Page 33 of A Fearless Heart
“You just walked down that way,” he said.
“That was before the rats did. Lord, this is my fault. I should have known. I could have done it differently, brought a lantern, or made some arrangement…” She twisted around as she spoke, either looking for more rats, or possibly a way to make time run backward to a point where she wasn’t yet angry and afraid.
Gabe tried again to offer a reasonable statement she could hold on to. “It will be fine. The rats have already found another hole to dive down.”
Cady didn’t move.
“You don’t want to stay here, do you?”
She looked at him, her expression desperate. “I want to beanywherebut here.”
“I could carry you,” he offered.
“Absolutely not!” The horror on her face was, frankly, a little offensive. Was he such an appalling option?
“Why not? I did last night.”
“Last night was different!”
“How? You were incapacitated in your laboratory. And you’re incapacitated now, just for a different reason.”
“I should be able to walk on my own,” she protested. “It’s ridiculous that I’m just…standing here!”
That was when he realized that she wasn’t angry at him, only at herself.
He moved toward the place that the rats had run out of, but the moment he came past Cady, he turned and scooped her up in his arms.
Unlike last night, she was alert and struggling now. But Gabe was also a lot bigger than her. He held her tight to him, preventing her from falling in her attempts to wiggle free.
“Would you stop that?” he asked, putting irritation in his voice to hide the surge of physical response when the smell of witch hazel hit him again. Unconsciously, he glanced down, catching the curve of her breasts above the edge of her gown.
Too frantic to notice, Cady put one hand against his chest, pushing ineffectually. “I didn’t say you could pick me up!”
“No, but you also couldn’t walk away on your own. So I’m going to take you back to the first glasshouse. And if you keep twisting around like a stray cat, I might drop you.”
Immediately, she went still.
“Let me guess. You’re afraid of being dropped on the ground? Does that count as falling?”
“It’s not funny,” she muttered, hiding her head.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. The distress on her face was real, and something in Gabe responded to it, wanting to make it go away. He never liked to see innocents suffering.
“And you wonder why I hide in my house. Your offer to make me brave was very sweet, Mr Court. But I’m a lost cause.”
No one, ever, not even when he was a boy, had described him asvery sweet. Maneuvering around the sharp corner, he turned sideways and held her closer to him. “Watch your toes,” he warned gruffly.
Cady dutifully contracted into an even smaller space, pulling her legs and feet in and tucking her head onto his shoulder.
Now Gabe had to contend with the darkened space and the softness of female flesh pressed against him. Those two things together usually pointed toward imminent pleasure, and his body was reacting in anticipation. It didn’t help that Cady’s breathing was still quicker than normal, or that he could feel the rapid thump of her heartbeat. Lord, this woman was more tempting every time he saw her.
“I’ll be better once we get back to the glasshouse,” Cady said. “The daylight will keep the rats out. And I’ll put out some poison to make sure,” she added.
Gabe’s grip tightened a little. “Poison? What do you use for that?”
“I have a powered alkaloid that I make from a certain plant. It’s a bean, actually, that grows in Asia, and they’ve used the ground-up powder to kill rodents for ages. A few bites of food that’s been coated with it will stop their little hearts. Thank goodness, I don’t like them to suffer. And I hardly ever have to use much, which is good, because it’s not easy growing beans that came from halfway round the world…”
Cady chattered away. He noticed that as soon as she had something else to focus on besides the thing that frightened her, she calmed down. So he kept asking questions, slipping in ones about poison when he could.
