It did not bode well. She knew—surely she must know by now what he was going to say. He’d tried a half-dozen ways now to tell her that he loved her, and something had come between them each time—an interruption or catastrophe or Margo fleeing the conversation.
He felt grimly certain that she did not want to hear it. If she wanted him—if she wanted his declarations and his stupid bleeding heart—then she wouldn’t have taken off like a startled doe.
It wasn’t worth it. There was no need for him to bare his soul.
And yet when he finally gave in and started to look for her, the words were on his lips anyway.
I love you,he was going to say.I’ve always loved you, since the moment I saw you at Number Twelve in your white dress and a cherry in your hand.
But then he couldn’t find her.
He searched around the waterfall. He made his way back to the clearing where he’d taken her on the ground, hoping like a lovestruck block that she might have returned there as well.
She hadn’t. And when he went back to where he’d tied up the chestnut gelding, it was still there, placidly nibbling at the gorse.
She hadn’t gone back to Darley Dale. She was somewhere in the Dark Peak, and he couldn’t begin to guess where.
“Goddamnit,” he said under his breath. He almost wished she’d stolen the horse right out from under him. At least he’d have known that she was on her way back to civilization, and not begun to panic that she’d tumbled into a mysterious crevasse or off another tree or into more ice-cold water.
He circled the waterfall again. This time, he shouted for her.
He felt a complete idiot. Twice now, in a single day, he’d searched for Margo. He’d probably scared off all the birds in the Pennines with the volume of his shouting. He was rapidly growing to despise the natural world, with its crumbling rocks and icy waterfalls and weather. If it started to rain, he was going to move to the Caribbean.
And then he caught sight of her hair. His mind fixed on the bright anomalous red in the green-gray softness of the moors before he discerned that it was she.
She was sitting, he realized. She was tucked mostly inside a small cave amid the flat limestone rocks, her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. He could see now how Matilda and Ashford could have disappeared.
Margo would have been almost invisible—her dress a mud-spangled dark green, her freckled arms camouflaged against the stone—if not for the siren call of her hair in the fading daylight.
“Margo.” His voice was hard, and he realized as he said her name that he was angry with her. “I’ve been searching for you—damn it, didn’t you hear me calling for you?”
She looked up at him from her place on the ground. He could see she’d been crying, and guilt stabbed at him. He fisted his hands at his sides. No.No.He was tired of chasing her. He was tired of throwing himself in her direction when she could not even be bothered to hold out her hand, and if that wasn’t fair to her, well, he couldn’t summon up fairness and decency just now.
She rose. Her bodice was split at the side, and he could see a flash of white chemise. She still had leaves in her hair. He hadn’t gotten them all out.
“You didn’t have to search for me,” she said.
“The hell I didn’t. What did you expect me to do? Mount the horse and ride back to Darley Dale and leave you to your own devices?”
“Yes.”
He gritted his teeth. “For Christ’s sake, Margo. I’m not going to abandon you out here—there’s a goddamned waterfall you could topple over and about three hundred more trees for you to fall out of, not to mention the fact that I’m not sure you even know how to getbackto Darley Dale—”
“I know you think I’m an idiot,” she said coolly, “but I’ve survived this long, Henry. I would have made it back in one piece.”
Guilt and frustration chased circles around each other in his chest. “I don’t think you’re an idiot, Margo.”
She threw up her hands. “Then why can’t you leave me here?”
Henry opened his mouth, then shut it again. It was a precipice, an edge over which he could not see, and he was terrified of the other side. “I want—I want to make sure you’re all right. It’s not because I think you’re incompetent, Margo. I’ve never thought that—not once.”
Her lips curved, a sad, wry smile so far from her usual grin that he barely recognized it. “Don’t you? You’ve plenty of reasons to think so. I act the fool, I know. This whole bloody trip was a fool’s errand, and I dragged you along.”
“You didn’t drag me. I wanted to come.”
She’d been looking down, her dark auburn lashes shielding her eyes, but at his words, she looked up. Her eyes were very blue and they burned in the last light of the autumn day. “Why?”
Henry hung, suspended, at the point of falling off the edge. It was stupid—and pointless—he knew what she would say. He was absurd and too much, and if he never told her, he would never have to hear her gently let him down.
