A fizzling curl of smoke rose up.
And promptly died, taking all her excitement with it.
What was she doing wrong? She thought of Aaron stoking the fire in the smithy, raking and turning the coals . . . pumping the bellows.
The bellows. That was it. A fire needed air.
She scattered another few embers over the tinder, then lowered herself almost to her belly, pursed her lips, and blew. A flurry of sparks resulted. Encouraged, she inhaled slowly, then exhaled again, careful not to overtax her lungs. This time, the little sparks swelled and caught the tinder, resulting in a few lapping tongues of flame.
Diana rose to her knees and cheered—quietly—while brushing the dust from her hands and skirts. A small triumph, perhaps, but a promising start.
Her sense of triumph quickly dampened, however, when the tinder began to flame out and she realized she had no split logs to keep the fire going. She looked around. Nothing, to either side of the hearth. Then she recalled the well-stocked woodpile outside the smithy, under the overhang.
After another slow, loving exhalation to nourish her small flames, she rose and dashed outside, gathering an armful of splits from the pile before hurrying back, all the while praying the fire wouldn’t die in her absence.
She knelt before the hearth—no more care for her skirts this time—and placed the thinnest of the logs atop the burning tinder.
The flames were immediately smothered, dying in a thin plume of white, elegiac smoke.
“No,” she cried. “No, no, no.”
She flattened herself to the hearthstones and huffed desperately, trying to rekindle the flame.
She couldn’t go back to Aaron and ask for more coals. He would know she’d failed before she’d even begun, and that she couldn’t perform the most basic of household tasks. What use could she ever be to him? It wasn’t as though they’d talked about marriage, but she wasn’t ready to foreclose the possibility.
“Please,” she begged. “Please, please. Don’t go out.”
And as if some pagan god of fire heard her petition, a small flame caught a notch on the underside of the wood. The fire began to gnaw at it, dripping morsels of ash.
Hosanna.
She fed the fire carefully, not daring to stray a pace from the hearth until she had a tall, respectable blaze.
When she felt it safe to rise, she gave the basin on the table a wary glance. She wasn’t ready for that fish just yet.
Instead, she found a knife and set about paring vegetables and adding them to a kettle of salted water. She managed three potatoes, two carrots, and an onion with only one slice to her finger. She bound her wound with a strip of linen torn from her handkerchief. The onion made a useful scapegoat for her silly tears.
After hanging the kettle on a hook and swiveling it over the fire to boil, she could no longer postpone the inevitable.
Time to gut the fish.
She went to the table and lifted the cover from the basin.
“Ah!” With a muted shriek, she dropped the cover. It felt back with a bang.
Oh Lord, oh Lord.
Several moments passed before she could bear to lift the cover again and peer inside. She hoped to see something different this time. But no.
There it was.
It wasn’t a fish.
It was an eel.
And it was still alive. Just angrily alive and now agitated, weaving slick, dark-green figure eights in its basin of murky water.
With a shudder, Diana covered it again. Then she drew out a chair and decided to sit and think for a while, about just how much she truly wanted this.
She closed her eyes and thought of Aaron’s kiss. The strength of his arms around her. The heat of his body, and the tender mastery of his tongue coaxing hers. She remembered their driving lesson. The joy of racing down a country lane, as fast as the spring mud would allow, with the top of the curricle down.
Then she pictured that eel, filling the basin with its writhing, slippery will to live.
She just couldn’t. Could she?
Diana opened her eyes and steeled her resolve. Some days, she decided, freedom meant the wind in your hair and the sun on your face and lips swollen with forbidden kisses.
And other days, freedom meant killing an eel.
She found the largest cleaver in the kitchen and gripped it in her right hand. With the left, she lifted the cover from the basin.
“I have nothing against you,” she told the eel. “I’m sure you’re a perfectly fine creature. But Aaron and I have something. And I’m not going to let anything stand . . . or slither . . . in the way of it.”
