stared, puzzled, until an alarm sounded in her mind and her thoughts cleared.
“There’s a fire,” she said. “In the far stables.”
“What?!”
“They’re empty but—”
But Guy was already moving. “Sculthorpe. If he’s still in there…”
He whirled about and ran.
Chapter 24
Guy ran, yelling “Fire!”, stirring up the household, not pausing as he raced outside. He passed a frantic messenger sprinting toward the house and ran on.
Too late. By the time he reached the far stables, the building was ablaze. Grooms and other workers circled it, clutching buckets of water, but no longer trying to extinguish the flames.
Horrified, ash-smeared faces greeted him, and he searched through them for the grooms he’d sent to tend to Sculthorpe, identifying one through his smoke-stung eyes. He put a hand on the man’s shoulder.
“Did he get out?”
The groom looked close to tears, his mouth working hopelessly, his head shaking.
The stable master arrived at Guy’s side. “My lord. I’m sorry. We were too late. We saw him try but… He must have been asleep and by the time we noticed the fire… We sent a message up to the house.”
“Bloody hell.” Guy raked his hands through his hair, stared at the flames engulfing the old, wooden frame and the man Guy had left inside. “What happened?”
The groom gulped. “We took him water and linens, like you asked, and he wanted whiskey too, so we got it, and then he told us to bugger off. He threw an old horseshoe that hit Roger, so we buggered off and we were all off in the other stables and…and then we smelled the smoke.”
The smoke now swirled around them, tickling throats, inducing coughs.
“Sculthorpe was always smoking,” Guy said. “If he had drunk whiskey, lit a cigar, and gone to sleep…”
Guy cursed again. He had never meant for the man to die. But then, neither would he have expected someone as practical and experienced as Sculthorpe to be so foolish as to smoke in a stable.
No one had anything to add. They stared somberly at the roaring blaze, until the old stable’s wooden walls cracked and shuddered. Yelling, everyone hastily backed away to safety, as the entire structure collapsed.
