Judith Ivory by The Indiscretion

Author:The Indiscretion [Indiscretion, The]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2012-04-25T12:31:21+00:00

12

When Lydia recognized Rose, she glanced at Sam, and the words just popped out—in an emphatic, almost embarrassing whisper. “Don’t say anything.”

“About what?” Beside her, he was barely paying attention. She watched him in profile. He’d put on his vest, though it hung open. He’d set his hat on the back of his head, the brim up as his gaze followed Rose’s progress.

She shrugged out of his grasp. “About—you know—that I—that we—”

Behind her, he laughed. “Why would I say anything?”

“I don’t know, just don’t.” Even to her own ears, she sounded curt.

“All right,” he said, humoring her.

She made a stiff nod.

On horseback, Rose descended the hillock, she and the animal skidding down the last of the embankment so quickly they plunged into the river with a rooster tail of water whooshing, horse and rider screaming.

Lydia crossed her arms, hugging herself. There she stood, Sam just behind her, Rose careening toward her. With a sense of disaster growing in the pit of her own stomach. Chaos. Fear, worry. Emotions bubbling up so fast she could barely grasp one before another replaced it: resentment, loss, surprise; discovery, exposure. Laid open to judgment.

She couldn’t remember ever having anything she wouldn’t tell Rose—or if not Rose, Clive or Meredith. Yet at her back stood a secret, six feet three inches of secret, that she couldn’t imagine sharing with anyone. Sam was a good secret, she told herself. Never had she felt so free and capable and purely happy as she had with him out here on the moor. Yet she could think of no acceptable explanation she might offer for what he and she had done out here, not to Rose or her brother or cousin. Her mind went blank when she tried. And she loathed the feeling of not wanting them to know something about her.

Little, round Rose was out of breath when she dropped from the saddle onto the ground. Being winded, though, didn’t stop her from running toward Lydia, talking, and gasping for breath all at the same time.

“Oh, Miss Lydia,” she said on the intake, then on the exhale, “I can’t tell you how relieved, why, we thought that, well, just anything could have happened, and Meredith and her brother and your uncle and aunt, oh, we’ve all just worried our heads sick.” She stopped in front of Lydia, her hand to her chest as she took another deep breath. “The young Mr. Linton and his Lordship are on the east road, while Miss Meredith is just over the next ridge, goodness, we’ve been searching for days and couldn’t even find the coach, though the horses came back, it just disappeared into the thin air, we didn’t know what to think, then a fog set it, you wouldn’t believe, it was so thick we couldn’t see the horses under us, but then today, we’d been riding since dawn, and we saw a wisp of smoke—”

“Oh, stop,” Lydia said, letting out weak laughter—better than crying, though for the life of her, she wanted to do both.

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