And just as she reached in to grab the thing . . .
It jumped.
It jumped clear out of the basin and—to Diana’s gasping horror—landed directly on her chest.
CHAPTER 5
Once Diana disappeared into the cottage, Aaron quickly lost himself in his work. He needed to get this piece right. If the jeweler was satisfied, it would mean a tidy sum in Aaron’s pocket—and more commissions in the future.
He did this finer work because he enjoyed it; the profit had always been secondary. He lived simply, and village smithing gave him more than sufficient income to meet his needs. But he was thinking about the future now.
Thinking hard.
He didn’t even realize how much time had passed until he looked up from the finished bracelet and saw it was midafternoon. Damn it. He’d left her waiting for hours.
He banked the fire, removed his apron, put away his tools, and locked the finished bracelet in his strongbox. Then he took a few minutes to wash at the pump before going inside. Wouldn’t do to go in all sweaty and covered in soot.
As he worked a soapy lather over his hands and forearms, his anticipation grew. This was like a dream come true. A day’s honest work at the forge, a well-made result, and Diana Highwood waiting for him at home, ready with a warm smile and a hot meal.
He ran his hands through his dampened hair to tame it, then entered the cottage through the kitchen door.
He found the place in shambles.
The room was cold. Every dish, pot, and spoon he owned had been turned out of the cupboards, it seemed. Peelings littered the floor. The acrid stench of burned potatoes hung in the air.
And Diana sat at his table, sobbing noisily, her head buried in her stacked arms.
“My God, what’s happened?” He crossed to her at once and knelt at her side. “What is it? Tell me.”
“It’s ruined,” she cried.
“What’s ruined?”
“Everything. Your meal. My life. Our chances.” She hiccupped. “The eel.”
“The eel?” He made attempts to soothe her, stroking her hair and back. “What happened to the eel?”
“It . . .” She squeaked out a little sob. “It got away.” A fresh burst of tears muffled the remainder of her reply.
“It got away?” He struggled manfully to contain his laughter.
“I had the knife . . . and it . . . it jumped. I didn’t know they could jump. Do you know they can jump?” She gestured wildly about her neck and head. “On my chest . . . in my hair . . . I couldn’t . . .” She coughed out an indelicate sob. “I flung it off me. It landed out the window, and then it got away.”
He glanced out the window she’d indicated. The weather had left the ground sufficiently wet and muddy that he could imagine an eel finding its way into a wheel rut and traveling a fair distance. It wouldn’t likely get far, but it could get away.
He laughed again. “I’d say that eel earned its pardon, then.”
“And then the vegetables boiled over, and the overflowed water put out the fire, and I . . . when I went to stoke it, a cinder caught me on the cheek. I’m sure it left a mark.” She lowered her head to her arms again. “Everything’s ruined. The meal is ruined, I am ruined. I’m too useless to be a working man’s wife, and”—her shoulders quaked with another sob—“and now I’m disfigured, so no gentleman will want me.
I’m going to die an old maid.”
As she spoke, her voice tweaked higher and higher. Until her last word was no more than a plaintive squeak.
“An old maid?” he echoed. “Because of one meal that went awry? Diana, I don’t know what to say. Other than to offer my congratulations.”
“Congratulations?”
He patted her shoulder, chuckling. “I grew up with a mother and two sisters, and all of them like to talk. And that is, undoubtedly, the most feminine progression of thought I’ve ever heard voiced aloud. One escaped eel, make you a spinster?”
She sniffled.
He pulled up a chair next to hers and reached to touch her cheek. “Let me see the burn.”
With reluctance, she offered her face for his view. “Is it very hideous?”
What a question. As if she could—ever—be anything less than beautiful in his eyes.
“This?” He pressed his thumb to the tiny red scorch mark on the gentle sweep of her cheekbone. “This is nothing. Barely noticeable, and it will fade in no time. I’ve had countless such burns myself.”
