Page 23 of The Autumn Wife
“It’s a crime,” he corrected, “when the man who abducted the girl from the fields is a viscount.”
She bent her knees up to her chin. “He was a nobleman…and you set your fists flying, didn’t you?”
He shrugged. “My men pulled me off the beast before I could do too much damage. The viscount was bloody, roaring with fury, but the masons hurried me off to Paris. No sign of the girl anywhere. She’d grabbed her basket and run away.”
Cecile knew why the girl had run. There was no remedy for that kind of assault, not for the victim.Not even if the poor girl had been the viscount’s wife. Noblemen committing that kind of violence considered it their privilege, and so remained unrepentant, unpunished, undaunted. Free to commit the same crime again, over and over.
Cecile rocked, forcing back memory, aching from the depths of her being for an impossible wish—that, back before that terrible June, she had had a defender as strong and big and reckless as Theo, willing to risk his own life to pull a monster off of her, and set her and Etienne free.
“Unfortunately,” Theo continued, lost in his own story, “the viscount was too full of pride to put the situation behind him. He searched for me in Paris. I wasn’t hiding, we of Guéret stay in the same neighborhood every year. He chose to have me arrested. I was hauled off, kept in shackles, and didn’t know until I was dragged into court what I was charged with. He claimed I’d stolen his ornamental dagger, which I had knocked out of his hand so he wouldn’t disembowel me while fighting. He said I’d tried to kill him with it.”
“But you had witnesses.” A lump hardened in her gut, for surely the purpose of the courts was to find justice. “Your fellow masons saw what happened. They supported your side of the story?”
“They did.” His voice curdled with bitterness. “But laborers from Guéret are strangers in Paris, foreigners who eat odd things and speak a differentdialect. Our testimony had no impact on the judges, who knew the viscount and his family.”
“But the girl…” A cold hand closed over her heart. “Certainly, she testified to—”
“They didn’t bother to find her.” He shook his head. “A woman’s testimony isn’t held in high regard in the courts, Cecile.”
She winced at that truth. She knew that justice—at least the frontier justice of Montreal that she was familiar with—wasn’t always full of mercy and grace. She’d seen the mutilations of men in the settlement and knew of the hangings in Quebec. But weren’t there valid reasons to assault someone?
“In the end,” Theo said, sitting up straighter, “the judge convicted me but offered me a choice of punishments. Four years on a galley ship in the Mediterranean or four years of indentured servitude here.”
“Why did you choose to be shipped across an ocean?” She lifted the bottle of wine again, giving her hand something else to do than give in to the ridiculous urge to reach out, to touch him, to ground the vibration humming between them. “At least on a galley ship, you wouldn’t be far from home.”
He fixed his attention on the eastern sky, hiding his face from her sight. A moment passed and another, the hoot of an owl joining the music of the ever-murmuring river.
“When I first arrived in Montreal,” he said, tilting his head back to look at the stars. “I was surprised tosee the same constellations that I used to view from a mountaintop above my village.” He pointed. “That’s Ursa Major, that’s Cygnus, and that gathering of stars that looks like a W is Cassiopeia. To see the same constellations here as in France seemed odd to me. I had come here, hoping this world would be different. I chose exile over a galley ship because Iwantedthis world to be different.”
“That’s why I came here, too, in a way.” She remembered the naïve girl who’d left the security of an orphanage for the dangerous unknown with a head full of foolish dreams. “But the nuns are right: Everything is wild in this place—the flowers as well as the men.”
“That wilderness is untouched. I hope it remains that way.” He jerked his chin toward the inky, impenetrable blackness of the forest across the river. “Out there, only natural law rules. I think that’s why so many Frenchmen lose themselves in the woods. From what I’ve seen, the law is as cruel here as it is back in France. Here, even my master can whip me to death, legally, for any reason—or for none.”
“Why haven’t you run away?” The woods seemed a natural choice for this strong, proud man. “They’d never find you out there, Theo.”
“My conviction and my exile from home have consequences for my family. I am the oldest, and they depended on me. I have to make it all up to them, someday. I can’t do that if I’m running from the law.” He straightened up a fraction, shaking his shouldersas if shaking off a burden. “It’s not a pretty story. But you believe me, don’t you?”
“Yes.” She cast him a glance, seeing the stillness of his expression and the hope banked in his eyes. “I believe every word, Theo.”
He made a strange, glottal sound, then dropped his head to stare at the ground, brow rippled.
“Is it…” He stopped, took a breath. “Is it because you’ve known violence yourself?”
“No.” Maybeyes,but she still couldn’t admit that to him. Not yet. “It’s just that I’ve come to know you. There’s more to you than the crime they accuse you of.”
Heavens alive, why had she said that out loud? She stopped rocking, caught up in a stillness she had no explanation for. She sensed his sudden intensity, though she dared to look at him only out of the side of her eye. What sort of dark magic did this huge, powerful man wield, to make her feel unafraid while alone in his presence?
“Cecile.”
She watched his lips form her name. She saw the way starlight gleamed in the bristles of his unshaven cheek. No part of him touched her, yet she felt held. Not held. Cosseted. This was a man who could protect her, as he’d protected that poor girl, as he’d protected Etienne. Theo would never hurt her. With that realization reverberating through her body, an otherworldly calm came from nowhere and suffusedher blood, tendons, and bones, even as Theo moved close enough for his breath to brush her cheek.
“I know I shouldn’t do this.” He grazed his knuckles against her jaw, turning her face toward his. “Maybe you’ll forgive me later.”
He brushed his lips against hers.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Abreath of a kiss. That had been Theo’s intent. At the first touch of their mouths, her lips felt wet and tasted of wine. He lingered just a moment, anticipating a flinch or gasp. He waited for a sign, for then he would pull himself back before her fear bloomed. A wiser man might have chosen another way to thank her for trusting him. He was likely conflating a carnal urge to seize her with a loftier goal to prove to her that not all men were brutes. Cecile was a beauty his body hungered for, but she was also the only true gentleness he’d encountered in years.
