Lenora couldn’t count the times she had visited the Elven Pools. There was a peace about the place that drew her time and again. It was here she had first found her passion for art, here she had strengthened the bonds of friendship with Margery over hundreds of picnics and imaginary battles and swims in the chill water.
And here she had found a friend in Hillram. Until he had gone and done the last thing she wanted and proposed to her.
Sighing, she started down the path that led to the base of the pools, only realizing after several seconds that Mr. Ashford didn’t follow. She peered back at him, still atop the rise. The wonder on his face struck her to her very core. Of course he would be overwhelmed by the beauty of it. Hadn’t she when first she’d clapped eyes on it, following like a duckling behind Lady Tesh, her hand clasped firmly in Margery’s? She returned to his side, looking down at the scenery, trying to see it through his eyes.
Like steps, the pools were staggered down the hillside, each one bigger than the last, fed from the one before it by meandering trails of water that bounced and gurgled merrily over the rock. As lush as the vegetation had been on the way here, the area around the pools was craggy, pure stone with a smattering of plant life, the bowls of the pools carved into the rock over millennia of rushing water. Yet despite its sparseness—or perhaps because of it—the pools were things of heart-wrenching beauty. Every stone and rock that lay slumbering beneath the translucent surface was visible, colored in vibrant shades of turquoise, azure, emerald, indigo. The tinkle of a dozen miniature waterfalls sounded in the air, lovelier than the finest music, more melodic than a symphony orchestra.
“I didn’t know anything like this existed in the world.”
Instead of shattering the moment, Mr. Ashford’s deep, rumbling baritone enhanced the magic of it.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it?”
“More lovely than I imagined.”
She smiled. Here was the Mr. Ashford she was coming to know, without all his bluster. He looked at her then, his eyes warm, full of an emotion she had never witnessed in him. She took a hesitant step closer, overcome by the sudden urge to reach out, to place her hand on his cheek…
“Lenora,” Margery’s voice reached them, “where shall we set up the easels?”
Lenora gasped, stepping back from Mr. Ashford. He looked equally shaken. Clearing his throat, he gave a few deep harumphs and, holding her supplies in front of him like a shield, hurried down the incline with long, strong strides.
Her face hot, she fought for composure as she followed him. It took her some seconds to find her voice. “I do believe the best view will be up that small bluff,” she called out to Margery, trying with all her might to keep her tone even—and her eyes from Mr. Ashford’s backside. What in Hades was wrong with her?
By the time Lenora joined them, Margery was busy directing the men in the placement of the easels.
“So,” Mr. Nesbitt said as he stepped back from his handiwork and looked out over the landscape, “these are the pools where fair Synne seduced a Viking lord.”
“She didn’t seduce anyone,” Lenora said, shrugging into her smock and turning about so Margery could do up the tapes. “As a matter of fact, she wanted nothing to do with Ivar.”
Mr. Nesbitt raised an inky brow. “Really?”
“Oh, yes.” Lenora smoothed the front of the smock as Margery finished, then turned to help her friend on with hers. “You must remember, of course, that a mere century before, the Norsemen had invaded the island and stole from the monastery. People were killed, perhaps some of Synne’s own ancestors. She wouldn’t feel kindly toward Ivar and his ilk.”
“Yet she grew to love him.”
Mr. Ashford’s voice was soft, almost contemplative. And it did strange things to her insides.
Lenora cleared her throat, focusing on unpacking her paints as she answered him. “Yes, she did.”
A thick silence fell, broken only by the call of a bird and the soft clatter of their supplies as they finished laying everything out.
It was Mr. Nesbitt who spoke, his cheerful voice banishing the tension in the blink of an eye. “Come along, ladies. You can’t keep us in the dark after teasing us with so little.”
Lenora smiled, looking to Margery. “Do you think they can handle it? It is a love story, after all.”
Her friend’s brown eyes twinkled merrily. “It serves them right if we leave them squirming.”
Laughing, Lenora peered over her shoulder at the men. Mr. Nesbitt had found an obliging rock and was lounging on it now, his long legs crossed at the ankles, his face full of good cheer. Mr. Ashford stood with his large feet planted wide, his thick arms crossed over his chest, looking as forbidding as he had when he’d first arrived on the Isle.
But what was that surreptitious little glance he gave her? Was the man waiting for her to speak?
Smiling to herself, she turned forward, adjusting the brim of her bonnet. “Synne snuck away from the village every chance she could. She came here to the Elven Pools often. It was her safe haven, and being hidden as it is, the Vikings hadn’t found it.”
“Until Ivar came upon her,” Margery chimed in.
“And spied her bathing,” Lenora added with a grin.
“Lenora!” Margery said on a gasp, laughter threaded through the shock.
