The Queen of Fairies she came by,
Took me wi’ her to dwell.
She knew the song—“Tam Lin”—the story of a young man loved by a human maid and enthralled by the Faerie Queen to be sacrificed for the harvest. His lover had saved him by pulling him from his horse and holding him tight as the Faerie Queen changed him into various forms. Through all his transformations—wolf, bear, lion, then finally fire—his lover had refused to release him, until the Faerie Queen conceded and turned him once more into a human man. Emmeline felt the story deep in her chest as he sang, his voice a rich baritone smoke that enveloped her.
Was he a human man enchanted by the faeries? Or was he a daemon lover come from faerie land to seduce her? In that moment, enchanted by his voice and the place, and spurred by a loneliness she rarely acknowledged, she’d met his eyes. Deep pools of amber and green. She felt dizzy, as if their souls—through their eyes—had touched, revealing him as alone and lonely as she had always been. The sense of connection, of knowing, had caught her breath.
Setting his lyre down carefully on the stone, he’d stood to face her, never letting his eyes leave hers. He’d remained several steps away, watching her.
His eyes had asked, and hers had answered.
She’d closed the distance between them, and he’d spoken to her in a mahogany whisper. Mavourneen. My darling.
When he’d leaned forward, she met his lips. His kiss had been soft, tentative, but, as she’d met him passion for passion, their kisses had turned hungry.
Had his song not touched her memory . . .
Had they met at noon, not twilight . . .
Had she not been so alone . . .
She shook off the memory.
A tall root of a tree inched its way across the path. Lost in her memories, Emmeline caught her foot on the root, and she stumbled, righting herself with her walking stick. She paused, her heart beating hard. She carefully tested her leg; it twinged but didn’t ache. She needed to move more slowly. If she hurt herself, she would be trapped. She listened for anyone following her through the woods, but heard nothing. She slowed her pace.
Her fancies always failed her.
Then, as if by magic, she was at the clearing. The giant oak’s branches made patterns of light and shadow on the forest floor. The branches didn’t extend to the altar rock, and there, the light fell in a warm pool.
She made her way to the rock. To keep from soiling her dress, she laid out her shawl, then pulled herself up to wait for Adam. The winter birds whose song had accompanied her through the forest were quiet here.
The silence left Emmeline with only her thoughts and memories. What did it say about her that she’d chosen to run from Colin, a supremely honorable man, with Adam, his opposite? Colin was committed to safeguarding the nation (and her), while Adam was intent on disrupting every social and political more, all in the name of reform.
She’d spent months refusing any thought of Adam, except in dreams. But now, knowing that she needed to be honest with herself, she let herself remember everything, each day from their first kiss to their last encounter. She retraced it all, every moment. Her memories of their passion warmed her like a physical touch. Her fiancé’s kisses had never felt so decadent or so necessary. And the knowledge of Adam’s deception tore at her gut once more.
Loss, grief, abandonment, hope: all had led her to behave foolishly with Adam. But none of them offered her a way forward.
She couldn’t forget that they both had blood on their hands. Would he think that helping her to escape also reconciled their other differences? Could she travel with him without wanting either to love him or to kill him? She could tell herself it was a second chance to prove to him that they could build a future together. But would he believe it now when he’d rejected it so soundly before? And did she even want him to?
Chapter Five
Knowing a dozen ways to slip unnoticed from Hartshorne Hall, Adam left Queen Bess patiently waiting and threaded a path to the wing farthest removed from both Emmeline’s drawing room and the chapel. There, he slipped out of the house to hide between the hedgerows until he could reasonably rejoin the wedding guests.
He removed his glove and ran his fingers across the silver unicorn in his pocket. He’d given the necklace to Emmeline not long after they had become lovers, a promise—when he had no other one to give—that he would never abandon her. He’d paid a pretty penny for it, at a time when his spare pennies were few.
Their improbable first meeting in the forest had made him unwilling to lie to her, unable to forget that moment when their souls and hearts had seemed to touch. Sometimes it required a bit of ingenuity—eliding questions and omitting details—to tell Emmeline only the truth. He’d already spent weeks creating the character of Adam Locksley, and he couldn’t tell her about his own life without contradicting the stories he’d made up for everyone else, so he avoided telling personal stories entirely.
Though he’d wanted to know everything about her—how she’d received her scars, why her father lived abroad while she ran the estate—to keep things fair between them, he refused to ask for her personal stories as well. And he turned a dumb ear when others brought up her name. Before they met, he’d known only that she had an uncanny, but potentially useful, talent for recognizing voices. Lord Colin, telling a story about a party at Emmeline’s, had inadvertently revealed that talent to their superior officer, Joe Pasten. By the time the Home Office sent him their research on Emmeline, he had refused to read the report.
He pressed the tip of his finger against the unicorn’s horn. When he’d given it to her, saying she was fearless as the unicorn, she’d refused the compliment. “A unicorn,” she’d said, “is merely a horse with a congenital defect.”
Her bright mind had made her an engaging conversationalist, and their talks had included everything: books; ideas; current events, both at home and abroad; politics and political theory; dreams and hopes. But none of it had made any difference in the end. She’d found out all the lies he’d told to other people, never realizing he’d told her only one: his name.
He turned the unicorn over, feeling the tiny ridge that held an engraved address where she could send it, if she needed him. He’d agonized over what to put there, unable to use his own address without telling her his true name. He’d eventually decided to use the address of one of his informants, someone who could know who Adam Locksley was and where to find him. Once everything between them had fallen apart so badly, he’d assumed that she’d never use it, that she’d never be so desperate as to call on “a scoundrel of the worst order,” as she’d called him. But she had. Even so, in her drawing room, he’d insisted on knowing that she was serious about leaving Colin at the altar.
He looked at his watch. By now all the guests would have been informed that the wedding had been canceled. Though he hated to think of how his old friend Colin felt about being jilted at the altar, he was relieved that Em had run.
He rounded the end of the house to see the guests circulating around the chapel doors. Some distance away, the Duke of Forster and his brother Lord Edmund stood in close conversation with Lady Wilmot’s solicitor, H. William Aldine. Adam raised a hand in greeting and made his way to meet them. It was time to put the next part of his plan into effect.
The men stepped apart, welcoming him into their discussion. A fourth man stood beyond them in the shadow of the doorway: Joe Pasten, deputy director of the very secret division of the Home Office, where Adam had first met Forster and his Somerville brothers.
“We were hoping you’d come to the wedding.” Forster patted his shoulder. “We’re determining how to address the problem of Colin’s missing bride.”
“When I heard the bride had bolted, I thought a walk through the woods toward the village might be wise,” Adam offered, knowing a half-truth was more sustainable