Page 14 of The Autumn Wife (King’s Girls #3)
Back on the convent grounds, in the dim quiet of night, Cecile yanked the cork from a wine bottle, tossed it on the riverbank, and took a long, deep pull.
The sweet red wine slipped down her throat like cool satin.
She sighed at the warmth spreading through her and sank back on the brace of one hand to lift her gaze to the heavens.
A smoky haze from the inferno still hung between land and sky, dimming the view of the stars and filling the air with the stink of ash.
But the red glow in the west had disappeared now that the fire was quenched.
Toward the east came a faint lightening, the first hint of dawn.
The Saint Lawrence River lapped against the shore beyond her feet, a siren’s call to strip down and wash the grit from her hair and skin.
But right now, the wine was doing valiant work calming her after the trauma of the inferno…and the searing memory of a bare-chested Theo, battling the flames like some warrior in a hero’s tale.
She took another long draw of wine.
“Can’t sleep?”
She didn’t flinch. She hadn’t heard Theo’s approach but, if she were honest, she’d admit—at least to herself—that she’d chosen to come to this quiet, secluded riverbank in the hope that he would eventually follow.
She’d seen the scars on his back.
She had so many questions.
“Here.” Head averted, she thrust the bottle at him, wondering if he was still bare-chested, taking a moment to gather her wits in case he was. “This might help with sleep, if you’re struggling too.”
He folded his stone-muscled body to the ground beside her before taking the bottle from her hand.
So careful, he was, to not touch her fingers.
How did he know that he unsettled her? His simple presence—even now—stole her breath, set her heart pounding, and made her stomach knot with uncomfortable feelings she couldn’t name.
No. I mustn’t be a coward. She braced herself, swiveling her head to face him—only to discover Theo had cleaned up, his hair damp and showing the tracks of a comb, his chest covered by a clean linen shirt. Another uncomfortable feeling spiraled through her, but it wasn’t relief.
Take hold of yourself, Cecile.
“Those burns.” She shifted her gaze to the blisters rising on his knuckles. “I have an unguent back at the—”
“No need.” He took a swig of wine and wiped his lips with his sleeve. “My hands are hardened from mortar—I don’t feel the sting. Save the ointment for others who need it.”
Of course he’d say that. She turned away from the sight of his long, strong throat as he swallowed.
She fixed her gaze on the far shore, where the forest stretched as black as ink, as impenetrable as the nature of this convict who’d saved her son’s life and kept a baby porcupine as a pet.
A man whose whip-disfigured back reminded her that he’d committed a terrible crime and bore the scars of the consequences.
Never, ever would she be able to put together the pieces of this man in a way that made sense.
Why did she keep trying?
“Such a destructive fire.” An inane thing for her to say, but she needed a safe topic of conversation. “I counted at least a dozen homes destroyed.”
“Several warehouses as well.” He offered her the bottle. “It’ll take a week for the wind to blow away the stink of burnt pelts.”
“The hospital was spared, at least.” She took the bottle but didn’t drink. She was already dangerously light-headed. “I heard a rumor that a woman started the fire, a servant—”
“A Mohawk captive,” he corrected. “Or so said the crowd shouting accusations in the street.”
She heard the suspicion curdling his words. “You think they’re wrong?”
“A fire could be started by anything.” He pulled a piece of grass out of the ground and shredded it. “A spark rising from a chimney. A torch fallen from a sconce. A badly stacked hearth fire spilling beyond the hearthstone onto a basket of wool.”
“Or arson,” she added. “How else would the rumor start? Maybe someone saw the woman set the fire and reported it.”
“Everyone wants a scapegoat.” He tossed the fragments of grass away and brushed the remnants off his breeches with more force than necessary. “And the authorities need somebody to hang.”
The question shot to her lips— were you a scapegoat?
—but she stopped it behind her teeth. Until this past June, she had fervently believed that everyone who had been convicted of a crime was a wicked, unredeemable villain.
After June, she’d spent every day and every restless night trying to convince herself that some crimes could be justified…
because if she was mistaken about that, then she was an unredeemable villain.