“What? It’s the truth. Your grandmother used to tell us as much when we were children.”
“It’s different now,” her friend mumbled, her face flaming as she poked through her pencils. “You’re an unmarried woman, and there are men present.”
“Just think of us as one of the girls,” Mr. Nesbitt called out.
Again Lenora’s gaze found Mr. Ashford. Not likely.
“I daresay Synne was not pleased to be caught in flagrante delicto,” Mr. Nesbitt prompted.
“She was furious,” Lenora answered. “From all accounts, she pulled a knife on him.”
“Where, I wonder, did she hide the knife?” Mr. Nesbitt drawled.
As Lenora and Margery choked on their laughter, Mr. Ashford growled low.
“Quincy.” The warning in his voice was clear.
“Oh, don’t tell me you weren’t wondering.”
“That’s beside the point,” he answered through his teeth. “There are ladies present.”
“Very well.” Mr. Nesbitt bowed his head in their direction. “My apologies, ladies. Please forgive me my barbaric Americanized ways. You were saying that Synne pulled a knife magically from the air…?”
Lenora fought back a grin. She had a feeling Mr. Ashford would not appreciate it in the least. “She went after Ivar, but he refused to fight back, though she drew blood. That tree there”—she pointed with her pencil to a tree not far from the largest of the pools, the only one that had dared to root itself on the craggy rock—“was said to have grown from the place where his blood was spilled.”
“But he didn’t die,” Mr. Ashford said, his voice stern, as if he were berating her for the story taking such a turn. “You said yourself they fell in love here at the pools.”
“No, he didn’t die,” Lenora assured him. Was it her, or did the man give a sigh of relief, his massive shoulders relaxing some?
Her heart twisted with…what? Affection? Flustered, she cleared her throat. “Synne realized her mistake in wounding him. If he died, her entire family would be made to pay. She quickly set about tending to his wound right there on the bank of the pool. Folklore says the magical properties of the pools healed him, bringing him back from the brink of death.”
“By then, of course, Ivar was completely smitten with Synne,” Margery added. “He never once revealed what she’d done, he was that in love with her.” She smiled at Lenora.
“Yes, he was,” she murmured. She was silent for a moment, thinking of the great brute Ivar, his heart snagged by small, ferocious Synne, protecting her even as she hated him so. “She didn’t trust that he wouldn’t reveal her secret, of course. She visited him day after day, demanding he tell her what he wanted in exchange for his silence.”
“And each day he told her the same thing, that he wanted only her heart,” Margery said with a small, happy sigh.
“Only her heart?” Mr. Nesbitt mumbled. “Not even a kiss? Not sure those Norsemen were the most intelligent of creatures.”
“Quincy,” Mr. Ashford growled again.
“When he was well enough, he asked to join her at the pools,” Lenora said, ignoring the small exchange. “She always refused. Until one day she didn’t.
“And though you may think the worse of him for it, Mr. Nesbitt,” she added, “he didn’t so much as steal a kiss. He won fair Synne with his conversation and his company. And each day she grew to love him more than the last. Until finally she was the one to ask him for a kiss. And that, as they say, was that.”
“He had a beautiful maiden begging him for a kiss?” Mr. Nesbitt stroked his chin. “Well then, perhaps Ivar wasn’t such an idiot after all.”
Mr. Ashford let loose another growl, like thunder echoing through the small valley.
“Lady Tesh did say late morning was the best light for painting the pools,” he grumbled, shooting his friend a long-suffering look. “Perhaps we’d best get to it then.”
Ah, yes, the painting. For a moment, Lenora had been so wrapped up in the story of Synne and Ivar that she had forgotten Lady Tesh’s reasons for sending them there—and her own reasons for needing to visit the place.
Hillram. His face swam up through the murky depths of her memories, earnest, full of love as he’d proposed. Guilt flared with it, and a pain so acute, she nearly gasped. Shaking her head, she pushed the image away. First, painting, she told herself desperately. Once that was out of the way she could face her remembrances. Squaring her jaw, Lenora turned to her paper and lifted her pencil.
The lines came without conscious thought, the tip of the pencil flowing across the parchment with the same certainty of the water that flowed over the rocks below. Here was the fluid line of water meeting boulder, there the graceful arch of a waterfall. Soon a precise sketch was laid out.
But all the while she sensed Mr. Ashford behind her, watching her. And suddenly the image before her wasn’t enough.
She saw in her mind what it could be: the swirl of movement under the water’s surface, the mix of color like in a sorcerer’s cauldron, as if the pools were alive with magic. There was a rock that resembled the craggy face of a troll. Beside it, a sparsely leafed plant, stretching up for the heavens, drinking in the warming rays of the sun.
