‘It was never my intention to frighten you. Please forgive me if that was the case and accept my heartfelt thanks for your service to my sister.’
Selina shrugged—a fleeting movement of one slight shoulder. ‘It was what anybody would have done under the circumstances.’
Edward nodded as though she had said something more gracious. She really did have the most disarming manner, he thought. Not at all polished, or even very polite, but there was honesty in her words, a lack of affectation that was oddly refreshing.
He shouldn’t admire it; indeed, his interest in her was unnerving. Get a hold of yourself, man, he chastised himself uncomfortably. You’re not some green lad, swooning over a milkmaid.
‘Well. Thank you all the same.’ After a moment’s pause Edward delved into his waistcoat pocket, wrestling with something contained within.
Selina flinched backwards at the movement, glancing this way and that; she seemed on the point of darting away through the trees—
‘No! Wait.’ Edward held up both hands. Bunched in his right was a snowy handkerchief, which he held out to Selina as gingerly as he might on approaching a wild bird.
‘You have some mud on your face, and a scratch—it’s been bleeding.’ He smiled wryly, one hand moving to the moon-shaped scar below his right eye. ‘I know from experience that it’s best to treat such a wound as soon as possible.’
Selina stiffened, and Edward saw another complex look dart across her countenance before she regained her composure.
‘Oh. Thank you.’
She tentatively took the handkerchief from Edward’s outstretched hand, her eyes never leaving his face. He watched as she dabbed at her cheek and cleared the dirt from her skin.
She may well be the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.
For all the scratches that marred her face, she was strikingly lovely in a way totally apart from the celebrated society belles of his circle. The notion was unsettling: hadn’t he long thought himself immune to the charms of women? The fact that in that moment, with the trees whispering around him and leaves strewn at his feet, he found himself as vulnerable as any other man was alarming in the extreme.
He would disregard it. She confused him, straying dangerously close to stirring something deep within him that he wanted left undisturbed, and that he couldn’t allow.
When she tried to return the handkerchief, he backed away with a shake of his head. ‘You keep it. Call it a memento.’
‘I’m not sure how much of today I’m like to want to remember.’
Edward bowed. ‘I understand. Whatever else you might feel, I hope you won’t forget that you have a friend in me. If I’m ever able to repay your kindness I shall endeavour to do so. I pay my debts.’
Selina’s answering smile was strange and still mistrustful, as though she knew a secret she didn’t intend to share. She was moving away from him, backing out of his reach in the direction of the place where Edward had seen her horse waiting for her. He watched her go, wishing the graceful movement of her stride wasn’t so damnably intriguing.
‘If that’s the case, you owe me twice over.’
‘Twice?’
She was almost out of sight. Edward frowned as she turned away from him, confusion clouding into his mind. Twice? How was that?
‘Once for today. Once for before.’
She threw the words over her shoulder and with a whisk of her crimson skirt disappeared between the trees.
Selina gazed up at the ceiling of the darkened caravan, arching in a perfect curve above her head. Orange embers glowed in the grate of the compact stove set against one wall, dimly illuminating the gilt-painted woodwork of the shelves and bunks to gleam like real gold. A sliver of moonlight fell from one not quite shuttered window, slicing down to leave a pale splash on the polished floor.
Like all Roma women, Selina kept her vardo spotlessly clean, and even Papa, when he came to call for a cup of tea, knew to wipe his boots before he was allowed to cross the threshold.
A sideways glance across the narrow cabin showed her grandmother was asleep, the mound of colourful crochet blankets she slept under rising and falling with each breath. In the eerie stillness of the night even that small movement was a comfort.
Selina sighed. It’s no use.
Sleep evaded her, just as it had on the previous three nights. Each time she closed her eyes pictures rose up to chase each other through her mind: Edward as a young lad, on the day she had first encountered him all those years ago, attempting to smile through gritted teeth as she cleaned his wounded face, and then his adult counterpart, the blond curls just as vivid but his shoulders so impressively broad beneath his fine coat that Selina felt her heart beat a little faster at the memory.
Would that distinctive hair have been soft beneath her fingertips, she wondered, if she’d leaned down from her tree to touch?
The very notion made her breath hitch in her throat before she slammed the brakes on that train of thought, horrified by its wayward direction.
You can stop that this moment, Selina. What’s the matter with you?
At least the mystery of who he was and why she had encountered him there had been solved. Edward Fulbrooke. Ambrose’s son and Charles’ nephew. Perhaps she should have suspected, she mused as the image of his face drifted unstoppably across her mind’s eye once again, wearing the same dazzling smile he had flashed her mere days previously. But Edward’s father and uncle shared the same chestnut hair and ruddy complexion, quite unlike his cool fairness. There was no physical resemblance. And as for character...
Certainly as a boy he had been agreeable, she recalled as she lay in the darkness. He’d looked surprised to see her there in the woods, hunting for wild mushrooms, and she herself had felt nothing but sympathy for him at the state of his bloodied cheek. In those days she’d had no real reason to fear the gentry; Mama had still been alive, and in her childish innocence it had felt the most natural thing in the world to go to him, to help tend to his wound and to feel a slow creep of pleasure at having made a new friend who delighted her with his strange old-fashioned manners.
But then they had killed Mama. The Roma had left the Fulbrooke estate, never intending to return—and Selina’s hatred of the gentry had been burned into her heart like a brand.
It was just as well he didn’t remember me. He might have wanted to talk, otherwise, and that would never have done.
Selina shifted beneath her bedclothes, attempting to make her body more comfortable than her mind. The fact Edward had been just as courteous as a grown man as he had been as a lad was as surprising as her apparently instinctive attraction to him—and almost as confusing. The upper classes were renowned among her people for their contempt of the Romani, fostering the animosity that raged on both sides.
Had her care of Edward as a child opened his mind to the possibility the Roma were more civilised than he would otherwise have believed? she wondered. Or perhaps she was giving herself too much credit, Selina thought wryly. Certainly she was giving him too much space in her head.
The fact that she had slipped Edward’s handkerchief beneath her pillow meant nothing. There just wasn’t anywhere else to keep it. Zillah, with her hawk-like eyes, would spy it at once if she left it on her shelf, and carrying