“And you’re still exceedingly handsome. So that’s some comfort.” She wiped her eyes with a shredded handkerchief. “You must think me ridiculous. I am ridiculous.”
“No, you’re not ridiculous. I understand.”
“How? Do you worry about being an old maid, too?”
He smiled. “I know we come from different backgrounds. But we’ve more in common than you’d think. I was the oldest child, too. And when my father died, I had a mother and two younger sisters to look after.”
“How old were you when he passed away?” she asked.
“Seventeen.”
“I’m sorry. That’s very young to be the man of the family.”
“I was old enough to take his place at the forge, thankfully. I threw myself into the trade, because I knew it was how I could keep my family safe. Spent so much time at that anvil, when I went to bed I pounded iron in my sleep. Then one day, I was shoeing a horse and put my hand in the wrong place at the wrong time. The horse caught my thumb and bit it, hard.” He lifted his hand to demonstrate. “My thumb was all black and swollen. I spent a week not knowing if the bone was crushed, too. Next to losing my father, it was the worst time of my life. I thought I wouldn’t be able to work. The family would starve . . .”
“Everything would be ruined.”
“Exactly.”
She nodded. “I see what you’re saying. You’re right, we are much the same. It’s not my vanity that’s pained, it’s just . . . I was always raised to believe the family depended on me. That my prospects—and to put it bluntly, my face—were our security.”
“So when your mind leaps from a scorched cheek to permanent spinsterhood, it’s understandable. But that doesn’t make it reasonable. You must realize you’re not responsible for your family anymore. Not since your sister married Lord Payne.”
“I know.” She dried her eyes and drew in a breath. “I don’t know why I’m sitting here weeping. I just wanted so badly for this meal to come out right.”
Aaron put a roughened hand over her delicate one, touched by the implication of her words. She wanted more than just the meal to come out right. She wanted this to work between them, and so did he. But it wouldn’t be easy.
“There’s hope yet.” With a fond squeeze to her hand, he stood. “Let’s clean this up and make something to eat.”
They worked together. While Aaron rebuilt the fire, Diana wiped the table and swept the floor—and then she ducked outside for a moment to wash her face and tame her frazzled hair. She did have some vanity.
She returned to find Aaron taking eggs and hard cheese from the larder.
“I hope omelette will do,” he said. “I don’t know any fancy cuisine, but I’ve become quite accomplished in bachelor cooking. Once my mother and sisters moved away, it was that or starve.”
“Omelette sounds wonderful.” She marveled at the way he could carry four eggs in one hand, holding them each separate with his big fingers. “Where did they move to? Your mother and sisters, I mean.”
“They both married sailors. One married a navy man, and she moved to Portsmouth. Mum went with her to help while he’s at sea. The other lives over near Hastings. Her husband’s a merchant sailor.”
“Do you have nieces and nephews?”
“Five so far,” he said proudly. He broke the last egg and added it to the bowl. “If you want to help, you could pare some shavings of that cheese.”
She gathered a board and a small knife, then set about slicing the cheese as thinly as she could. Simple as the task was, she still had a near miss with the blade. His forearms were every bit as distracting in the kitchen as they were in the forge. She was entranced, watching him whisk the eggs with a long-handled fork.
He was so good with his hands in every situation. It was hard not to imagine the wonders those hands could work on her.
She ducked her head and finished paring the cheese.
He took a skillet from a hook and cut a lump of butter into it before carrying it over to the fire.
While he cooked the omelette, Diana sliced a loaf of bread and set the table for two. A burst of whimsy led her to gather two china candlesticks from a high shelf, dust them, and fit them with tapers.
He smiled when he saw them. “That’s nice. Those don’t get used often.”
As they sat down to eat, she felt like she’d finally done something right.
“I’ve been wondering.” He jabbed at his food, gathering a man-sized forkful of eggs. “So you’re named Diana, for the Roman goddess of hunting.”
“And virginity.” Her lips quirked.
