The Highwayman's Folly

by Daria Vernon

  She looked into his eyes and they held hers unwaveringly. His dark eyebrows drew up. The expression was uncomfortably earnest. Pleading, even. She’d been wrong about him once; could she not also be wrong about what she saw in his eyes now?

  Without looking down the embankment again, the dark image of its abyss crossed her mind. She swayed with weakness, trying not to show it to him.

  But her good shoulder slumped against the tree for support anyway. She leaned into it, allowed it to cradle her while her head swam with thought.

  “I’ve learned some things about you in the last few hours,” he said. “I underestimated you. You’re resourceful. Educated. Smart enough to glean that it’s an exceptionally cold and wet week of winter. It’s a couple hours yet ’til the sun is up, and even when she rises, she will shine from behind a blanket of rain clouds. That frock of yours, which barely kept you warm under the best conditions, is now wet and ruined. You know that you’re injured. You know that you’re far from home. And you and I both know that you’re lost. You probably know all of this and are considering it anyway because you think the alternative is worse. But it’s not.”

  Beth slumped deeper into the tree’s embrace, considering his words, knowing their cruel truth. She inhaled deeply, and the cold filled her lungs, foreshadowing the consequences of exposure. Still, how could she trust him? She scooted herself closer to the edge, where the hill ran steep again—

  “Please!”

  She looked to him, her eyes peeled wide by his note of alarm. Then she settled into his gaze.

  “Captain, I need to know—”

  “Please, you can’t call me that.”

  “Then what do I call the thief who is bidding for my trust?!”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He looked at the ground frantically, as though his eye contact might send her over the edge—quite literally.

  Beth’s chest collapsed from the brief exertion of outrage, and the wound at her collarbone reminded her of its needs with an evil stab.

  There was a long silence before he looked up again. “Rhys. My name is Rhys.”

  She stared at him. She could tell that the extended silence caused him discomfort—he shifted and looked up into the trees—but it wasn’t on her to make her captor comfortable. She had her own discomfort to consider.

  Rhys. Had he just offered up his given name?

  “Alright, Rhys. Where were you taking me?”

  “It’s an abandoned hunting lodge, utterly dilapidated. It’s neither clean nor comfortable. It’s just a hideout, a lumber house, but there will be fire in the old hearths.”

  “Those badgers will put their hands on me.”

  She watched him digest her fear. A penitent lowering of his chin acknowledged that he knew who and what she meant.

  “They won’t. I promise. I won’t let them. Trust me.”

  Trust me. She didn’t move or answer him.

  All her choices clashed noisily within her as images of different futures surged through her head. She saw herself dead and frozen at the bottom of the gorge but also saw herself on foot, spotting chimney smoke and running toward a friendly cottage. She saw herself coming home after many days, into her father’s arms, but then saw her wound festering until it took her life. She saw her father being swindled by these bandits as she was handed over to him. What if they didn’t just hand her over? What if they wanted more than just a purseful? What if they hurt somebody? It broke her heart to think of her father losing everything because of her.

  Yet there again was that vision of herself frozen amid the bramble. Her father’s heart would break much more were she to die.

  Beth sniffed against the tears that she’d only just realized were in her eyes. She wouldn’t let them spill.

  Rhys inched closer to her, still extending his gloved hand. The rough leather gauntlet had seen better days. His palm collected raindrops as she stared at it . . . thinking . . . grappling . . .

  Please, he’d said.

  Trust me, he’d said.

  She looked up again to the sky. Rainclouds made up the eerily glowing ceiling of the known world. Somewhere in the branches overhead, an early rising songbird began its call. But the hope of that song was strangled by the icy gusts that nipped against her shoulder’s flesh.

  Beth looked back at him, illuminated now by the misty morning light. His gaze glowed from beneath his cap as a wild animal’s does from the shadows of its den.

  So how was it that those piercing eyes could make her less afraid?

  She reached across the space between them . . . and gave him her hand.

  His fingers closed, ironclad, around their agreement. Sensing that she could not now pull away, her heart twitched, at this, the first small taste of consequence.

  The leather of that rough glove was now against her skin. The beads of rain trapped between their palms felt far too cold to not be ice, yet some semblance of warmth still escaped him. She soothed herself with that, trying to relax into her decision. Trying to accept her instinct to believe in him. Trying to hope.

  He moved over her with Dahlia’s tattered cape, wrapping her up in its feeble protection. From his coat pocket, he pulled some of the fabric that had been around her wrists. It must have been left on the slope behind her. Trust and hope shattered in her chest at the sight of it.

  Disbelief. Anger.

  “How dare you restrain me, when I’ve just—”

  She’d been right to assume she couldn’t ever just pull away. Both her arms went up to stave him off, but his movements remained fluid and unbothered by her protesting pushes at his arms. His strength, though undirected at her, made her feel as little more than a horsefly to him as he moved for her. “You can’t—”

  Wordlessly, he wadded up the fabric and pressed it to her shoulder before guiding her good hand to it and holding her hand there. Her next biting words evaporated.

  Sheepishly, Beth took over, applying a comforting pressure to the wound. Looking away, she allowed him to help her to her feet.

