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Before he could say a word, she was out the door, her footsteps racing down the hall and stairwell.
Reiner stood in her room. Stood and stared at the door for thirty seconds. He turned to the front window and searched the main road. In a flash, her dark skirts appeared against the grey gravel of the road and she moved down the lane toward the edge of the village.
He was going to follow her, whether she liked it or not.
But he’d give her a modicum of space. After another thirty seconds of watching her walk down the road, he turned to the door, but then spied her open valise on the bed.
He paused and went over to it, rifling through the contents. Chemise, cloak, dress, stays, and stockings. Nothing else. Just as he was about to put the contents back into the bag, his forefinger slipped along the inside bottom seam of the bag. It shifted.
He picked at the edge of the fabric a moment, and it lifted. A false bottom.
Breath held, he tugged it open.
His red ledger.
He flipped open the leather cover. Written in his own hand, the start of transactions unveiling the web of trickery and smuggling and murder.
With a long exhale, he looked to the window. He couldn’t see Sloane from his angle. But her presence was still with him. In his bones.
As brutal as it was to admit, he doubted he would ever be able to shake the feel of her from his mind or his body.
He closed the book, setting it back in place in the false bottom and restacking her belongings on top of it.
With a sigh at his own stupidity, he spun to the door.
He had a Scottish lass to catch.
{ Chapter 13 }
The clanging metal ringing in her ears, Sloane walked past the last building on the road that cut through the village—a blacksmith’s shop that stood in front of a livery stable.
She stopped at the split in the road at the end of the town. To the left, the lane rolled through hills and crags. To the right the road weaved a line through the vast misty moors that sat south of town. Barren, both directions. Neither path held much interest to her.
Not when the only thing she could see was Reiner’s face in front of her. Raging. Gentle. Consumed with passion. Hungry—ravenous for her—for everything she was.
She just didn’t know if she could give him what he wanted. Her. All of her.
Not when there were still too many unanswered questions. Not when he was asking her to trust that he wasn’t the man that killed her brother. For if he was…
If he was, then there would be no escaping the ultimate betrayal. Grandfather would never forgive her. Her brother would never forgive her.
She would never forgive herself.
Yet, despite that real possibility, she wanted to believe him. Believe everything he was telling her—be she a fool or not.
Her feet veered to the right, passing by the clanging from the smithy and the horses standing outside the stables, their snouts in a trough.
Just as she moved beyond the stables, she heard a wagon behind her and moved to the right side of the road to let it pass.
The man at the reins on the driver’s bench tilted his head to her, his hand to his cap. Hay fluttered out past the open end of the wagon as it passed.
She didn’t see the other man behind her.
But she felt him as he barreled into her from behind, knocking the air from her lungs. He half carried, half threw her onto the back of the wagon, his body landing on top of hers and smothering her face first into the hay.
Screams tore from her throat. Screams muffled by the brute atop of her and the thick bed of hay below. Screams she wished she would have saved, for no one would hear her over the constant clanking of the blacksmith.
The brute atop her wedged a hand under her face and clamped his putrid palm across her mouth.
