The sea of Zaitounay Bay reflected the sun like a metal sheet, and the glare blinded Catriona through the flimsy screen of her travel veil. For a while, she had shielded her eyes with her hand, but eventually her arm had grown tired. Waves crashed ceaselessly against the wall of the promenade, salt coated her lips. Sensations of home, of Applecross, though notably warmer and brighter; still, she clung to this vague sense of familiarity to keep calm. Peregrin had left the hotel yesterday morning, now it was afternoon and there was still no sign of him. It had been impossible to stay indoors, trapped with vivid mental scenarios of Elias married to someone else, of Elias disliking her, of him scratching her from his memory. The hotel was behind her, a few hundred yards to the left. She might have to return for a drink of water soon, the glass of sweet lemonade she had bought from a street vendor earlier seemed a distant dream. Her posture was beginning to sag, her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth; she had been out under the sun for hours.
A man approached the hotel. He drew her attention as if he had called her name. He wore Ottoman clothes: a cropped, intricately embroidered velvet jacket, and the sherwal, baggy trousers that disappeared into knee-high leather boots. A brown, conical cap covered his hair, and a white scarf, tied around the cap, concealed half of his face. Her knees sagged. She would have recognized him in any attire, with his face fully covered. She would know him by the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head, his smooth walk that was half grace, half purpose.
He had recognized her, too, shrouded as she was in dark lace from head to toe. He changed course, coming right toward her. She turned back to the sea, her shaking fingers curling around the railing, and focused on breathing in and out.
She inhaled dust and male sweat and him, and, faintly, something warm and smoky, the smell of leather. Her chest contracted with a bittersweet pang of yearning. He was growing a beard, looking handsome but different. Already his life was moving on without her. But he had a rifle and a knapsack slung over his shoulders, the various straps crisscrossing over his chest; he must have come to her straight from the mountains, and it fanned her flicker of hope.
“You’re here,” he said. His voice was gravelly, assessing rather than pleased. A wary tension hummed in his body and his gaze was gliding over her quickly.
Her heart sank. “I am,” she said. “I arrived two days ago.”
He pulled his scarf forward, creating a screen between his profile and people walking past him from his left. She flipped her travel veil back from her face and hung it over her right shoulder, helping form a makeshift cocoon around them. Appreciation for her presence of mind briefly lit Elias’s eyes. Perhaps it was just a reflection of the sun. The blood seemed to drain from her face and pooled heavily in her feet.
Elias muttered something under his breath and he detached a flask from his belt. “Here.”
She gulped down the lukewarm water. “Thank you.”
“You ought to sit, I shall find us a bench.”
“I’m fine right here, thanks.”
He arched a brow but didn’t insist. His gaze furtively ran over their surroundings, then penetrated her with a grave intensity.
“Are you . . .” He leaned closer. “Are we in trouble?”
The meaning of his question evaded her at first. The penny dropped when his eyes moved over her belly.
She bit back a hysterical little laugh.
In her darkest moment, after she had found him gone, she had briefly hoped for it, that sort of trouble, as it would have allowed her to keep a piece of him. The scathing irony of that thought had not been lost on her.
“No,” she said, “that’s not why I came.”
His expression didn’t much change, no sigh of relief, no prayer of thanks, just a nondescript flicker in the depths of his eyes and a slight twist of his lips.
“You came here,” he said. “With only a young man for company.”
“Lord Peregrin was the only experienced, trustworthy traveler available at short notice.”
He rubbed his temples, looked over the sea, then back at her. His handsome face was set in hard lines.
“Has anyone seen you?”
“Here? The hotel staff.”
“If anyone asks,” he said, “say that he’s your brother.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “It’s how we registered at the hotel.”
“That’s good,” Elias said. His shoulders were relaxing, his mouth softened. His voice was soft now, too: “How are you?”
A flash of numbness.
She shook her head. Rallied. Tried again. “Ana bhebak,” she said. “I love you.”
He went very still.
In the bright light, the blues and greens of his eyes were entrancing, vivid, an irresistible lure. She had a sensation of slowly falling forward, of sinking into him until the rest of the world had gone out of focus and she wasn’t certain where he began, and she ended.
“Tell me,” she said, her lips barely moving. “Am I too late?”
He moved his hand toward hers on the railing. “No,” he said. “Not too late.”
She exhaled, a long, shaky breath, until no air was left.
“My darling,” he murmured. “You could have told me sooner. We could have saved ourselves angry feelings.”
“No,” she said. “I couldn’t.”
It had taken crashing down to the bottom of her own abyss to shake the words loose, to show her that a lifetime without him felt worse than whatever fears were swirling in that pit. Fears that were so bound up with her mother, death, a brother she had never met, a cold, empty castle, and other terrors, such as the never-ending stream of sorry fates like Mrs. Weldon’s. All that fearful scrambling to keep herself safe, to keep history from repeating itself, to keep distance from danger because her skin was too unbetterable porous. It was Elias who had called her sensitivity a gift, it was his lips and hands that had shown her the full glory of the other side of the coin.
“I was afraid,” she said.
His brows swooped. “Of me?”
“Of everything.” Her palms were damp inside the gloves. She took the gloves off, the caress of the wind and Elias’s stealthy gaze over her bare fingers providing instant relief.
“I was afraid to tell you that I love you. And I didn’t tell you about my artifact scheme—it was for your protection, of course, but it also would have told you more than words ever could.”
He gestured, seemingly at a loss. “What did you think would happen?”
Something diffuse but terrible. “That you might propose in earnest. That you might want a dozen children, that you’d resent me for my aspirations, and ask me to leave my father and all my friends forever and I’d be trapped in a marriage where I could never leave, nor remain myself . . . that one day, I would lose you.”
Elias had paled under his tan. “A dozen children?”
“Or three, or four—I don’t know, too many for someone like me.”
He sucked in a breath. “Catriona. My grandmother was a midwife.”