Remembrance

With one arm still around her, he reached for her foot to try to look at her ankle. Callie was a bit smaller than other girls her age, and compared to Talis she was tiny, but even at that, he could hardly reach her ankle while holding her. In order to see her injury, he had to pull her skirt up past her knee just to see her ankle.

Oddly enough, there didn’t look to be any swelling around the joint.

As he was looking at her ankle, trying to see the wound, Talis wondered why he had never before noticed that Callie had such delicate ankles, nor had he been aware of how gracefully her ankle curved into her calf. She wore thin, almost transparent hose that were made just for her leg and fit her like skin.

“My leg,” Callie whispered. “Higher. My leg hurts very much. I think it is bleeding.”

With a hand that shook just a bit, Talis raised her skirts higher on her leg. When had she started wearing all of these female undergarments? If they’d been on the farm and he’d found out she was wearing delicate stockings, he would have laughed at her. These things would not hold up for even one afternoon’s jaunt through the brambles.

But right now he had never seen anything as alluring as these pale pink stockings that stretched up Callie’s shapely leg. Slowly, with his mind nowhere near his purpose of seeing whether or not she was injured, he held her upper body with one arm and lifted her dress with his right hand.

The stocking stopped just above her knee and was tied in place with the most extraordinary thing he had ever seen. It was a garter made of pink ribbons and white embroidered cloth; there were tiny hearts sewn onto the cloth. The garter was frothy and feminine and Talis had never in his life seen anything as fascinating as that piece of fabric. It was as though he could not take his eyes off it.

As though time were suspended, his eyes moved to above the garter and there he saw Callie’s thigh. Just a few inches of skin before her skirt concealed her body. Her skin was as pale as spring sunlight, the curve firm, seeming to invite his hand to touch it.

As he lifted his hand, a loud crack of lightning brought him back to reality.

In one frantic, terrified movement, Talis dropped Callie to the ground and jumped away from her. “I must find the horse. I must find the horse,” he said, and the water on his face was more sweat than rain. “I must get you back to the house. I must—”

For a moment Talis thought he heard some rather vulgar words come from Callie but he was sure that couldn’t be true. If she’d said such a thing, it was probably just the pain from her leg, or maybe that damned monkey twisting her hair. Whatever the problem, he realized he had to do something now. Jumping up to grab the lowest hanging branch of the tree, he swung himself upward.

“What in the world are you doing?” Callie yelled up to him as he

quickly and agilely began to climb the tree.

“I’m trying to see the horses,” he called down to her.

It was at that moment that, coming from the other direction, Callie’s horse appeared and she grimaced. “The only horse ever born that can’t find its way back to the stables, and I have to have it,” she muttered. Glancing up to be sure Talis was involved in his mad dash to the top of the tree, Callie ran across the grass into the rain to the idiot horse. It was looking at her as though it wanted her to take care of it—which it did.

Callie loved animals but she loved Talis more, so what she did, she did with a feeling of guilt. From inside her pocket she withdrew a little bundle of herbs from her own garden, a posy she had prepared for just such an emergency as this, and tied it to the horse’s bridle. With one whiff of the herbs, the horse turned and ran in the general direction of Hadley Hall, and Callie, with Kipp clinging to her belt, scurried back to her place under the tree.

When Talis came down from the tree, Callie was reclining on the ground, which was growing damper by the moment. Talis saw that her dress was disarrayed so that one leg was exposed to above her knee, the other to midcalf. He knew it could not be possible, but it was almost as though her gown was torn more at the shoulder than it had been and now it seemed to expose more of her breast than it had. Was he being punished for having laughed at her flat chest of a year ago? Couldn’t she have stayed flat? Why did she have to look so ravishingly desirably beautiful?

“Callie?” he said, then when she did not open her eyes, he fairly shouted, but he did not stoop and take her in his arms again. “Callie! We must get out of here. You are wet through and the rain’s coming down harder. We must…”

Gracefully, she opened her eyes and when she spoke she sounded as though she were at death’s door. “I cannot walk. You must go and get help. Get…get Edgar, the farrier’s son. His house is near here and he is strong enough to carry me back to Hadley Hall. He will not need a horse.”

At that Talis swept Callie into his arms and she snuggled her body against him, her face in his shoulder, her arms tightly about his neck. “You will harm yourself carrying me,” she whispered, her lips against his ear. “Your back—”

“Save your breath; you need your strength,” he said tightly. “I can carry you to the ends of the earth, if need be.”

“Are you sure you need no help?”

Talis didn’t bother answering that. However, it was miles back to the hall and the rain was coming down harder with every minute.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, managing to turn her body so her breasts were pressed against his chest.

Water was dripping off the tip of his nose. “That I’d like to know why that stupid horse of yours ran off. That was very odd. And I’d like to know why you insisted on riding this far out when I told you there was going to be a storm today. Anyone with half a mind could see that a storm was brewing, yet you—”

At that moment Callie was sure that if any man in history had ever been romantic, it had been an accident.

“Oh, Talis,” she began to wail. “I am so sorry. I have been awful to you lately. Really awful and I wanted us to get away from everyone just to be alone. Like we used to do. I just wanted to tell you that I loved you and I am sorry that I have been so horrid. Can you ever forgive me?”

Callie knew that groveling from her was one of Talis’s favorite things in life. Abject apologies often got her what pride could not.

“Well, perhaps,” he began, blinking away rain that was cascading over his lashes, down his nose, and splashing straight onto Callie’s face.

“I am sorry it all worked out wrong.” She had to shout to be heard over the rain. “But I truly am in pain. Couldn’t we stop? Isn’t there any place we could…well, rest until this is over?”