There was a wind, which he had not noticed when he left the house or when he descended the path to the beach. It roared about his head and his feet at what must surely be hurricane force. The rocks to which he clung were slick with ice, and the sun baked his back and the top of his head. And such imaginings meant that he was going out of his mind—which might be the best place to be at the moment. All the better if he could go out of his body too.
Climb. Don’t think. Climb. Don’t stop. Don’t wonder how far you have come. Climb. Don’t wonder how far there is to go. Don’t wonder where Imogen is. Don’t wonder if that valet was murdered. Stop thinking and climb. Don’t wonder if Bains’s father was threatened and intimidated. Don’t think. Don’t stop. Don’t wonder if Barclay was lured to his death and if Imogen had escaped by the skin of her teeth. Climb. Don’t stop.
At one point he looked down inadvertently. He knew the sea was not directly below him—the tide did not come in that far. Nevertheless, the sea was all he saw, gray and choppy and far, far below the hurricane that was roaring about his feet. He wished he had taken off his waistcoat. He wished all the bones from his knees had not migrated elsewhere. He hoped like the devil that he was not going to arrive at the top with wet breeches. He hoped like a thousand devils that he was going to arrive at the top.
Climb. Don’t stop. Climb.
He should have worn his other boots.
A couple of times he was stuck with seemingly nowhere else to go. Each time he found a way. The third time it happened he was scared out of his wits—what was left of them. There was nothing there above him. There was nowhere else to go even though he pawed about with one hand to find solid rock. He crawled along a horizontal surface, still looking, and something came down flat on his back—a hand?
“Don’t ever, ever do that again,” a shaking voice said, and for a moment he mistook it for an angel’s voice and thought perhaps he was crawling on his belly toward the pearly gates. “Not ever, do you hear me? I could kill you.”
“That would be a bit of a shame,” he said to the grass on the cliff top—he was grasping two fistfuls of it, “when I seem to have survived the cliff face.”
He rolled over onto his back, and she came to her knees beside him, and somehow—for some idiotic reason—they were both laughing. He wrapped his arms about her—they felt a bit like jelly—and drew her down on top of him while they snorted and shook with mirth.
By Jove, he had done it.
“By Jove, I’ve done it!”
“Why?” she asked, rising to her knees again.
Two bulging eyes, gazing steadily at him from his other side, asked the same question.
“I have some dragons to slay,” he explained. “But first I had to slay the one at my back.”
She shook her head and tutted but did not say what she obviously wanted to say. Hector merely looked.
“Percy,” she said then, “you must be frozen.”
“Frozen?” he said. “Are you sure someone has not shoveled more coals onto the sun?”
She looked upward and smiled. “What sun?”
Lord, but he loved to see her smile. He was glad he had survived just to see that.
Clouds stretched unbroken from horizon to horizon. No sun. And what had happened to the hurricane?
“What dragons?” she asked him. Her hands were clasped tightly in her lap.
“I called a staff meeting this morning,” he told her.
“Yes. Mrs. Primrose told me,” she said, “though she would not tell me what it was about. She would only say it was business. You called it?”
“I made it clear,” he said, “that my land and the beach below here are now and forever out of bounds to smuggling, and that no employee of mine will be involved in any way in the trade. I have allowed a couple of days for any voluntary resignations and for the removal of any illegal goods from the house and grounds while I look studiously the other way. Everyone has advised me to turn a blind eye, but I have not turned it.”
She gazed steadily at him for several silent moments before leaning over him and kissing him on the lips. “When I first knew you,” she told him, “I would have said that you were as different from Dicky in every imaginable way as it is humanly possible to be. I would have been wrong.”
It was not the best feeling in the world for a man to be compared to his lover’s dead husband, even if it was a favorable comparison—especially then, in fact.
But her eyes were bright with unshed tears.
“That is exactly what he would have done,” she said. “You fool, Percy.”
It was not great to have your lover call you a fool either.
“I l—” She clamped her lips together and returned to the upright. “I honor you.”
I love you? Was that what she had stopped herself from saying just in time?
He covered the hands in her lap with one of his own.
“I am a bit of a fool actually,” he said. “Having conquered the impossible heights, I now have to trot back down the path to haul up my belongings.”
“There.” She pointed behind herself, and he saw both of his coats and his hat and cravat and neckcloth. They were even neatly folded and stacked. “How can you possibly walk around wearing all that, Percy? They weigh a ton.”
“Because I am tough. A real man, in fact.” He grinned at her. “I knew the little woman would carry them up for me.”