His observation seemed like a criticism. She almost snapped, Whose fault is it that so little light remains? But she caught herself. He had agreed to help her when he didn’t have to, and she didn’t know what troubles he might have encountered on her behalf at the house.
“Set the pace. I can keep up,” she said, testing her knee under her skirts to be sure. Bess, ever Em’s protector, took her place beside Em’s leg, offering comfort and reassurance.
Adam directed Emmeline to the far edge of the forest. “We’ll wait until the morning to travel from your estate. Tonight we’ll stay where we won’t be found.”
“There’s nothing in that direction but forest.” Em folded her arms over her chest. “And while you may be used to pitching a camp in any terrain, I’m hardly dressed for it.”
“Do you intend to be this difficult for the whole journey?” His voice sounded simultaneously amused and annoyed.
Bess tilted her head to one side, her eyebrows meeting as she watched the pair spar.
“If my asking questions strikes you as my being difficult, then I suppose I will be.” Emmeline stared at him intently.
Bess lay on the ground and covered her ears with her paws.
Em ignored the dog’s commentary. “I intend to ask as many questions as I wish.” Though she’d meant to be gracious, her nerves were exhausted. She raised her chin in defiance. “I trusted you once, until I learned that trusting you is a fool’s game. This time I intend to be more circumspect.”
He faced her, his chin set taut in frustration. “It’s not going to be a quick business to avoid Lord Colin’s men. We’ll be traveling together for weeks, perhaps even months, depending on our destination and the weather. If we fight at every step, we’ll only make ourselves miserable.”
“There you are, being reasonable.” But she felt her annoyance fade as quickly as it had flared.
“Emmeline, I owe you this.” He picked up the pack and threw it over his shoulder. “I will help you because you asked me. But if you continue to berate me for the past, I’ll find another way for you to escape Lord Colin.” He paused. “I never meant to hurt you, and if I could change the past, for you, I would.”
She said nothing.
He sighed. “There’s an old folly farther into the woods from here. We can spend the night there, out of sight.”
She looked at him suspiciously. “Where?” But she began to make her way in that direction.
“You curve around those trees there, then . . .” He paused. “Can you simply trust me?”
“I believe I know the place you mean, but it’s a ruin. No walls, no roof.” She looked up into the sky, ever darkening. “And we can’t light a fire, or everyone for miles will know where we are.”
“It didn’t take much to make it habitable.”
“All that time you were living on my estate.” She felt as if he’d hit her in the belly. “Isn’t it time to tell me the truth?”
“I wouldn’t call it living so much as visiting.” He gave the last word a light tone. “I thought it would be safer to remain close . . . in case you needed me.”
“Why would I have needed you?” she asked sincerely, his soft tone having made all her frustration drain down her spine.
“The man you heard giving the orders to the cottagers was neither a rabble-rouser nor a revolutionary. Instead, he’s a very dangerous man, with connections to criminal gangs across Britain and the Continent.”
She nodded, taking it in, then stared him full in the face. “At some point you are going to have to explain to me how you are alive when you should be dead. You know that.”
He held out his hands in petition. “I always intended to explain everything, but once you were engaged, my explanations seemed unimportant.”
“It never felt unimportant.” She heard the pain in her own voice, but she didn’t explain. She feared that if she did, she would open wounds that could never close.
“At some point I will explain everything—I promise—but not tonight. We are tired and hungry, and that makes us both short-tempered and unforgiving.” Adjusting his pack, he pointed her through the forest.
Eventually they reached a section overgrown and impenetrable even in winter, where a thick veil of brambles blocked their path.
“This way.” He pointed into the brambles.
“Through that? You haven’t any way to cut through it, unless that pack happens to contain a machete,” she objected. “Luckily, the ruins are in that direction.” She pointed farther into the forest, away from the brambles before them.
“I didn’t say ruin. I said folly.” He motioned for her to step to the side of a large tree, where the brambles grew up against its trunk. “Follow me?”
“Lovely.” She stared into the thicket. “I’ve recruited Robin Hood to help me escape.”
“I’ve always wanted to be Robin Hood. A gallant outlaw who defends the defenseless. And will you be my Maid Marian, mavourneen?”
She said nothing, just followed him behind the tree. There, at a break in the brambles, he stepped several feet forward, then turned to the side, and disappeared entirely from sight.
She waited a few moments, then called out. “It’s a maze?”
“Nothing so elaborate as that, merely a thick hedge of brambles through which I cut a path at angles. Can you follow me?”
She stepped into the space he’d left, then turned to the side just as he had. She came face-to-face with another hedge of brambles. Bess growled low in her throat and crouched low, as if the brambles were a human adversary.
“Turn back right. Then take two more steps.”
She followed his directions and stepped into a small clearing. Bess, behind her, sniffed the ground. Across from her stood a folly, surrounded by tall trees and the thickets that grew below them.
Em turned around, surveying the area with wonder. “It’s a perfect smuggler’s lair.”
“I was afraid it might become one, if anyone found it. It was one reason I conscripted it myself.”
“Who else knows this is here?”
“Your great-grandfather kept it as a secret hideaway.”
“But who told you?”
“An old man in the village. Your grandfather left him a pension to keep the place up, which he did until shortly before his death. When he learned I was a friend of yours, he gave me directions on how to find my way in and how to trim the thicket to obscure the entrance. After that it was easy. The folly is quite well built.”
“So, let me understand this. My grandfather kept up my great-grandfather’s