Etienne, too.
“Theo.” His name fell from lips on a breath, as did the question to which she now needed an answer. “What were you convicted of?”
“Theft,” he answered, as if he’d been expecting that query from her forever. “Theft and murderous assault.”
She flinched, remembering Theo grappling on the dusty ground with Jules.
Dear heavens. A smarter woman would have stomped on her own curiosity and continued to avoid Theo in an excess of caution, but instead, here she was— reckless fool—tearing down the wall between them.
She raised the bottle and took another hefty swig, then settled it on the grass.
His voice rumbled in the darkness. “You’re still here.”
“I am.” As foolish as it might be.
“Most people would run away.” His chest rose. “After all, you’re sitting alone with a violent criminal on the banks of the river under the cover of night, so far away from others that no one would hear you scream.”
Her throat tightened. “I know.”
“You’re a brave woman, Cecile. In so many ways.”
She didn’t feel brave. She felt confused, conflicted, and addled to the point of being unable to make sense of the storm of feelings the presence of this man set loose inside her.
She couldn’t look at him right now, yet she was intimately attuned to his breathing, to the warm, muscular bulk of him shifting at her side.
Though every tendon in her body vibrated, she couldn’t even tell if that trembling was due to fear.
“Thank you,” Theo murmured into the silence. “I almost forgot what trust feels like.”
Did she trust him? She knew better than to trust any man. A new pressure rose up in her chest, the front wave of the old terrors. To hold it off, she blurted, “Are you guilty of those crimes, Theo?”
“Not of theft.” He leaned back on his hands, the muscles in his arms bulging under his weight. “But I am guilty of murderous assault.”
Such a casual confession of a brutal crime, the words ringing in her ears. “So…you murdered a man?”
“No.” His jaw tightened. “Though, in the moment, I wanted to, very much.”
His words kicked her, but not in a way that thickened the pressure in the back of her throat, or set her stomach dropping. Instead, those words jolted through her in bright recognition, for she knew how it felt to want someone dead with every fiber of her being.
“I’ll tell you the story,” he continued against the shush-shush of the lapping river.
“I’ve got nothing to hide. Every spring, we—the stonemasons of Guéret—made a pilgrimage out of our village to find work in the bigger cities.
That year, I led a crew toward Paris, where we had already been hired to raise a city building. ”
She imagined Theo on the roads, trowel tucked into his belt, a linen bag slung across his body, men following in his wake. Easy to imagine, for she’d seen how well he worked with others upon the scaffolding and, tonight, how men during a fire followed his lead without question.
“We weren’t far outside the gates of Paris,” he continued, “when I noticed a stopped carriage and the coachman sitting across the road with his back to it. I thought the coach needed repair for a broken axle or something. Then, on the ground by it, I noticed an overturned basket of posies. The kind of flowers poor girls gather in the fields outside the city, around that very road, and then head to Paris to sell on the streets for a trifle.”
She sensed how this story would unfold as an image of Theo hurling himself toward Etienne to save her son shot through her mind.
“The coach was shaking,” he said. “Noises came from inside, a girl’s muffled cry—”
“It’s hardly a crime to save a girl’s honor,” she interrupted to stave off the grim details.
“It’s a crime,” he corrected, “when the man who abducted the girl from the fields is a viscount.”
She bent her knees up to her chin. “He was a nobleman…and you set your fists flying, didn’t you?”
He shrugged. “My men pulled me off the beast before I could do too much damage. The viscount was bloody, roaring with fury, but the masons hurried me off to Paris. No sign of the girl anywhere. She’d grabbed her basket and run away.”
Cecile knew why the girl had run. There was no remedy for that kind of assault, not for the victim.
Not even if the poor girl had been the viscount’s wife.
Noblemen committing that kind of violence considered it their privilege, and so remained unrepentant, unpunished, undaunted.
Free to commit the same crime again, over and over.
Cecile rocked, forcing back memory, aching from the depths of her being for an impossible wish—that, back before that terrible June, she had had a defender as strong and big and reckless as Theo, willing to risk his own life to pull a monster off of her, and set her and Etienne free.