The desire to capture that scene washed over her with frightening force, years of denying that part of herself quickly transforming it into a wave that crashed over her head, nearly drowning her in sensation. Fighting against the pull of it, she gasped and stepped back. Her pencil fell from her fingers to clatter to the stones at her feet, a harsh sound in the still peace of the place.
“Lenora, are you well?”
The familiar sound of Margery’s voice grounded Lenora. She managed a wan smile.
“Of course I’m fine. Just a hand cramp is all,” she lied.
Margery frowned. “Perhaps we’d best take a break for a few minutes before we add paint.”
“Yes,” Lenora mumbled, “perhaps you’re right.”
As Margery moved off to see to her things, Lenora hugged her arms about her middle and looked out over the pool. The force of her desire to draw what was deeper than the surface still thrummed inside her. And it frightened her witless. After three years of being denied, it seemed to have grown into a wild thing, a feral beast that demanded attention. She could not unleash it again.
“Miss Hartley, your pencil.”
Again that electric jolt as Mr. Ashford’s deep voice sounded in her ear. She looked down at the pencil he held in front of her, noticing the way his strong fingers gripped the thin wood, at the play of muscles and tendons beneath the sun-darkened skin. His knuckles were scarred, the nails blunt and painfully short.
She took the pencil from him, the remnants of warmth from his skin on the wood seeping into her and grounding her. “Thank you.”
He stood at her side, silent. Finally he said, “Perhaps I’d best go after them.”
Blinking in confusion, Lenora looked up. Margery and Mr. Nesbitt had walked off a way, no doubt to explore one of the many pools. As she watched, they kneeled down to inspect something, disappearing from view behind an outcropping of rock.
“Damnation, I told him to take care,” Mr. Ashford bit out.
“You worry about Margery?” She gave a small, humorless laugh. “You may rest assured, Margery is quite safe with him.”
“You don’t know Quincy.”
“No. I do, however, know Margery. And I can say with utmost certainty that she isn’t affected in the least by your friend’s charms.”
“How can you be so certain?”
She gave a small sigh. “The love my friend had, and still has, for her late husband is uncommonly strong. She mourns him deeply, though you may not know it looking at her. She’s as loyal as they come and will not betray his memory by allowing herself to be seduced by a rake, if you pardon my calling Mr. Nesbitt such.”
“No offense taken, for that’s just what Quincy is.”
Lenora laughed softly.
Margery and Mr. Nesbitt popped into view again, working their way over the rocks to the next small pool.
“How did he die?”
“Margery’s husband?” Lenora kicked at a small stone with the toe of her half boot. “At Waterloo. He wasn’t supposed to have gone off to war. They’d been married a mere six months before he bought his commission. I never did learn why he insisted on going. Margery doesn’t talk of it.”
“And she won’t love again?”
“No,” Lenora said.
“And you?”
Lenora looked at Mr. Ashford, stunned by the soft question. He seemed equally shocked.
“Please,” he muttered, “forget I asked that.”
As if she could. The question preying on her mind now, however, was why he’d asked her. Flustered, she bent down, picked up a smooth rock from the ground, and chucked it out over the water. It fell with a splash, the pale blue of the disturbed water shining like diamonds in the sunlight for the briefest moment.
“And so this is where Hillram proposed to you.”
She cast him a startled glance. He was frowning at the lone tree in the clearing, as if highly offended by its presence. When his eyes found hers, they were solemn, and almost gentle.
“You don’t have to tell me about it if you don’t wish to,” he murmured low.
She was tempted not to. Mr. Ashford had known pain and would understand if she wanted to keep her own private.
Yet she found to her shock she wanted to tell him. Here was someone who didn’t know Hillram, who wouldn’t look at her with pity, thereby increasing her guilt tenfold.
But more than that, she felt a connection to this man, one much stronger than she’d ever expected.
She took a deep breath, letting the memory through, carefully probing it for pain, like a toothache. It was there, but so far bearable. “Yes, he did,” she replied hesitantly, “by that rock. We’d come here for a picnic, the last one of the summer before the weather turned. He dropped to one knee on the bare stone. I was worried for his trousers but he laughed. He told me that starting our life in a place so dear to his family’s history would guarantee our future happiness…” Her voice trailed off and she clasped her hands together tightly, vaguely aware of Mr. Ashford’s warmth by her side. It gave her comfort, and the strength to look deeper into the memory.
She’d known the proposal was coming, of course, and had dreaded it. As the day of her departure approached, she’d begun to hope she would escape it. But then he’d asked her to go to the pools, and she’d known she wouldn’t escape. She’d accepted him, seeing no other option, knowing it was expected of them, knowing it would make everyone, even her father, happy.
Everyone except her.
Mr. Ashford cleared his throat once, twice. “This place must inspire romance then.”
She blinked. “I’m sorry?”