  Their trip back to the top was tedious, even with the rope. Rhys helped her and caught her whenever she slipped, but she exerted almost all her remaining strength in the crawl.

  “It’s gettin’ daylight up here. Can you move it?”

  Beth knew the obnoxious voice was Lionel’s. They could now see the rest of Rhys’ band looking over the edge. As they got close, Harry slid down a distance to meet them and help. He took Beth’s other side, and she was grateful that he was the one helping and not one of the other two. After staggering back onto the flat trail, she moved stoically toward her horse, trying to avoid the one called Lionel.

  It didn’t work. He came right for her.

  “Yer goin’ to learn a lot o’ humblin’ lessons while we’re watchin’ over you, let me tell you. Because you think you can get away or pull things like that, and yer mistakin’. We’ll—”

  Rhys interrupted him by pushing him out of the way. “You’re so antsy to get back on the road, are you? So then, let’s do it.” The troll slunk back to his own horse.

  Beth was surprised when Rhys guided her away from hers.

  “I’m afraid you’ve lost that privilege,” said Rhys, moving her around to his own horse. The real saddle, waiting there for her at eye level, looked so inviting to her weary haunches that she almost reached out and stroked it. Rhys started to put his hands at her waist, but she brushed him off, grabbing the saddle herself and bracing her left foot in the stirrup.

  Two hops, then she launched herself upward, just as Dahlia had taught her years ago during surreptitious rides astride.

  But she’d forgotten her shoulder.

  Her arm buckled, and she slipped downward, feeling Rhys’ palms catch her backside and elegantly assist. It happened so quickly that it was as though nothing had gone amiss. Lionel didn’t growl with laughter at her folly
, and the man who now stood at her heel said nothing derisive. Still, her cheeks flared from her stubbornness and a little, too, from the singed sensation that now ran up the backs of her thighs.

  Rhys put a hand to her lower back, scarcely brushing the nap of her wool. “Move up a bit.”

  She did, until she was positioned on the less comfortable slope of the pommel.

  She inhaled as he swung up, anticipating—

  His great weight slid against her, displacing her even farther forward as he dropped into the saddle. Every part of him was against her. She held her breath, at an earnest loss for how to exist in such a situation. Then she began to feel it. His heat. It permeated through her from her spine, thawing her. She closed her eyes and pictured frost melting from the edges of a leaf as she molded herself to the source of the heat, without another thought.

  The other riders passed by them as they got situated, and he didn’t seem to mind. He’d thrown her torn cape over her legs, to defend her now exposed ankles from the cold, and he had his own cape back on. With an arm around her waist, he somehow pulled her even more tightly to him before closing his own broad cloak around them. She sleepily grabbed its edges, taking it as her duty to hold it shut in front of them both.

  His large thighs tensed around hers as he gave the horse a gentle squeeze and he clicked his tongue to signal them forward.

  His cape was like a little shelter. Within its protection, he crossed an arm against her chest, palming her shoulder to keep the pressure on it. The fabric against it now stayed there on its own, where the dried blood had clung it to her. Yet even though the bleeding had stopped, she wished for his hand to stay. There was a comfort in the weight of his arm as it rose and fell with her breath, holding her upright even as it lulled her.

  Her cheek rested near his bundled neck. Scents of damp wool and pine emanated from his muffler. It drew her in, reminding her of days when nature was less cruel. Her eyes blinked against another drop of rain in her eye, and she retreated deeper beneath his chin. So near now that she could hear the gentle sound of his breath.

  Her spine stiffened then, and her tired eyes protested as they were peeled wide. Her heart was alert. Racing. Like the heart of a rabbit who senses a predator that it cannot yet see. Yet the arm that held her seemed to detect none of this. It was forged in place to steady her, to comfort her, and she was the warmest and most comfortable she’d been since leaving Ashecote. Her alarm softened into a warm, tingling sensation that stretched through her slowly before disappearing through her fingers and toes. The most comfortable she’d been . . .

  And all in a stranger’s embrace.

  Beth hadn’t realized she was falling asleep until she was waking up. Her eyes blinked open in the brighter light, but it was the rain picking up that had roused her. Rhys curled himself over her as the rain steadily patted down on the shoulders of his wool cape. The tip of his tricorn hovering over her kept most of it off her face. She liked the sound that the drops made as they pummeled the forest.

  Rhys shifted, and the movement brought to her attention that he’d rested a cheek against her hair. The arm that crossed her still held her firmly, but the hand with the reins now led the horse quite lazily from where it rested . . . in her lap.

  She didn’t have to look down to see it. She could feel it. The back of his large hand warming her skirts where they bunched up on the pommel. So many layers of fabric to separate them, and yet that hand—the hand of a man likely half dead with exhaustion—sent a crack of lightning through her as she let the heat of it seep into her, as she imagined . . .

  Behind her stays, the muscles over her stomach spasmed, and she drew in a ragged breath. She knew the sensation well enough, but she flushed with shame to feel it here.

  She shivered as though to shake off any other uncommon instincts.

  “Are you still cold?” The sound came so close to her ear that it raised tiny hairs at the back of her jaw.

