SOPHIE HAD TO scramble to keep up with Lancaster’s long strides. They followed the main street out of the village square and headed down the route that she normally took.
“Of all the paths I’ve taken so far, this is my favorite street in the village,” she told him—his back really—still scampering to keep up. “It’s like something out of a storybook.”
Lancaster stopped so abruptly that she very nearly crashed into him. He turned slowly and looked at her.
“Not all storybooks have happy endings, Sophie.”
She was going to tell him to stop being such a sober-sided spoilsport all the time, but something in both his tone and his eyes stopped her. His gaze rested on her, somber, for a long time. Long enough that she felt a shiver go down her spine as he turned from her and faced a side yard of one of the houses.
Like the houses on either side of it, the garden was adorable. Enclosed in a low stacked-stone fence, the flower beds had been cleaned for the year, and the long-since-finished blooms cut off the shrubs, but even in the evening light, the fall color was resplendent. That beautiful autumn smell was in the air: wood smoke curling out of chimneys, crushed leaves, damp soil.
“This is where it used to be,” he said, his voice low and pained.
For a moment, she didn’t know what he was talking about. But when she looked at him, she felt a wave of his pain wash over her. It wasn’t in his features. They were carefully schooled to show nothing at all. But there was something in his tone, his eyes, the subtle heave of his shoulders that spoke of a burden almost too great to bear, even for a man as colossally strong as Lancaster.
It occurred to her, now, that it wasn’t a yard at all. It was where a little cottage had once stood, an arm’s length from its neighbors.
“It’s a wonder the whole street didn’t go up,” he said softly, his eyes moving to the thatched roofs that she had always admired as unbelievably charming.
He didn’t have to say anything else. He had told her this story, once. He had been off the island on a training course. The cottages—at the time she had only imagined them, and she had not imagined anything quite so charming as this—still had the traditional open hearth and chimney in them. The ensuing investigation determined a child’s toy had been left too close.
He didn’t have to say anything tonight. Not about the fire. Not about his loss. She knew the message he was giving her. This was where the fun had ended for Lancaster. A man like him, who gave himself so completely, who had such a strong sense of honor and duty, might never recover from what he would see—forever—as his greatest failure.
It would make no difference to him that he wasn’t there. That the incident had been totally out of his control—out of anyone’s control.
That’s what he was telling her.
In a way, it was a warning to her, and she knew that. But in another way, he was also trusting her with something of himself that he kept hidden, guarded from the world and the well-meaning sympathy of the neighbors.
She could see their love for Lancaster and his family in this beautiful garden. Far back, under a tree whose branches drooped under the weight of gold and red leaves nearly the same color as Lancaster’s hair, she saw a bench. It had a stone angel beside it, a winged mother who held a babe.
This wasn’t a side yard to one of the cottages. Maybe she should have seen that before. These little cottages had no side yards. It was a small park. A memorial.
The sadness that gripped her was so strong, she might have wept. Except that to weep would soothe something in her. And there was something larger in her that asked what she could do to soothe him.
She suspected many had tried. But this place he was in was deep and dark and treacherous and she knew it was a place words could not touch. It would take amazing bravery to enter that space with him, and yet Sophie, who had never thought of herself as brave, entered unhesitatingly.
She slipped her hand into his, she connected with his agony, she accepted part of his burden as her own.
Sophie had known Lancaster for four years. She had longed for something from him that she could not quite define.
This was the closest she had come: a moment of deep, inexplicable connection.
She thought he would feel it, too, and slip his hand out of hers immediately, but no, he accepted her hand as if he had waited for its small comfort for a long, long time. His hand was warm in hers, the strength that had been so sorely tested pulsing through it.
She was not sure anything had ever felt so right, or so pure, as standing there on a foggy street holding the hand of a man who was watching his ghosts.
Finally, he took a breath. It was long and shuddering. He let go of her hand, and turned away. They made their way silently back up the steep climb to the castle.
He did not remind her she had claimed to have a donkey in her purse. The lightness was gone from both of them. She did not speak to him at all. Sophie felt no desire to break the silence between them. The silence was a communion that felt nearly sacred.
He saw her to the door. “Please don’t go to the hot springs tonight,” he said, his voice a rasp of weariness.
“I won’t,” she promised him. He turned to go.
She laid her arm ever so lightly on the back of his, and he turned back to her. She drank in the squareness of his chin, the silk of his fog-dampened hair, the depth of those green, green eyes. He did not pull away from her touch, but waited, returning her gaze, until reluctantly she took her hand away from his arm.
She watched him walk toward the darkness, watched with an aching heart, the power in that stride, his great sense of his confidence in being able to control the world. He had shown her his greatest failure.
It occurred to Sophie that ever since she had met him, she had seen Lancaster through the lens of herself. How he made her feel and how she wanted to feel.
But now she saw what he had possibly seen all along.
That was how a child viewed the world, seeing the world and everything in it, including people, as toys to bring them pleasure. Even her engagement had felt like an attempt to create a picture that brought her a sense of comfort, safety, belonging.
