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“He said something about–” Evie started to say, but Alex cut her off.

“The carriage house, too,” Alex said, turning his surgical look on Ryan, who only glanced briefly at him before turning away. A strange ribbon of tension followed the arc of his body through the air as he moved.

“We’ll sleep out there,” Ryan said, letting his eyes skip to Evie before he turned his back on both of them and led the way down the hallway. Despite her efforts, Evie glanced at Alex who stood watching her with a look that made a chill pass over her skin. She left him there, delicately massaging Lindsay’s earlobe between his thumb and forefinger.

Grateful, Evie followed Ryan out of the room, making every effort not to run as she hurried to catch up with him.

There was a sprawl of men in the big room of the cabin, who all grew quiet when she entered the room. She smiled and nodded at one or two of them she made eye contact with and then averted her gaze. Not ideal, because she hated being seen as diminutive, but she also couldn’t stand to be scrutinized right now. Ryan,thankfully, wasn’t interested in pausing either. He walked straight through the room with a nod to the men.

“Whisky, Ryan?” one of them called after him.

“Save some for me,” he called back in his rich voice. “Be right back.”

“No, no, have a slug with us real quick,” another man said. “And the lady too! Ya’ll look like you could use a drink.”

“I’ll take one,” Evie said, automatically.

Next to her, Ryan made a sound of exasperation, but that didn’t stop the men from descending on them and shoving a bottle into Evie’s hands. She tipped it back and nearly choked on the burn. But it was a good liquor, better than some of the harsh stuff that passed for bathtub gin that she’d tried. It didn’t have the smoothness of the fancy smuggled brandies that Linus preferred, but it had a rich, appley taste that made her take more out of the bottle than she ought to have.

The men clamored around her, fawning over her, until Ryan pried the bottle from her hand and ushered her out the door while the men all protested.

The carriage house, it turned out, was a short distance from the house. A small outbuilding, fronted by two doors large enough to let a carriage through, a chain wrapped between the handles and latched together by a heavy padlock bigger than her hand. There was a smaller door just to the left that sood ajar. Windows on the second story of the small building hinted at a lantern flickering within.

Around the cabin and the carriage house, she could just make out the many hands of trees reaching toward the sky, half lit by a waning moon. Glancing into the deeper dark below, she could make out only the bare outline of a few tree trunks. And for a moment, she thought she saw the flash of eyes, which made her heart skip a beat. When she looked back, the eyes were gone.

Inside, the old carriage house carried a strong smell of apples. Old apples, rotting apples, fermenting apples, the brightness of fresh apples. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant. The scent transported her instantly to her grandmother’s house where she had to hopscotch around the fallen fruit as a girl, lest she put one of her bare feet straight into the mealy mush of a rotten apple, worm bitten and wasp full.

“Upstairs.” Without looking back at her, he led the way to a shadowy staircase to the left of the big, dark room they were standing in. Large, looming shapes covered in large sheets of heavy canvas cloth were all she could make out in the gloom.

“Upstairs” turned out to be a loft of sorts, with a small bureau, and a mattress covered in a faded old quilt, resting on a battered old wood spindled bed frame. There was also a frayed old rug under foot and a woodblock print of a farmhouse on the wall in a cracked frame. A single chair, spindle backed like the bed frame sat near the window, framed by calico curtains. A wash basin with a jug sat next to the lantern on the old bureau, with a foggy old mirrorshowing a shadow of herself back to her as she moved into the little room.

As rustically charming as the little space was, it was stuffy and unbearably hot.

“Christ,” Ryan said, and crossed to the window right away and opened it to let something of a draft inside.

Evelyn watched him, appreciating the strong, capable flow of his body as he moved across the room. The way his trousers hugged his waist and his perfect backside. She said nothing, in spite of the suddenly oppressive awkwardness of them being alone together.

Instead of turning toward her, he moved back toward the stairs. “I’ll be back later. The door will be locked while I’m gone.”

This time, she didn’t argue with him as his footsteps moved away down the stairs.

She slowly turned back to the look around the small bedroom, alone.

Blissfully, totally alone.

Chapter twenty-six

Evie

Getting ready for bed wasn’t an elaborate affair. She didn’t have cold cream, or rose oil, or a bathtub, or hair pins, or a silk head scarf, or any of the things she used to implement the ritual she’d had for years now before going to bed. All she had was a hair brush and a little water with which to rinse her face, which she did, grateful for the coolness the water brought to her cheeks and the back of her neck, even if the water itself was a little warm from the heat in the room. The hair brush didn’t do much at all to her chopped locks, but it gave her a feeling of comfort to groom herself even a little at the end of the day.

She slipped off the green dress and laid it neatly across the trunks stacked in the corner of the room. The silk stockings, the brassiere, the corset, and the silk knickers Alex’s housekeeper had provided for her all went neatly on top of the dress. Then she was standing naked in front of the window, trying to absorb as much of the cool air as possible. The thin cotton nightgown was laid out across the old quilt, but she had half a mind to leave it off andsleep naked, it was so hot in the room. It wasn’t as if Ryan hadn’t seen her naked before.

The sound of the door downstairs closing startled her so much that she stumbled and had to hold onto the bureau to keep herself righted. Then, she scrambled to pull the obnoxiously virginal nightgown over her head, smoothing it and her hair as the sound of footsteps slowly made their way up the stairs. Though she wasn’t doing anything wrong, she couldn’t help but feel awkward, caught in the act of something. She crossed her arms, prepared to see Ryan, but the breath pressed out of her lungs as the moth-pale figure of Alex emerged from the gloom of the stairwell.

He paused at the top, hand resting on the old, worn hand rail and smiled at her. A simple expression, but it struck her to the heart, a thunderclap of terror moving through her. And below that, the strange hum of anticipation.

“What do you want?” she said. And though her tone would have sounded convincingly blase, there was a breathlessness that she couldn’t suppress.

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