“Right.” He wolfed down another bite of eggs. “And then your next sister is Minerva.”
“Roman goddess of knowledge.”
“So where does ‘Charlotte ’come in? Shouldn’t she be a goddess, too?”
“She was meant to be. Those classical names were all the fashion in my mother’s day, and you know my mother is always concerned with the latest fashion.” She pushed the eggs around her plate. “She had the idea to name all her daughters after deities. I think Charlotte was supposed to be Venus. No, no. Vesta.”
He choked on his food. “Either is cruel.”
“I know, I know. My father’s name was Charles, and they’d been waiting to name a son for him. But he fell ill while my mother was pregnant the third time. I think my mother knew there wouldn’t be a fourth child, or any son at all. So that’s how Charlotte was named Charlotte and spared the cruelty of Vesta.”
He put down his fork. “I’m sure she’d rather have the cruel name if it meant having her father. I shouldn’t have joked.”
“Don’t be sorry. Nearly everything my mother does is ripe for ridicule. But occasionally she does mean well.”
They finished their simple meal all too quickly.
“Look at that,” he said. “The sun’s come out. Just in time to disappear again.”
“I really ought to be going back to the Queen’s Ruby. If I’m not there when dinner’s called, they’ll be worried.”
He walked her outside and they stood there, side by side, watching the sun sink toward the horizon. A fiery red ball, painting the clouds with vibrant shades of pink and orange.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“My father used to say, Christ might be a carpenter, but the Heavenly Father is a blacksmith. He melts the sun down every night and forges it again the next morning.”
Diana smiled. “What a lovely thought.”
“No, it’s rubbish. At least that’s what I decided after he died. If a good man slumps over his anvil at the age of two-and-forty, his Creator is no kind of craftsman. I inherited his forge, not his faith.” His chest rose and fell in a thoughtful sigh. “But then, every once in a while, I see something so finely made, so exquisitely wrought”—he turned to her—“I can’t help but wonder. Maybe he was right.”
He brushed a light touch down her
cheek. “Only a divine hand could make something this lovely. Christ, you’re perfect.”
She laughed a little. Partly because she was amused by his blend of reverent wonder and shameless blasphemy. And partly because it made her uncomfortable.
“I’m not perfect,” she said. “Not inside, not out.”
“You’re a terrible cook. That I’ll grant you. You can’t hold your liquor, either. And you have questionable taste in men. So no, you’re not perfect.” His voice sank to a husky whisper, and his gaze dropped to her mouth. “But you’re close. Close enough to restore a man’s faith in miracles.”
Her heart fluttered as he leaned in for a kiss.
“Dawes!” The call came from around the other side of the smithy. “Dawes, are you here?”
Diana jumped back, worried they’d been seen. And then she worried she’d offended Aaron with her swift recoil. Again.
“It’s fine,” he murmured.
She didn’t know which of her concerns he meant to allay.
For his part, he didn’t show any unease. He walked out around the smithy and greeted the man. Evidently a horse needed shoeing.
She heard Aaron speak to him. “Walk him around, and I’ll be right along. Just have to fetch something from the house for Miss Highwood.”
Diana patted her hands down her front. Gloves, cloak, reticule. She had everything she’d come with, but she followed him anyway.
“What was it you needed to give me?”
“This.”
He lashed an arm about her waist, pressing her up against the wall and claiming her mouth in a passionate kiss. No time for preliminaries today. He took what he wanted, thrusting his tongue deep and putting his hands in places that were just this side of scandalous. The light boning of her corset pressed into her torso—the one thing holding her together, while the rest of her seemed to dissolve.
“Right,” she breathed a few moments later. “I’m glad you didn’t let me leave without that.”
He trailed kisses toward her ear. His whiskered jaw scraped deliciously against her cheek. “I’m taking my work to Hastings tomorrow,” he murmured. “Invent some reason you need to go along. Shopping. Someone to visit. Anything.”
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