Is that why her fiancé had told her it was over? That he felt her heart wasn’t in it? Because he had seen that what she called love was just an effort to make a fairy tale out of reality?
Lancaster had to have known all along, from the first time she had met him when she was eighteen and become totally and unreasonably infatuated, that her romantic view was going to meet the obstacle of reality, and be crushed.
But in this moment, it did not feel as if the reality of his sorrow was crushing her. Her heart felt both so bruised and so wide open.
And standing watching the mist swallow him whole, she had an epiphany.
What if she added a mission to her stay on Havenhurst? What if it wasn’t just about helping Maddie, who didn’t really seem to need her help very much, anyway? What if she was able to give a gift to Lancaster that he was sorely missing?
She thought of his laughter earlier, and how she had known what a rare thing that was. She went to bed and mulled over her plan.
* * *
The next morning she called him, using that ancient rotary dial phone in the nursery that went directly to him.
“I’ve decided I want to go to that Irish band thing at the pub.”
Her announcement was greeted with silence.
“Spoons?” she reminded him.
“I know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you might want to come with me. I think me, and a few drinks, is more than poor Ricky can handle.”
That should make him remember the last time he’d been with her, at the christening. He wouldn’t want her inhibition unleashed on one of his guards, she was fairly certain of that. It was a mark of her commitment to this mission that she would deliberately turn his thoughts in the direction of one of her most humiliating moments.
That night came back to her. It had been absolutely magical being part of the beautiful occasion of Ryan’s christening with Maddie and Edward. The connection of the prince and princess had been so strong, their love for one another shimmering in the air. Lancaster and Sophie had been connected, also, made a couple, by the grave honor that had been bestowed on them.
Godparents. They had spoken vows over that baby that had been so like marriage vows: that they would be there for him together as long as Ryan needed them.
Sophie, looking at Lancaster as he held that baby so tenderly, and yet with such fierceness, had already been drunk on the feeling of knowing him. Knowing herself. Knowing what she wanted. And needed.
Had she remained sober, she might have kept it all to herself. But the Champagne had gone down way too easily, and she lost count of how many she had. It made her feel courageous and effervescent and unbelievably sexy.
She had seen the look in Lancaster’s eyes as they had followed her. That feeling of knowing him had kept growing stronger as the evening progressed.
Until, finally, she had tugged him out onto a darkened balcony, bracketed his face with her hands, looked into it and felt the truth.
“You are my future,” she had told him. “I’ve always known.”
She had kissed him. And he had answered. As if he had always known, too.
But then he had put her away from him, his face the same stern face that he had shown those schoolgirls who had tried to flirt with him.
“Lass, I cannot be who you want me to be.” Canna. And he had walked away, leaving her with a sense of drowning in her own humiliation and questioning her own intuition, the intuition that had told her, with absolute certainty, the truth about him and her and the future.
All that history leaped between them, now, over the phone wire, fierce and smoldering.
But then Sophie reminded herself how unreliable her intuition really was, because she had given it a second chance. Right until she had caught Troy with someone else she would have sworn her fiancé was devoted to her and only her.
So, this was not about rekindling anything, and Lancaster’s tone, when he answered her, made her realize what a good thing that was.
“Fine,” he said, his voice icy, not because of their shared history, but because he thought she had not seen what he had revealed to her last night. He thought she had not heard him at all. He thought he had trusted her with the deepest part of himself and she was being cavalier with that trust.
In fact, she had heard him completely. And now she was going to do something she was ashamed to say she had not done very often in her life.
She was going to figure out what Lancaster needed and how to give it to him. Not to benefit herself, except that it might aid her in getting over her own sense of heartbreak and failure if she helped another person.
What did Lancaster need? The very thing he resisted the most, as if any kind of frivolity, and kind of fun, was a betrayal of the memories he held and the great loss he had sustained.
“And please don’t wear your uniform,” Sophie said. “It just makes me feel terribly conspicuous. As if I’m a prisoner under escort.”
Silence.
“Tomorrow, then,” she said. “It starts at eight. Bye.”
She put the phone back in its cradle. “Buckle your seat belt, Mr. Major, the ride is about to begin.”
* * *
She wasn’t quite sure what a person wore to the pub in Havenhurst, so Sophie chose an outfit she would have worn to any concert, and she had been to many of them. She put on one of her favorite dresses, yellow with a parrot pattern on it. The skirt flared in a delicious swirl right at her midthigh. She coupled it with a colorful pair of cowboy boots and a denim jacket. She left her hair loose, and dabbed on just a touch of makeup.
“Really?” she told her reflection. “Girlfriend, you are practically screaming fun.”
Lancaster, of course, was completely punctual. He looked amazing in his very lack of effort to look amazing: a casual light blue sports shirt, a brown leather bomber jacket, pressed khakis, loafers. But his expression was aloof. If he noticed how fun she looked, nothing in his eyes gave it away.
“I hoped you might wear a kilt,” she said to him, trying to tease a bit of that aloofness out of him. But he was not going to be teased.
“A kilt is part of our dress uniform,” he told her, his tone formal. “They are worn only for very special occasions.”
