Something sharp snagged at her skirts, jabbed at the chilled flesh of her thigh beneath. The hedgerow. A flash of lightning showed her a gap in its tangled branches, barely wide enough for her to pass through. And a little way beyond it, an abandoned stone cottage. Would its thatched roof provide shelter? She could not tell until she reached it.
Head down, she pushed onward. The wind snatched at her sodden bonnet. Nearly strangled by its ties at her throat, she scrabbled with numb fingers to loosen them. Once free, the bonnet whirled into the storm and was gone.
The twenty yards standing between her and her goal seemed to take almost as long to travel as the two miles she had already come. At last, its stout slab door stood before her. Here, in the shadow of the low building, the wind still lashed, but it no longer threatened to carry her away. As she leaned her head against the door to fumble with the latch, she felt a movement. Not of her own making. Not the rumble of the storm, either. The door swung inward and she collapsed onto the dirt floor at the booted feet of a stranger.
The cottage was not abandoned, after all.
Even a cursory glance told her these were not the sort of boots generally worn by cottagers, however. The supple leather was not muddy or scuffed as it would have been if the man was a laborer or had recently trudged across the open field. Perhaps he had been traveling on horseback. Or perhaps he simply had been wise enough to take shelter before the rain began.
Without speaking, he stepped around her to shut the door, muffling the storm’s noise and closing out its murky light, casting the single room into near darkness.
Oh, God. This was it—her most serious error in judgment. Ever. Erica scrambled to her feet and whirled about to face him, feeling her rain-sodden skirts slap against her legs. But he was already moving past her again.
“Wait there.” His voice was pitched low, barely audible beneath the storm.
Gradually, her eyes were able to pick out his shape, now on the far side of the small room. A narrow seam of light formed a square on the wall behind him—a window, blocked by wooden shutters. She heard a rattle, a scrape, a hiss. Flame sparked to life in his hands then became the warm, flickering glow of a candle.
“That blast of wind blew it out,” he explained with a glance past her at the door. Was it her imagination, or was there an accusatory note in his voice?
The candle lit his features from below, giving them a sardonic cast. Impossible to tell whether he was handsome or plain, dark or fair, young or…well, his voice, his ease of movement certainly did not suggest an old man. And he was tall—taller than Papa. Than either of her brothers or her brother-in-law. Taller even than Henry…
Oh, why, in this moment, had she thought of Henry? But so it always went, her mind flitting from one idea to the next, fixing on precisely the things she ought to forget, and forgetting the things she ought to—
My journal!
With a shudder of alarm, she slithered a hand between the wet, clinging layers of her pelisse and her dress and pulled the book from its hiding place. As she hurried toward the light, the man drew back a step. With the candle between her and her journal, so the stranger could see nothing but its binding, she turned the book over in her hands, then thumbed through its pages to assess the damage. The leather cover was damp; rain had wetted the edges of the paper here and there. It would look worn and wrinkled when it was dry, but so far as she could tell, the journal’s contents were miraculously unharmed. A sigh of relief eased from her.
When she laid her journal on the tabletop, the candlelight once more threw itself freely around the room. The stranger was looking her up and down, his expression both incredulous and stern. A familiar expression. Cami wore it often in Erica’s presence.
Of course she looked a mess. Who wouldn’t, under these circumstances? Icy rivulets ran from her hair down her face, and beneath the howl of the wind, she could hear the steady patter of her skirts dripping onto the floor. If this were a scene in one of those novels her sister denied reading, the hero would probably invite her to strip off her drenched clothing and dry herself before the fire. Something shocking would likely follow.
But there was no fire. And this man showed no intention of acting the part of a hero.
As if to confirm her thoughts, he shook his head and folded his arms across his chest. “What in God’s name are you doing out in a storm like this?”
* * * *
When Major Lord Tristan Laurens asked a question, he expected an answer. He certainly did not expect the subject of his interrogation to bristle, fling a lock of wet hair over her shoulder—spraying him with rainwater, almost dousing the candle—and reply, “I might ask you the same.”
Unblinking, she faced him across the table, communicating quite clearly that if he was waiting for her to bend first, he might wait forever. He had some experience coaxing information from unwilling sources, and he knew better than to begin by barking at them. But her arrival had caught him off guard. He had never liked surprises.
The silence that stretched between them was eventually broken by her fingers drumming against the cover of the book she’d unearthed from her bodice. She radiated a kind of nervous energy that refused to be contained. When another moment had passed, she plucked up the book,
