Page 102 of Counting on a Countess
For all the landscape’s beauty, he was more transfixed by watching Tamsyn flirt with the water from the crashing waves. She held her skirts up, revealing her ankles. Like a sandpiper, she followed the line of sea foam as it reached up the damp beach and retreated again. At times, she would stay in place, allowing the water to cover her feet and soak into the hem of her dress.
He bent and tested the temperature of the water, expecting it to be warm. It wasn’t.
“I’ve been thinking of you as part mermaid,” he noted. “Now I know it must be true. How else to explain your ability to tolerate the icy water?”
“This is positively balmy from how cold it gets in the winter.” She picked up a shell and handed it to him. “But from May to August, it’s perfectly lovely for a brisk swim.”
He turned the shell over in his hand. Such a fragile thing, so easily broken. But it weathered the sea and stood against storms.
Kit slipped it into his pocket, running his thumb over the grooves in the shell. He pictured the place on his mantel where he’d put it—no, better yet, he’d keep it in the table beside his bed, to take out and admire just before falling asleep.
“Who taught you to swim?” he asked.
She stopped walking and frowned. “I can’t remember. It seems like I always knew.”
That made him smile—thinking of her playing in the waves, the sun making new freckles on her skin, her hair damp and full of salt, like a creature of nature.
“Like I said, a born siren.” He glanced up toward the bluffs. “We’re not far from your home,” Kit noted. “If we kept heading north, we’d encounter the beach that’s just at the foot of the cliff by the house. Is it part of the property?”
“It is,” she said, and added quickly, “but no one goes there.”
“Haunted?”
“Full of rocks. It doesn’t make for a good walk. In fact,” she went on, “we ought to turn back and go to the village to pick up our luncheon.”
Kit remembered glancing down at the cove on her family property yesterday. From the bluffs, it hadn’t looked rock strewn at all, only covered with more sand. There had been a rocky outcropping at the far end of the inlet—he wondered if that was what she meant.
The instinct that had kept him alive for years while fighting flared into alertness again. That sense of alert dimmed when he was with her, yet something in this place continued to needle him. Much as he wanted to, he couldn’t ignore it or quiet the voices of doubt that whispered to him, telling him something wasn’t right.
But he followed Tamsyn back down the beach, hoping against hope that for once, his instincts were false.
Chapter 25
Tamsyn was in one of her favorite places, yet unease kept its needles in her—poking into her neck and along her arms, keeping her in a constant state of apprehension.
Carrying their basket of food, she led Kit from where they had tethered their horses, down into the ancient forest’s dell. Huge mature oaks shaded grassy banks sloping toward a creek, and the sunlight filtered through their leaves, turning everything cool and green. She tried to take comfort from the permanency of the place. No matter what happened in her life, the old trees would go on as they always had, the creek would continue to run, and all the living things that made this wood their home would persevere regardless of her tempestuous existence.
She cast a look over her shoulder to watch Kit as he ambled after her, a woolen blanket in his arms. His attention was fixed on the shadows between the trees, as though searching out hidden enemies. Yet he seemed to find the environment safe enough to glance upward at the leafy canopy and smile.
“This part of the world has more than its share of enchanted sites,” he said, picking his way around a stand of ferns. “Hardly seems fair to the rest of the country.”
“We take our enchantment seriously,” she answered with a solemn nod. “Woods like this are calledkoswigow. They’re full of old magic.” She stopped at a place where the ground was relatively level. “This will be a good spot.”
“Are you certain?” He peered into the shadowy places beneath the ferns. “We might be trampling over the fairy folk’s palace. I’ll wind up with donkey ears or speaking only in gibberish.”
“No need to worry,” she assured him. “We’re old friends, thespyrysyonand me. And you’d look charming with donkey ears.” She pointed to the ground by her feet. “Let’s put the blanket down here.”
He did as she asked, laying down the coarse covering. “You haunt this spot as much as the fairies?”
“Nearly.” She sank down onto the blanket, removed her bonnet, and began unpacking the basket. It would be a simple luncheon of pasties, ale, and strawberries—a meal she always enjoyed. “Some of the girls in the village were frightened of it here. Like you, they feared retribution from thespyrysyonfor trespassing.”
“I am not afraid,” he said with a show of wounded pride. “I am extraordinarily cognizant of my surroundings.” He laid his long body down on the blanket, propping himself up on an elbow and looking the picture of a gentleman taking his ease. “So you came here alone.”
“Even when I was very small.” She handed him one pasty. “My mother and father used to tease me and say they needed to tie a kite to my back so they could find me when I wandered away. I did that quite a lot,” she admitted. She ran off more after her parents’ deaths, seeking the comfort she couldn’t get from Jory and Gwen.
“I wouldn’t know anything about being born with wanderlust,” he declared airily, then grinned. “When I asked for a commission, no one in my family was particularly surprised. It was said that two things were my main attractors—the scarlet uniform, and the chance to go abroad.” He took a bite of pasty and made a sound of pleasure.
She also took a healthy bite. After chewing and swallowing, she said, “You must have looked very dashing in your uniform.”
