He mounted the stairs behind her. “There was only one list.”
“ . . . and your ridiculous ‘esquire’ of a friend . . .”
“I can explain him.”
“ . . . and your dog . . .”
“He’s not my dog.”
“ . . . and I was fool enough to let you stay. I welcomed you into my home because I hoped you’d see that Twill Castle is just that. My home. But you’re so stubborn.” She trod hard on the steps as she spiraled toward the top. “You’re just like Piers, caring only for your career and nothing for me. I wish I’d shown you the door.”
As she took the next step, her ankle twisted. Her slipper skidded on the damp stone.
Rafe’s hand shot out to steady her.
“I have you.” He flexed his arm, pulling her flush with his chest. “I have you.”
Clio clutched his shirtfront. She would have caught herself, even without his help. But for this one fleeting moment, she would let him play the hero.
She was growing dangerously used to this. The way it felt to be held in his arms. Protected. Valued, to whatever small degree.
“Still wishing you’d shown me the door?” He cocked his head at the unforgiving stone floor, some twenty feet below. “It’s a long way down. We could have landed there in a heap of broken bones, waiting days for someone to find us.”
“Hah.” She released him, turned, and resumed climbing. “If we were found here together, we would be better off dead. You can well imagine what people would conclude.”
“What would they conclude?”
“That we were lovers, of course.”
Chapter Six
Lovers?” Rafe asked.
The round, echoing walls threw the word back at him, like a teasing chant.
Lovers . . . Lovers . . . Lovers. . .
He cleared his throat and dropped his voice to a quiet, commanding timbre. “Why would anyone think that?”
“It’s all around us,” she said, climbing the remaining few steps to the second floor. “Just look.”
What with the rain and the paucity of windows, it was difficult to make out anything at first. But as his eyes adjusted to the dimness, Rafe began to understand what she meant. The stone walls surrounding them were carved and etched with letters. Letters in pairs. Some of them enclosed in hearts.
The initials of lovers.
This must have been the local trysting place for decades now. Perhaps for centuries.
“It’s rather charming, isn’t it?” She traced a heart with her fingertip. “So many couples over the years. I wonder who they all were.”
Rafe decided this was a welcome development. Anything that churned up thoughts of romance and couples in her imagination had to aid his cause.
“What about you?” She turned to him. “Are your initials carved in a wall somewhere in Somerset? Or . . . many somewheres?”
“Me?” He shook his head. “No. When it comes to women, I don’t car—
“You don’t carve anything in stone.” She shook her head. “Of course not.”
He looked at her, annoyed.
“What? Fighters aren’t the only ones who can concentrate, anticipate, react.” She held up weak little fists and mimed boxing his shoulder. “If you don’t like me finishing your sentences, try being less predictable.”
He chuckled to himself. Damn. She was clever, this one. And perhaps not quite so innocent as her looks would suggest. Still, she could never predict what kind of thoughts were churning in his mind right now.
During her almost fall, she’d dropped the overcoat he’d lent her. The cursed thing was probably to blame for pulling her off-balance in the first place.
But now she was left in just her thin, wet, nearly transparent muslin frock—and shivering, either from cold or from the lingering fear of falling.
He couldn’t look at her without wanting to warm her.
Hold her.
Guard her.
More.
“Piers,” he said. “Piers would be the sort to carve your initials in the wall, right alongside his.”
She settled on the floor. “I doubt it. He’s spent years declining to write his name beside mine in a wedding register.”
“That’s different.” He sat beside her.
“Rafe, I wish you’d stop denying the obvious. He doesn’t love me.”
“Of course he does. Or he will. Love has a way of creeping up on a man. I’d venture to say love has to creep up on a man. If men ever saw it coming, we’d only run away.”
“Love’s never caught you.”
“Well, that’s me.” He gave her shoulder a teasing nudge. “I’ve spent years honing these reflexes. Love can take all the swings it likes, but I’ve always managed to dodge the blow.”
“So far,” she added meaningfully.
“So far.”
They listened to the rain for a moment.
The truth was, Rafe doubted love would ever catch him. He lost interest in things too easily. He’d always been this way. His studies, tasks, clubs . . . friends and lovers, too. Fighting kept his body and wits engaged because the challenge changed with every bout. It was the one pursuit that had managed to capture and hold his fascination.
He glimpsed a faint wash of pink on Clio’s cheek.
Well, perhaps it was one of two.
“What if it’s the opposite?” Clio asked. “What if Piers returns, sees me, and what hits him isn’t love but the realization that he feels nothing for me? That he never has and never will.”
“Impossible.”
“It’s not impossible. He must have changed in his time away. I’ve changed, too. I’ve grown older, and I’ve grown . . . Well, I’ve just grown.” Her voice went quiet. “I’ve gained a full stone since he saw me last.”
In all the best places, he wanted to say.
But he couldn’t say that. He considered it rather heroic that he only dropped his gaze to her breasts for a moment and not ten.
“Clio, you’re still—” Damn. “Still” was not the word he wanted there. “You’ve always been—”
“Just stop. Please don’t try to flatter me. It’s so unconvincing. Especially when it’s clear you don’t like me.”
That’s right, he didn’t like her. He didn’t like her so much, he’d just risked plummeting to his doom to catch her when she stumbled.
“In eight years, you haven’t answered one of my notes,” she said. “You’ve never repaid any of my calls. Until you showed up here, you hadn’t accepted a single one of my invitations. And I made several.”