He waved a hand impatiently at the scenery. “The mythology surrounding this place, all that talk of elves, giving it a sense of magic. It certainly inspired romance between Synne and Ivar.”
“I might have thought so, long ago,” she murmured.
“You don’t now?”
“No,” she answered without hesitation.
His brows lowered. “Why?”
She let out a tense breath, wishing they were talking about anything but this. “Because, as much as I love the story of Synne and Ivar, what’s romantic about it? He left her, with a small child to care for. And though she eventually married another, it’s said she grieved for him the rest of her days.”
He was silent for a moment, standing beside her, looking out over the pool. And then he observed, “Like Romeo and Juliet. People sigh over the love story. Yet it’s the worst tragedy.”
“Yes. Yes, exactly,” she replied. “Mere children, in the throes of passion, acting without thinking. And they lost their lives because of it.” She tilted her head, considering him. “But how do you know about such a tale?”
His lips quirked. “My mother insisted on it. She was a gentleman’s daughter, though she fell far after my father lost nearly everything we owned.”
His eyes closed briefly, as if in intense pain. Lenora longed to reach out, to lay a comforting hand on his arm.
Before she could, he straightened, seeming to physically shrug off the pall that had fallen around him. “But don’t think you’ll get out of it that easy,” he said, spearing her with a stern glare. “You can’t mention that Ivar left Synne and not finish the story.”
She blinked. “Well, I can’t tell you the story of his leaving when you’re just learning how they fell in love.”
He stared at her as if he couldn’t quite believe she’d denied him. “Tell me what happened,” he demanded, with all the officiousness of a Viking lord ordering a servant—Ivar come to life.
She managed to hide the smile that fought to break free. The man had spent the last week holding himself aloof. Yet now he was begging to hear the rest of it, like a child at bedtime.
“That, I’m afraid, is a story for another day.”
He frowned. “You refuse to tell me?”
“Lady Tesh wouldn’t approve.”
“Hang Lady Tesh!”
She snorted in laughter, quickly clamping a hand over her mouth to hold it back. At his disbelieving glance, however, she lost the fight entirely. She doubled over, her arms going about her middle as she shook with the force of her mirth. She laughed as she hadn’t in too many years, the sound of it rolling on and on, bouncing off the boulders and back at her.
Just as her laughter began to subside, he spoke.
“I don’t see what’s so blasted funny.”
And she was off again. Tears streaming down her cheeks, she gasped for breath. Yet still the laughter came, the release of it incredibly freeing. It was as if something had been unlocked within her in the last minutes. As if, in sharing something of herself with Mr. Ashford, a secret chamber of her heart had been opened.
As she wiped at her tears, clearing her vision, she noticed he was striding away from her.
Immediately she sobered and ran after him. “Mr. Ashford, I’m so sorry,” she called to his retreating back. “I wasn’t laughing at you. Well, I suppose I was, but it wasn’t to make fun of you. Mr. Ashford, will you please slow down.”
But the man made no indication he’d heard her. Frustrated—because, really, it wasn’t as if she’d been able to control it—she reached out and grabbed hold of his arm.
He spun to face her. Her hand, firmly attached to his sleeve, went with it, throwing her off balance. She stumbled forward, landing with a soft exhale into his chest.
The wind seemed to hardly blow, the birds quieted their calls. Even Lenora’s heart seemed to falter in her chest. She stared up at Mr. Ashford, her breath trapped. He stared back with wide eyes, so close she could see the darker blue outlining his iris, could hear the soft rasp of his breath. His arms came about her, bands of steel that anchored her to his chest. A chest that was amazingly firm and wide.
Her entire body flushed, awake with heat and life. Every inch of her thrummed, pressed from breasts to knee to his hard planes. So close, she could feel his heartbeat against the suddenly sensitive tips of her breasts.
Her fingers, trapped between their bodies, convulsed in the fabric of his coat. As if they could tether her against him, a port in the increasingly vicious storm of her emotions.
Though she feared that he was in truth the eye of the storm, the center of it all.
His mouth hovered above her own, his breath fanning warm over her face, drugging her senses until she could hardly see straight. She felt the mad urge to rise up on her toes, to press her lips to his…
He swallowed hard, his throat working. “Perhaps,” he said, his voice quieter, more strangled than she had ever heard it, “it’s time you returned to your painting.”
Mortification reared up, blocking out the maelstrom of feelings that had momentarily overtaken her. She pushed away from him and stepped back. Feeling the loss of his arms as they fell away from her like a blow.
“Yes,” she managed. “Of course.”
Turning from him, she walked back to her easel. Forcing the doors closed once again on the Pandora’s box of desire and tenderness—and mayhap something much more—that was churning inside her. Though she feared the lid no longer fit, and she would never be able to lock it again.