She looked at him with quiet eyes. “I should have been different.”

“Hold that thought.” Ned couldn’t touch her, not without risking another flinch. Instead, he knelt before her, making himself seem small and harmless. He looked up in her eyes from his vantage point on the floor. “Hold that thought tightly, with both hands. Can you feel it?”

She clasped her hands together.

“I believe what you just said was that if you had been a different person, your husband might not have hit you.”

She gave a second jerky nod.

“Well, let me show you something I’ve learned. Now, are you still holding on to that thought? Gather it all up in your hands—don’t leave any of it out. Have it? Good. Now stand up.”

She stared at him suspiciously. “Is this some sort of trick?”

“Lady Harcroft, if I wanted to betray you, I wouldn’t need any tricks. I would have come here with twelve men and your husband. I’ll stay here with my knee on the floor for now—you stand up.”

Warily she clambered to her feet; as she did, she started to drop her hands to her waist.

“Careful,” Ned warned teasingly. “You’ll drop the thought, and I specifically told you to hold it with both hands.”

“But there’s nothing there.”

“Nonsense. You can feel that thought in your hands, even if you can’t see it. You’re holding it, all one great weight. It’s bowing your shoulders. And if you run your thumbs over it, you can feel the surface. What does it feel like?”

Lady Harcroft glanced down at her empty hands. “It’s a harsh, spiked thing,” she said softly, “full of bitterness and recrimination.”

“I’m going to stand up now.” Ned did, and then, giving her a wide berth, he walked to the door and threw it open. He took three steps back, so that she could stand in the doorway without coming too close to him. Then he motioned her forward.

She crossed over to him.

“Now this is the hard part. Draw back your arm—yes, like that—and throw the thought as far away as you can.”

“But—”

“Just toss whatever you were thinking right out the door, like the slimy piece of refuse that it is. That sort of thinking has no place in your life. It wasn’t your fault. It’s never your fault if a man hits you.”

She glanced at him in hesitation.

“Go on. Throw it.”

“But I’m not holding on to anything.”

“Then it shouldn’t bother you to discard it.”

Tenuous logic, but then, doubts that wormed into his own heart had little truck with logic. Ned had discovered a thousand ways to cast out that legion on his own.

Louisa drew in a tremulous breath, and then looked out the door. Her gaze sharpened, and she focused on the valley that lay below. Slowly she raised her hands to her waist. Then she mimed a throw—a girl’s throw, halfhearted and tentative, the sort that would have made him toss up his hands in outrage if she had been bowling in cricket—but a throw nonetheless. And then she turned and gave him a faltering smile. It was the first smile he’d seen on her since he’d arrived.

“There. Now don’t you feel better?”

“That,” she said, stepping backward, “should not have worked. It was entirely irrational.”

Ned shut the door behind her. “It helped, didn’t it?”

“You’re a black magician, Mr. Carhart. How did you know? Did Kate send you to cheer me up?”

Ned shrugged. He knew because…he knew. He’d known doubt and uncertainty. He’d grappled with fear. And he’d won, damn it. Eventually.

It shouldn’t have mattered that he needed to employ such cheap tricks to claim his own triumph. It shouldn’t have mattered that in the worst of times he still needed every scrap of dark magic he could conjure, just to maintain his illusions. All that mattered was that he won, every damned time.

“It’s my job to know irrationality,” Ned replied with more airiness than he felt. “As for my wife…” He looked around the cabin and a second truth struck him. Someone had thought of everything. There were provisions. A little washtub stood to the side—no doubt where the infant’s napkins had been cleaned this morning, something Ned would never have thought of in a million years. She’d planned for this as carefully as for a siege. Now that he glanced into the small adjoining room, he could see the shadowed form of a nursemaid, holding a child in her arms.

And he’d thought Kate was delicate. He felt as if he’d glanced into a room, expecting to see a china tea set, and found instead an intricate mass of gears, silently running the clock tower to which every man set his watch.

“My wife,” Ned said, “will handle the eggs.”

Lady Harcroft raised her chin. “Tell Kate thank you, then. This was as good as eggs for breakfast.”

THE MILES BACK to Berkswift blurred in Ned’s mind, dust and the scent of burning leaves commingling into a confusion in his mind. The slow trot of his horse seemed to drum the important points into his mind.

Lady Harcroft had escaped her husband.

Kate had helped. And she’d not said a word of it to Ned—or, as far as Ned could tell, to anyone else.

She didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust anyone, so far as he could tell. And it was probably partially Ned’s own fault.

Whatever their marriage might have been, he’d destroyed those nascent seeds of hope when he had left. Their marriage had been a convenience, an accident. It had only seemed polite to leave her alone, to not inflict on her the worst of his faults. He hadn’t wanted to burden her.

But now he wanted to be more than a burden.

It was in this mood that he arrived at home and handed his horse off to Plum. He headed round to Champion’s pasture, armed with a bag of peppermints. Easier, perhaps, to talk to a horse than to carry on a conversation with his wife. Anything he could imagine saying to her came out in his mind as a confrontation. And the last thing he wanted to do at this point was engage in recriminations.

But it was not Kate who found him as he leaned against the railing. It was Harcroft. Ned had not had time to sort his thoughts about his wife into place. He wasn’t ready to think of Harcroft. He strode through the thick grass, his boots gleaming as if even the cow shards made way before his shining magnificence.

He walked up to Ned and stared through the fence rails. “That’s the most flea-bitten, mange-ridden, hollow-chested mongrel of a horse I’ve ever seen. Why was it never gelded?”

“His name,” Ned said in abstraction, “is Champion.”

Harcroft sighed. “You always did have an odd sense of humor, Carhart.” He spoke those words as if he were hurling insults.

Ned shrugged. “You always didn’t.”

Once, Harcroft’s epithets might have stung Ned, along with the implication that Ned was too frivolous, too ready to make a joke. If Ned had just pledged himself to knighthood, Harcroft was his enemy. He was the dark knight across the field.

He didn’t look much like a villain.

A pause.

“Any luck?” Harcroft finally asked.

“Nothing.” Ned had gone on to visit Mrs. Alcot after he saw Lady Harcroft. “Just an ancient widow, who insisted on talking my ear off. She was delighted to answer my questions—and to tell me about the health of her pigs, her ducks and Kevin.”

Harcroft frowned in puzzlement. “Her grandson?”

A point to Ned. He smiled grimly. “Her rooster.”

“Ah.” Harcroft’s lip curled. “Women. Always talking. Naming things.”

Harcroft’s wife had surely kept her silence long enough. Years and years. And all this time, Ned had known the man and never guessed. It made him feel queasy.

What he finally said was, “And your day?”

Harcroft didn’t answer. “Where did you get this horse?”

“I bought him for ten pounds.” If Ned were a knight in rusted armor, Champion—mangy, distrustful Champion—might have made an appropriate steed.

“So the story I heard today was true. You happened upon a carter struggling to control a vicious animal, and you intervened to save the brute from a beating.”

Ned nodded. “Talking about that in the village, are they?”

“You always were too soft-hearted.” Harcroft spoke in smoldering disdain.

Tags: Courtney Milan Carhart Romance
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