Annie plunked herself down onto one of the rocking chairs. As Rory sipped her tea, she was aware of Annie studying her, curious but after a friendly fashion.
“Now I saw one of them there balloons once at a circus. You people with the circus?”
“No, I’m an aero—” Rory started to protest, then broke off with a tired sigh. What was the sense of getting into all that? With the Seamus sunk to the bottom of the ocean, she didn’t feel much like an aeronaut at the moment.
“Yes, we’re with the circus,” Rory concluded glumly.
“I thought so. A cousin of mine a few days ago traveled all the way to upstate New York just to watch some couple get married up in a balloon. Was that you two?”
“Yes, that was us,” Rory agreed before she even thought, then was appalled by her lie. But she sensed that Annie would be mighty disapproving if she realized Zeke and Rory were junketing about together unwed.
The woman was scowling anyway. “Married in a balloon— I’m not sure I exactly hold with that. Don’t sound as legal and binding as being wed in a church.”
“People get married on ships, don’t they?”
“That’s so.” Annie She tossed down the rest of her drink. “Well, I don’t mean to sit here jawing at you all night. Poor little thing. You’ve had a bad time of it, but you’ll feel perkier after a good sleep. Then, in the morning, I’ll get my boy to hitch up the buggy and drive you into Sea Isle.”
Sea Isle? Rory started at the mention of a town far down the south Jersey coast. She and Zeke had drifted much farther than she had imagined. They would have a long, dreary trip back to New York ahead of them. But she was better off not worrying about that now, or about the difficulties that would await them on their return.
Annie hustled off to her own bedchamber and returned with a voluminous nightgown, which she helped Rory to don. Rory felt swallowed up in it, like a child parading about in her mother’s things, but she was grateful for any clothing that was warm and dry.
“Off to bed with you now,” Annie said, jerking her head toward the door behind which Zeke had disappeared. “Your man’s likely out so cold, he’ll never hear when you creep between the sheets.”
Rory fought down a blush at the thought of slipping into bed with “her” man. She barely concealed her expression of dismay as she realized the full consequences of the lie she had told Annie. But wasn’t that just the way of it every time she told a fib? She always ended up in some kind of bramble.
What was she going to do? It would be far too humiliating to confess now. Annie was already marching about, blowing out the oil lamps. Rory had little choice but to inch toward the door, bidding Annie a nervous good night.
Her fingers trembled as she turned the knob and slipped inside. Closing the door, she leaned up against it, allowing her eyes to adjust to the chamber’s darkened interior.
Like the cottage’s sitting room, it was small, the chief object of furniture being a heavy wooden bedstead. Moonlight streamed through the open shutters, and Rory could make out Zeke’s muscular form draped beneath the covers, his dark head resting on a downy pillow.
“Zeke?” Rory whispered.
But she got no reply. It appeared Annie was right—Zeke was lost in a deep slumber. The wind howled outside the cottage, rattling the panes. There was something unbearably lonely about being the only one left awake. Rory hovered by the bed, shivering, wrapping her arms about herself. It was cold now that she was away from the fire, the boards of the floor chill beneath her bare feet.
Her gaze traveled wistfully to Zeke, so snug beneath the softness of a patchwork quilt, drawn halfway up across the bared expanse of his chest. She took a hesitant step closer.
It wouldn’t really be like going to bed with a man, she argued, not if both of them were asleep. Yet she knew what the nuns back at St. Catherine’s would have told her. Far better to curl up on the floor, suffer one night of discomfort rather than put her virtue at risk.
But Rory wasn’t sure she’d ever had much virtue, and it was difficult for conscience to win out with gooseflesh prickling her arms and her feeling half-ready to drop from fatigue.
“The devil with it,” she mumbled. Tugging back the covers, she scrambled beneath them, trying to keep to the edge of the bed, putting as much distance between herself and Zeke as possible.
The bed was as soft and warm as she had imagined, but having allowed herself to become chilled again, it was difficult to stop shivering. She couldn’t help staring at Zeke, lying flat on his back, one arm flung over his head. A silvery stream of moonlight outlined his profile, the muscular contours of his chest. Knowing the heat that radiated from that powerful body, Rory was tempted to snuggle a little closer.
She resisted, cuddling the quilt beneath her chin, trying to lie still, not wanting to disturb Zeke. Even in repose the rock-hard line of Zeke’s jaw conveyed a certain belligerence, as though daring anyone to challenge him or to hurt him.
She wondered if he really meant what he had said earlier that day, about thinking it best if he never saw her again after they returned to New York. He had talked of being bad for her, causing her harm, but perhaps he was as much afraid of making himself too vulnerable. She would bet that Zeke Morrison had let many women come close to his body, but none near his heart, and Rory was fast realizing that was exactly where she wanted to be.
Stifling a sigh, she rolled over and lay with her back to him. She would never get to sleep this way, so tense, so much aware of that masculine form only a pillow’s length away.
But by degrees, exhaustion overtook her and her eyes drifted closed. She found sleep, but not a restful one. Tossing and turning, fragments of dreams floated through her mind, tormenting images from events of the days gone by.
Tessa, garbed like a witch, cast some kind of spell, turning Finn McCool into a slavering beastie. Zeke lay sprawled on the street, his arm bleeding, torn open from the attack of a black-winged harpie with beautiful masses of ice-blonde hair.
“It’s Mrs. Van Hallsburg,” Rory tried to tell Zeke, but he only laughed at her, and all the while Tony stood by smirking. “I told you so. I told you so.”
Rory moaned, rolling over, but she escaped one dream only to tumble directly into another nightmare equally as tormenting. She was back in the sea again, feeling the icy chill of its embrace, fighting the waves. But this time it wasn’t the balloon she was trying to cling to but her father. He was alive. He was still alive if only she could save him.
