concern creasing his brow. “Are you all right?”
She let out a long, unsteady breath, and her fear dissipated into embarrassment. Now he would think she was a flighty, clumsy mess of a woman, as well as an eccentric. For all that she was used to being disliked, for some reason it cut her to the core that this man might share in those opinions of her.
Her dress was heavy and cumbersome, but she wouldn’t accept his hand, not when she was so vulnerable. With considerable effort, she scrambled to her feet, nearly tripping on her hem.
He stood, hand still out as if he didn’t quite trust her to manage on her own. She teetered for a moment, swaying into him before regaining her balance. Before the breeze wound between them, she caught the faint scent of sandalwood and whiskey. It had been so long since she had been touched, at all, by anyone, never mind an astonishingly attractive man. She found herself wishing she could take his hand. “Quite all right,” she said briskly when she finally found her voice, taking a good step back.
He gave her a look of lingering concern but only nodded. “I didn’t think that you—” He stopped himself, though Sophronia knew what he was going to say: I didn’t think that you ever left your house. Clearing his throat, he just said, “The path up was overgrown, and I didn’t think I’d see another soul.”
She pretended she didn’t notice. “It’s the highest point in Pale Harbor. In the summer, the blueberries will be ripe, and in the winter, when the trees are bare, you can see clear across to the old lighthouse beyond the harbor.”
“I should like to see that,” he said.
She gave a grim little laugh. “You say that now, but you’ve yet to experience a winter here. Bleak doesn’t begin to describe it.”
“And yet you brave it to come up here.”
“Well,” she said, bristling, feeling the need to defend her home, “there’s a beauty in the bleakness. If there wasn’t, the endless months of snow and gray would be enough to make one go mad. Besides, it’s part of my property.”
She wasn’t sure what perversion made her say that, other than she felt he should know that she did exert some control, that she was not a completely ridiculous person.
She waited for him to redden and stammer an apology, but he only leveled a curious look at her. “Is it now?”
“It is.”
He nodded without further comment, squinting out into the distance. The shadow on his jaw she had noticed the other day had lengthened into the beginnings of a beard. It became him. Parlors and manners and polite society didn’t suit him, and his broad frame looked much more at home here on the rocky hill than it had folded into a chair in her parlor. Unlike her, he was not trapped in a cage of his own construction. He came and went as he pleased, beholden to no one and nothing. An acute pang of envy ran through her.
The breeze was picking up, the sky darkening, and she began to wish she had brought a cloak after all. To change the subject, she asked, “And what brings you here? Gathering inspiration for a sermon?”
He reached into his pocket and held up a notebook, the pages blank. “Something like that.” Although he didn’t smile, there was just a hint of chagrin in his hazel eyes. “I thought a walk might get the words flowing.”
Should she warn him that he might write the most illuminating sermon and it would only fall on indifferent ears? The people of Pale Harbor were not exactly keen for outsiders to come to try to enlighten them. When Mrs. Whittier had come from Rochester and tried to start an abolitionist society, there had been such an uproar that she had been forced to abandon her plans and had eventually left town. The townspeople might fill the pews and listen with upturned faces, but their hearts and minds would not bend from the prejudices that shaped them. Sophronia hadn’t the heart to dash the minister’s naive hopes, though, and so she bit her tongue.
Pocketing the notebook, he gave a shrug, as if the sermon and the inspiration for it were suddenly unimportant. “And what brings you out here?”
“I was craving some fresh air,” she said, omitting the reason for it.
It would be so easy to let her guard down with a man like this. A man who looked at her with eyes as warm as cinnamon, a man who did not judge her or ask anything of her. But neither did he want to offer her anything, as it was becoming clear. He did not wish to engage with her about his church, and he certainly did not seem interested in sharing his thoughts.
“Well, I don’t want to frighten away any inspiration,” she finally said, turning to leave. She would go and calm her racing mind, seek her solitude elsewhere, and leave him to the privacy he so clearly craved.
“Wait.” His hand shot out and he caught her by the elbow. She froze.
“Please,” he said without removing his hand, “don’t leave on my account. I trespassed on your property. I should be the one to go.”
His hand was big and his grip strong, his fingers encircling her arm like a manacle. Panic sluiced through her, and suddenly it was Nathaniel clamping his hand around her in his bruising grip, berating her as if she were a contrary child. She let out an involuntary gasp, wrenching her arm away from him as hard as she could.
At her cry, he released her, dropping her arm like a hot coal. He took a hasty step back. Through her receding panic, she saw the alarm on his face.
Safe. Safe. You are Safe. Just breathe.
She hadn’t bothered with a corset today, and she was glad of it as she gulped down the cool, salty air like a tonic. “I...you’ll have to excuse me,” she said with a shaky laugh. But when she nervously looked up at him, there was no sign of humor or understanding in his expression, only intense scrutiny.
“No excuse necessary,” he said, his graveled voice dropping to a soft murmur. “I shouldn’t have taken the liberty.”
She bit her lip, burning under his level gaze.
“Would...would it be possible, do you think, for us to start over?” She didn’t want to be the woman whom he’d heard rumors about, nor the woman who had flown into a panic at an innocent gesture of goodwill. Most of all, she didn’t want to be pitied.
For a moment, it seemed like he would not answer. He dipped his head, rubbing at the back of his neck. When he looked up again and met her gaze, his face broke into a dazzling grin. It was glorious, lighting up his whole face and flooding her stomach with warmth. “God, yes.”
A weight lifted from her shoulders. His smile was infectious, and she found herself grinning back at him.
He stuck out his hand. “Gabriel Stone,” he said. “And you must be Mrs. Carver.”
With only a second of hesitation, she put her hand in his and shook it. This time, she did not shrink back from his touch, instead letting the warm strength of his grip envelope her. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Stone.”
It seemed silly to cling to such formal conventions when they were surrounded only by grass and open skies, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask him to call her by her given name. But oh, Lord, what would it look like spoken on those sensual lips of his?
“When I come up here I like to sit.” She pointed to a little depression in the ground
