Page 52 of The Autumn Wife
Lucas must have had the same thought, for he handed the toddler to Marie before standing to grab his flintlock. Theo pushed up from his chair to follow.
“Saints Almighty,” Lucas muttered as he swung open the door and stepped outside. “What areyourascals doing here?”
Theo came around the captain but saw no deer or elk. What he did see were three soldiers in bright blue uniforms, their canoe pulled up at the riverbank.
“Forgive the intrusion, Captain Girard.” The front soldier saluted sheepishly. “I know it’s early, but I’ve been ordered here on official business.”
“Lieutenant,” Lucas said with a sigh, “I’ve told your colonel more than once that I’m married with children now and have no interest in returning to service. Stubborn goat, he is—”
“It’s not about that, sir.” The lieutenant fished a paper out from between the brass buttons of his coat. “I have orders to arrest a Madame Cecile Tremblay.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Shivering on the hay-strewn floor of her jail cell, Cecile hugged her knees to her chest. Three days of nothing but bread and water had left the walls of her stomach scraping together. Rocking for warmth, she yearned for sunlight, a wool cloak, and uninterrupted sleep. And yet, in a strange way, she was grateful that thoughts of worldly needs consumed her, for they turned her mind away from the phantom rope tightening around her neck.
A clank of an iron key jerked her alert. She glanced beyond the bars of her cell to the rattling wooden door of the shed. Was it time for another interrogation?
The door swung open, and light poured in, slinging daggers into her eyes.
“Terce bells will be ringing soon,” said one of her guards, speaking to someone following him inthrough the blinding light. “At the first chime, your time is up. Got it?”
A man grunted an assent—deep-chested, rumbling—and at the sound Cecile’s heart leapt. Scrambling to her feet, she pushed filthy fingers down her unkempt braid. The closing of the door engulfed the shed in darkness again. Gripping the iron bars that kept her caged in a corner, the sole prisoner in the room, she blinked as Theo’s figure approached through hazy filaments of light seeping through the badly caulked walls.
With a half sob, she shot an arm through the bars to touch him, fingers grazing his jaw. He sported an inflamed cut on his brow and a black eye from the beating he’d taken for trying to save her from the arresting soldiers.
“Oh, Theo.” She hazarded a gasp, her throat dry. “Does it hurt?”
“It’s nothing.” He slid his hands between the bars, hissing as his warm hands cupped her cheeks. “You’refreezing.”
He released her long enough to shrug off his cloak and shove the garment between the bars. As he struggled to settle it across her shoulders, the wool cocooned her in pine-fragrant warmth.
With Theo’s battered face only inches away, she noted another scratch on his throat and a split in the lobe of his right ear, healed over in the three days they’d been apart, but still red and angry.
She ran a finger over a nick on his short-whiskered jaw. “What have they done to you, my love?”
“You’re the one suffering.” He tugged the collar so the cloak would cover her more fully. “And you’re worried about my bruises.”
“I thought…” She swallowed hard. On the day she’d been arrested, the last thing she’d seen, as one guard had pushed her toward the canoe, had been Theo grappling with the two other soldiers blocking his way. “Those soldiers’ flintlocks were primed, Theo… I thought—”
“The captain pulled us apart before any real blood was spilled.” He huffed in frustration. “I don’t think any other man but Lucas could have managed that.”
“It was foolish of you to fight.” She slid her hands through the bars to grip the linen of his shirt, to feel the warmth of him in the fibers. “You might have been arrested—”
“They tried. But the captain knew the soldiers and talked them out of it.” He ran his thumbs over her cheeks. She couldn’t tell whether the roughness was due to the calluses on his hands or the gritty soil on her face. “That doesn’t matter. I’m safe, Lucas is safe, Marie is safe. You arenot.I’ve been trying to see you for days.”
He pressed his face against the bars, gripped her cheeks in place, and locked his lips over hers.
A gasp died in her throat. His strength flooded through her, melted her spine, urged her to lean into him as far as she could despite the iron bars between them. She couldn’t quite feel her feet upon the hay anymore—she might as well be levitating.
He murmured her name as he tilted his head, shooting his fingers into her loosened, plaited hair, squeezing with desperation, speaking words she no longer understood as language, but only as the melody of love.
He finally pulled away, pressing his forehead against hers as best he could with iron bars keeping them apart. She’d thought she had no more tears to shed, but they prickled, now, at the backs of her eyes. Tears not of sorrow or fear but of a swelling love for this beautiful man.
What a tragedy, that such a love arrived in her life only when her life was soon to end.
He cleared his throat and pulled back from the bars, taking in the small shed and the smaller cage, glaring at the narrowness of her cell and then at the empty pewter plate on the floor next to a dry, tipped-over cup.
“We don’t have much time,” he said. “Have they interrogated you yet?”