He led her out to a waiting car and held open the door for her. Despite the fact he was not wearing a uniform, he seemed very much on duty. At least he held open the front door of the car for her.
“How was your day?” she asked, when it looked as if he intended to ignore her completely.
“Busy. Yours?”
“Peachy. You know that red fluffy bear that Ryan packs around?”
“Sammy,” Lancaster said.
She shot him a look. It told her more about him than he would care to know that he knew the name of Ryan’s favorite toy.
“The wonderful future sovereign of your nation flushed him. Of course, he’s too large to go down. Or his head was too large. But Ryan was screaming bloody murder and the toilet overflowed and there was water running all over the nursery.”
She glanced at Lancaster out of the corner of her eye. The most reluctant smile tickled his mouth.
“I’m surprised your team didn’t arrive expecting terrorists, really. The nanny, Caoimhe, apparently has a phobia, so she wouldn’t touch it, and she got up on a stool in a corner so as not to get her feet wet. I think she was having the vapors or something.”
“Vapors? She’s a trained professional,” Lancaster said disapprovingly, but he was still trying not to smile.
“I’m not throwing her under the bus. Everyone has their weaknesses—remember me and vomiting?”
“Trying to forget,” he said. “But vapors? Those horrible virtual cigarettes?”
Sophie could not have been more pleased! He was engaging in spite of himself.
“No, no. Not related to vaping. Vapors. It’s an old-fashioned word for a sudden fit of fainting helplessness. Used in romance novels.”
“Ah,” he said, as if that explained a great deal about her.
“I’m not given to such things,” she clarified, meaning both vapors and romance novels, though, of course, in her worst moments, that was exactly what she turned to. Romance novels, not vapors. Or vaping.
“Huh,” he said, with a total lack of conviction. He seemed to remember his unspoken vow to not enjoy himself and not to add more than monosyllables to the conversation, so she gamely held it up on her own.
“That left me to extricate said Sammy from his watery trap. He came out with a tremendous pop and splatter that practically undid Caoimhe—”
“You’re a bit off on the pronunciation, it’s Kwee-vah.”
Multiple syllables, she congratulated herself!
“Thank you. So, Kwee-vah was having a heart attack, and now I had a very wet and unhygienic stuffy to deal with. Ryan was leaping at me like a maddened monkey trying to get his hands on Soggy Sammy.”
Sophie actually heard a muffled snort. She cast him a glance. Yes, indeed. Suppressed laughter.
“I would have liked to have passed off the cleaning and care of the bear to a qualified staff member but oh, no, Ryan, having had his friend rescued from near death, was not going to be separated. So, dragging a screaming prince, who had attached himself to one of my legs, I found the castle laundry room. Good grief, I think it used to be a dungeon. It took most of the afternoon to wash and dry the bear. Thankfully, after quite a momentous escalation of his tantrum, Ryan fell asleep on the floor. With one hand pressed firmly to the dryer that held his BFF—that’s best friend forever—and one thumb in his mouth, which made it quite easy to love him again.”
Lancaster had managed not to laugh out loud, but his smile was full-blown.
“And then, after Ryan went to bed, I went to see Maddie and she actually got sick seven times in a row, which I think is probably a world record, but which put me off my own dinner. So, basically I am starving, in need of adult company and ready to have a bit of fun. Thank you for asking. Will there be dancing?”
“Sorry?”
“Dancing. At the event tonight?”
“I certainly hope not,” he said, his smile replaced instantly with glumness.
And then she laughed, and it teased another most reluctant smile out of her escort.
“There will be dancing,” he said. “It’s our way. But I’m afraid you will probably just want to be a spectator.”
“Look at this dress,” Sophie said. “Does it look like something someone who wants to spectate would wear?”
He considered this, not even trying to hide his trepidation. It was clear, if he could think of a way out of this, he would.
But he parked the car, and walked down a cobblestone street to the pub. It had a sign out front that announced it was the Black Cauldron Free House, established in 1586.
“Oh!” Sophie said. “Another incarnation of the Black Kettle.”
It was like something off a postcard: the building was a Tudor style that seemed to be leaning capriciously to one side. They stepped inside.
“It doesn’t look like it’s changed much in the ensuing four hundred or so years,” Sophie called to Lancaster over the noise of rambunctious patrons. The floor was stone, and uneven. The ceilings were low, and the place was being held up by blackened beams that looked as though they had survived a fire. Long, rough tables were set out in rows.
She glanced at Lancaster. His eyes were narrow as he surveyed the very crowded premises. He was in warrior mode.
She could not help but notice the looks that were sent their way. He might as well have worn his uniform. Everyone knew who he was, and it made them curious about her.
She had intended to give him a carefree evening, to coax him to have some fun, but she clearly saw that this particular venue was only making him more alert, more on guard, more on duty.
“It doesn’t look like there’s any room,” she said, disappointed.
Lancaster already had his shoulder against the door, eager to leave.
But then, just when Sophie thought her plan to coax Lancaster to have some fun had been thwarted by an uncooperative universe—who was she to decide what anyone else needed, after all—someone called his name.