  “No,” she mumbled, “I’m lovely.” Her eyes slammed shut. What an imbecilic response to give without any cut of sarcasm. Hopefully, she came across as a half-asleep fool who didn’t know what she was saying.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  She looked ahead. The other men were riding into a clearing, and as they approached the break in the trees, she saw more and more of the strangest house rising out of the mist.

  It was opulent and eccentric, looking much like an ornamental folly built for a lavish palace garden. The pretty windows—or what was left of them—exposed its true nature as a one-time residence. Ivy and other creeping things had consumed much of the creamy, marble facade. It was two stories but with a small footprint—likely only a few rooms top and bottom. It looked fairytale-like, almost too saccharine to exist.

  “It looks French,” Beth mumbled, not taking her eyes off it.

  “It is.” Rhys walked their horse to a crude hitching post. “It reminds me of follies I’ve seen in gardens on the Continent. So that’s what I call it—The Folly.”

  She whipped around at him in disbelief. Had she not just thought that very thing?

  His eyes crinkled, perhaps in concern, but then they changed. Was he smiling?

  “What?” he asked.

  She shook her head mutely, deciding to leave it.

  He slid off from behind her, and the loss of him and his cape exposed her to the rain and, in a sense, to reality.

  Hitting the ground, she found it to be a mix of slushed snow and the gravel of an old drive. All the men’s boot-soles crunched in its iciness as they tied their horses to the shoddy hitch.

  Rhys placed her hand on his arm and hurried them under the portico, out of the rain. Harry and Solomon rushed ahead of them to get the doors. Beth didn’t understand why that was necessary until they began to pry at the ornate entry. The hinges were strangled by woody tendrils that tugged and cracked as the doors were fought open. Lionel came up to assist the other two, with an ugly looking knife drawn.

  Beth looked down at her hand in Rhys’ arm, while the others worked on their entry. He rested a hand on hers as if they were just a cheery couple sidling up to a grand house for a fete. With a final hack of Lionel’s knife and a loud snap of protest from the ivy, the doors were opened.

  Once inside, Beth could see just how much of nature had invited itself in. A great room to the left had been almost entirely consumed by things of the forest. Decorative paintings of leaves on the walls blended into the piles of real leaves on the floor—wet and rotting. One window had been pushed out entirely by an intrusive branch. The wall around it crumbled too, and a keystone lay on the floor, calling the stability of the entire place into question.

  Small drifts of snow had blown into the room, leaving dark and soggy streaks on the herringbone floor. Some furniture was toppled and rotting, but other pieces were draped in white linens. Their ghostly silhouettes reminded her, with a pang, of what Ashecote had looked like when she’d closed the door on it the night before.

  The odor of the place was fusty but inoffensive. Now she knew what Rhys had meant by dilapidated.

  In front of them, the base of a grand staircase took up an exorbitant fraction of the ground floor. Unlike the rest of the place, it looked solid enough to hold up the sky. Beth drifted away from Rhys, taking it all in.

  “Harry, bring in our things. You know what to do with the takings. Lion and Sol, see to the horses.”

  “And what’s yer job, Captain?” asked Lionel.

  “Her,” he said, pointing to where he thought Beth was and then correcting to point to her by the stairs. Solomon wandered behind her like a watchdog. Clearly, she had no one’s trust.

  Lionel laughed at the captain. “You let our money run off again, and I’ll have no part in gettin’ it back.” He deliberately bumped against Rhys’ shoulder as he pushed past him to the door. “And I won’t be happy.”

  Rhys approached he
r, and Solomon decided it was all right to drop his guard and head outside. Rhys and Beth were alone at the bottom of the staircase.

  Beth kept her head down, observing the mundane routine of Rhys pulling off his gloves and rubbing his hands together. Before knowing what came over her, she reached up and tugged at the scarf on his face. He caught her wrist—fast as a viper—and pulled away from her. But the scarf now lay lopsided, and she could see the corner of a stubbled lip draw upward in a disarming way.

  He released her much more gently than he’d caught her and calmly unwrapped the rest of the scarf for the benefit of her rapt attention.

  Her idea of what he must look like had changed so many times over the course of the night, yet it was almost as if she had figured it out by dawn. So, while his face left her completely speechless, it wasn’t from surprise. She reached up again to pull down his collar and he allowed it.

  Instead of the pallor of winter, his skin was warm and vital. The tip of his nose was a little pink from the cold as hers likely was. A strong jaw was rough with short, dark hairs that threatened to become a beard. Strays of equally dark hair spilled out from under his hat to frame the penetrating brown eyes that she’d noticed before.

  “Tell me your name?” he asked, breaking the hold his eyes had on her.

  She swallowed hard. She wasn’t sure how she felt about giving that up. It still felt far too cooperative.

  He nodded, accepting her silence as answer.

  “Shall we?” He gestured up the steps.

  “Is the second floor even intact?”

  “Much more so than the salon.”

  He proffered his arm again, and Beth took it as they ascended. She caught herself escaping once more to her previous thought—that they were just another pair at a party, in a grand house, arm in arm.

  Chapter 5

  Rhys caught himself escaping into the moment as they ascended, savoring something . . .