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Tilly continued her daily rounds, collecting eggs, weeding the garden. The fawn she now dubbed Rose nibbled at the pink flowers that grew near the outdoor worktable. She got on her knees and rubbed the fawn behind the ears. “You like your name?” Rose kept eye contact like their dog had once done, making Tilly believe the deer was especially evolved and definitely agreeing to be hers.
She cut and polished the mother-of-pearl, all the while daydreaming about Landon, how tender he was. She stopped and touched her lips, closing her eyes, a gentle breeze brushing over her skin recalling the fluttering touch of Landon during the night. Perhaps she’d been unfair to him.
No. The word crept to mind as often as the pleasant thoughts. She couldn’t get past him pushing her to sell her land to him, as though him buying it would make the raping of the cove less painful. She shuddered at the thought of the claws he described. She’d heard of them before. The mechanism, the way it worked caused her skin to burn, as though being scraped with the very claws that could remove dozens and dozens of mussels at one time.
Better Landon is gone.
She finished the necklace for Mrs. Carson, mixed more hide glue and finished the boxes for Alice and Earle. And as she thought of Alice’s story of her sleeping with Earle, Tilly finally understood a hint of what her friend had been saying. Heat rose in Tilly’s body as she recalled Landon’s lips against hers, the gentle sweetness, the way it all had made her want to press herself against him. She finally understood Alice.
Yet... he’d asked her again. So casually suggested he could make her life better by taking her beloved property. She focused on that piece of who he was. She couldn’t trust him no matter how her body responded to his presence. That she couldn’t control how she felt about him, around him, made him the most dangerous thing of all.
